So, every day, every hour, every minute our minds are assaulted by thousands and thousands of bits of data regarding our surroundings, selves, and what is going on in both of these. On a conscious level we simply cannot pay attention to all of these details and so we have to make some decisions at some level what information is important, on which we want to focus our attention, and which information simply is not. Information that is considered unimportant is observed and discarded and important information is retained. To see a demonstration of this, enjoy the following video:
As you can see from the video, your brain decides which information was relevant at the moment and it was only that information that you were aware of. We can use this method of our brains to pick out information our subconscious wants us to know, but that our conscious mind is unaware of. As an example in my personal life, I have been noticing wolves a lot. I flipped through a book on animals and paused briefly on the wolf page, listened to a song called ‘la loba’ (she wolf), and noticed an ad on Craigslist for a wolf cub. After the third item, it occurred to me that my brain, for some reason, is paying attention to occurrences of ‘wolf’ in my life and my conscious mind doesn’t know why. That is how the Universe gives us signs – for some reason, our unconscious mind will make our conscious mind start paying attention to data usually ignored.
And, just for fun, here’s another video:
