Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
The Stickperson
Use the conscious mind as a gatekeeper — consciously accepting or rejecting incoming thoughts before they reach the subconscious — so that you stop installing unwanted programs.
In 5 lines: Your conscious mind is the doorkeeper; your subconscious records whatever you let in. Catch each thought as a candidate, not a fact. Reject the limiting ones by refusing to believe or feel them. Deliberately dwell, with feeling, on the thoughts you do want. Practice it daily, like training a muscle.
What it is
A practice built on Proctor’s most-taught diagram. The “Stick Person” (a circle for the head split into conscious mind on top and subconscious below, on a stick body) was created by Dr. Thurman Fleet and popularized by Proctor to show how mind produces results: thoughts → feelings → actions → results. The practical move is at the gate: the conscious mind can accept or reject any thought, while the subconscious cannot reject anything — it simply records whatever the conscious mind passes through, and then runs it.
So the practice is to stand consciously at that gate and decide which thoughts you let in, rather than absorbing every passing idea, fear, or others’ opinion by default.
The Method
- Hold the model in mind. Conscious mind = the thinking, choosing mind that accepts or rejects. Subconscious = the receptive mind that accepts everything impressed on it and expresses it through the body and circumstances. Proctor: “no person or circumstance can cause you to think thoughts you do not want to think.”
- Catch the thought at the gate. Through the day, notice thoughts as they arrive — especially anxious, limiting, or borrowed ones (“you’ll fail,” “people like us don’t…”).
- Consciously accept or reject. Treat each as a candidate, not a fact. If it serves the result you want, accept it and let yourself feel it. If it does not, reject it — decline to dwell on it or attach emotion to it, so it is not impressed and recorded.
- Notice the emotion lever. Proctor taught that a thought becomes installed when you believe it as fact and attach emotion to it — that is what impresses it on the subconscious and makes it part of your paradigm. So the gate is guarded largely by withholding belief and feeling from unwanted thoughts.
- Deliberately feed the wanted thoughts. Having rejected the unwanted, consciously choose and dwell on the thought/image you do want, with feeling, so that is what gets recorded.
- Repeat as a standing discipline. This is not a one-off exercise but an ongoing stance — Proctor framed mental fitness like physical fitness: maintained by daily practice. (Sourcing note: the Stick Person diagram originates with Thurman Fleet; short quoted phrases reflect Proctor’s consistent teaching of it. The numbered steps are a faithful description, not a reproduction of his text.)
Source & Lineage
The diagram is Dr. Thurman Fleet’s (Concept-Therapy, 1930s); Proctor adopted it as his core teaching tool and made it famous. Conceptually it restates the long New Thought claim that the subconscious accepts uncritically and the conscious mind is its doorkeeper — the same idea found in Quimby’s “correcting false belief” and Murphy’s guarding of the subconscious.
Common refinements
Turning it into thought-suppression. “Reject” does not mean force the thought out (which rebounds); it means decline to believe, feed, or emotionalize it, then redirect.
- Only rejecting, never planting. Guarding the gate is half the job; you must also consciously choose and dwell on the thoughts you do want.
- Trying to police every thought. Aim at the charged, recurring, limiting ones — not an exhausting audit of all mental traffic.
- Believing the diagram literally. It is a map of choice and attention, not anatomy; don’t expect a mechanical “filter.”