Slide Traps
The unenlightened should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing thingsR. Buckminster Fuller
A wise man once told me that one could not psychoanalyse one's self, in this instance he was wrong. This false assertion however did illustrate the perception that areas of knowledge are defined by the barriers to entry which surround them. Whereas in my mental wanderings I've managed to disprove the wise man I've now hit the barrier which caused the original statement. Although I've successfully managed to navigate thorough my mind - and managed to discover a few interesting generalities - I'm finding it impossible to communicate my findings to the professionals in any language which we would both appear to understand. The problem is one of language, or to be more precise semantics. It's not helped by the fact that so much of my inner lexicon exist simply as unspoken concepts built-up following years of devotion to SF.
But now I'm beginning to notice some really odd things that go beyond the accepted consensus reality to which I've subscribed for most of my life. Take the recent flooding on the east coast. It was about three or four days ago when I was listening to my iPod on random shuffle that the music and my thoughts started to interact and I was left with the overwhelming feeling that a rain storm was due at any moment. When the very next track was one entitled Thunder and Rain I got a really creepy feeling. Then there's the idea I had that if I willed it hard enough I could trip the circuit breaker for the lights in my house thereby saving me the tediousness of getting up and wandering over to the light switch - after meditating on this for a good hour the lights did indeed go out suddenly; only I soon discovered that a third of the street was in darkness because the substation had fused. Then there's the time I tried to to use chaos magic to make one of the bright red lights on the top of the Beetham Tower go out; I failed, but as I look out of my bedroom window one of them has indeed gone out.
The spookiest example of this phenomena took place in May last year. In the weeks following my car crash my standard coping strategies began to fail me. It became obvious that the boss taking the opportunity to capitalise on my misfortune to push me to a point where I'd quit rather than have him sack me. Wearing my standard workplace persona I became increasingly unable to cope with the environment and my anxiety levels shot through the roof. To get him to back off I visited my GP and after hearing my symptoms I was awarded a sick-note; an hour after I presented this sick note I was called into a meeting where I summarily dismissed; followed by threats of violence if I dared used my knowledge to mess with the network. In my high anxiety state this was unpleasant, but if you imagine a child dancing around when it knows it needs to take a pee you've got the right picture of how comical he looked waving his fists in the air. The point is that the very morning all this happened I woke from a lucid dream into a dream like state in what I can only describe as a different dimension of thought. As I looked down I could see patterns of force which connected circles which represented people in my life; with my mind I took a step back so that I could see myself, then reached out and broke the lines of force which bound me and my boss together. I imagine I was trying to engineer a situation where I could break one of my fundamental rules; never to give-up of something once I'd set my mind to it. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I didn't, in some totally bizarre and inexplicable way, engineer myself into getting the sack.
Long time readers of this blog will be aware of my seemingly puerile attempts to explain the reality of perception. Amongst the unpublished oddness I was dabbling with I developed a theoretical model of consciousness based upon the premiss that we have nine senses rather than the more usually accepted seven, blending ideas from the Computational Theory of Mind, Object Relation Theory, Quantum and Particle Physics, Memetics, a whole load of less conventional theories picked-up from fiction and the mass media, along with a smattering of the theories of Carl Jung to tie it together. Round about the time of my car crash I'd developed an extension to this theory that Society is a sapient entity which resides within the mass unconcious and that belief systems taint the world sense of this entity leading to the mess of a world we see around us when one faith feels it has a god given right to kick the crap out of anyone who thinks different. What I'm now starting to consider is that the world we see around us can best be summed up by a phrase from popular culture:
There is no spoon.