Does the conscious mind know that the information it receives from the subconscious mind is real?

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It most emphatically does not. The process for learning to trust the subconscious mind is the same process used to cultivate deep belief in spiritual reality. Because your subconscious is the primary way you experience that reality. If you delve deep enough into Buddhism, you’ll eventually see that it’s the only way. And it’s the only way you experience material reality as well.

But let’s stick with subconscious for a minute. Think carefully about how you remember things. You’re searching for a particular concept and then you suddenly ‘find’ it. If it’s a concept, then generally you’re matching a concept that you’re witnessing in your mind to a word or term or prose to describe it.

Doing this easily and quickly and fluidly enough and you have a semantic grasp of the situation. Images that allow the mind to better relate to the concept jump to mind and you can articulate them in real time.

If you’re not as familiar with the subject matter, it may take the mind some time to come up with a witty enough response. The term of art for this is L’esprit d’escalier, the wit you discover when you’re going up the stairs, long after the right moment would have been to deploy it.

What’s happening here? There’s thought going on, bubbling under the surface. You’re not necessarily thinking about the past interaction, but it set something off in your mind anyway, and when it’s finally done processing, the conclusion jumps to mind in a mad fit.

This is the subconscious at work. Brain activity that doesn’t quite reach conscious attention. The mind is constantly processing little things that it finds relevant for whatever reason, and the results of its musings eventually reach conscious awareness.

Is this information always real? Maybe, maybe not. I discuss many things with many people and I have to calibrate my response to their subconscious, irrational musings so as to provoke even deeper inquiry. You don’t just want to shut their mind down and leave them without a thread to continue thinking. But you also want to add a rational frame so that the conscious can contribute to the process as well.

The process of turning subconscious musings into legible, semantic ideas is one I’m extremely, extremely familiar with. I shade smoothly from the rational to the chaotic, the literary to the brutish, stupidity to wisdom. For me it’s never a question of whether something is real, but rather if “real” is the right word to describe the concept. The thing speaking to me in my head, through my subconscious, calling it God just doesn’t feel right to me, even though it clearly seems to know the divine well.