Saturday 4 February 2006

Pic of the day: More than a little cluttered.

Tricking myself?

I have thought back to the disastrous day on which my would-be landlord turned into a not-would-be landlord. I understand him better the more detached I become from the actual event. The place looked (and even smelled) like an ongoing disaster. It was pretty much the worst moment anyone could come and see the place. And I not only knew this a couple days before it happened, I was even the one who set the time.

It is entirely possible that I am so used to chaos that it did not occur to me that some people are actually neat. It may be that since my landlord for 21 years had been so happy about my presence, I thought it was self-evident to any rational human being that I was a good tenant. And there is a tendency in humans, which I have often observed, to think that others are like them and see things the way they do, then get upset when this is not the case. While it is easy to see that this was so with him, my own behavior implies that I was the same way.

There is however an even more disturbing possibility, which I have just lately come to think of. What if this is a ploy by my own subconscious? What if it set me up for this rejection? I observe when reading my years-ago entries that my subconscious seemed to play a kind of game with me, making me write about the same topic or quote the same lyrics on the exact same date of the year, either the next year or two years or even three years later. Of course there are some topics that repeat pretty often, and also a couple of songs. But there are also some that barely ever are found except in just two entries, on the same date. I even had related dreams on one occasion. It seems to be well within the power of my subconscious to remember such trivial details and then trick me into repeating them, for no obvious reason. How much more then if it has a very good reason to yank my chain.

There is a phenomenon called "posthypnotic suggestion". During hypnosis, you are told to do some meaningless thing at some later day and hour. When the time comes, you actually do this, even if it makes no sense. What is worse, you have built a framework beforehand that makes it possible for you to explain it, at least to yourself. "I walked under an open umbrella even though it didn't rain, because I was wearing my new clothes and I would not want to get bird droppings on them." If our subconscious is able to convince us of such things when told by a stranger, why would it not do the same or more if it had its own agenda?

No, I don't think my subconscious could know that this house was waiting for a quiet single tenant. No matter how much I believe in the "collective subconscious", that is not what it means. The collective subconscious is just a collection of our shared myths, prejudices and traditions. It does synchronize in a myriad of small ways, but not telepathically. (Some mystics disagree with this, but as far as I am concerned, making the subconscious have all human knowledge is a leap of faith, in effect creating a new religion where the subconscious is God. I actually believe in God, but I don't believe that he's constantly messing with our minds without telling us so.)

What my subconscious could know, however, and what I should have known if I had any common sense, was that I could not possibly squeeze into the small apartment without getting rid of most of what I owned, not just half of it like now.

Still, you think a sensible subconscious would have looked for some way out before burning the bridges. Or at least pulled off the trick before there was only two days left. The most convincing proof that it was not planned even by my subconscious however, is this: My body reacted far more strongly to the shock than my mind. While I was a bit worried, my resting pulse doubled. If anything, my subconscious must have been far more scared by the development than I was.

So the most likely explanation so far is that I really am this stupid. ^_^*