Tuesday 21 August 2007

When no one's watching

I was sat at my desk at work today and I got irritated by tiny bits of grit on my mousemat. I'm not sure why my mousemat has the propensity for collecting these minute pieces of detritus, or indeed where they come from, but I dislike the feeling of them under my fingers as I run my mouse around the mat. I got so annoyed in fact, that I picked up the mat and proceeded to beat it against the corner of my desk in an attempt to get rid of them.

Suddenly it occurred to me that if anyone had been passing by my window at that point I would have looked completely mad, like Basil Fawlty when he beat his car with a branch. Why would you beat up a mousemat? Looney.

This got me thinking about other things I do when no one is watching, (no, not THAT!) and I realised I have a tendency to do all sorts of strange little things. I'm sure most people do, in fact I'm certain of it as I had a discussion with my housemates about this sort of thing a while back. I forget what their little idiosyncrasies were, but it was comforting to know that they had them.

Some of mine are perfectly normal, like dancing in the kitchen while doing the washing up (I have my Ipod playing, so that's pretty normal,) but I do other stuff too, like practice martial arts moves, (again not too wierd, especially since I actually do martial arts,) but also just random things that amuse me or make me laugh... I can't think of any examples at the moment, but when I do I'll come back and edit them in. Oh - like making up silly songs on the spot, usually containing a large splash of profanity, (and sometimes only using swear words,) which makes me chuckle to myself. Other times I practice skateboard moves, without the board. (Again I do skateboard, so not entirely nuts.)

One thing I like to do, (when circumstances permit,) is while driving alone, at night and when it's snowing. I imagine that the snow flakes coming toward the windscreen are really stars and that I'm in some sort of space fighter ship, travelling along at incredible speeds so the stars streak past.

My point is, if everyone does this sort of stuff, why can't we do it in front of each other? With some close friends you can display some of this behaviour - a friend of mine is amazing at making up silly songs on the spot, about whatever is in front of him at the time, be it a drink, his cats or whatever but they are always funny and sometimes his wife joins in and they end up doing a duet - never fails to make me laugh.

It seems to me that our fear of others' perceptions of us is a much bigger motivating factor in our behaviour than I had previously realised. On the whole I don't think of myself as a person who worries a lot about what other people think, but I keep these things to myself, so perhaps societal pressure exerts on me in more subtle ways than I realised. Like for example if I see a person walking down the street alone smiling to themselves, it makes me smile, but if that person is walking alone and talking out loud and there is no mobile or bluetooth headset present, then I tend to think they're a little strange but I have on many occasions verbalised my thoughts while alone. (My housemate does it a lot, to the point where I have stopped asking if she's talking to me and just wait to see if the conversation requires my input.)

I think that if we could get past the embarrasment of the situation, it would help foster bonds between people. Imagine seeing someone doing something wierd or silly that you do in private and rather than ridiculing them for it, (we've all caught someone doing something and given them the, 'oookaaay' raised-eyebrow look, and also been on the other end of it,) instead we said, 'Oh I do that too!' or admit to doing something similar. Imagine the feeling of relief that person would feel and the instant bond it would create between you. It could be that the thing that ends up uniting humanity is our admission that we're all at least a bit wierd...

So, what do you do when no one else is watching?

Wednesday 1 August 2007

Majik and coincidence

I have a book on magic, or magik or majik, however you want to spell it. Most of the book is over my head to be honest, but it makes for interesting reading, if only to see how some people think about the subject.

The first article in the book is written by Grant Morrison, who is a pretty famous writer if you're into comics. It's about how to be a 'pop' magician and talks about how to easily integrate majik into your everyday existence. It talks about things like sigils (majikal symbols,) and channelling spirits, but in a very different way to the 'usual' way of talking about these things - for example Grant mentions that if he wants to feel more confident in a situation, he prepares by channelling the spirit of James Bond. It's like majik lite and his main premise is 'use what works', which makes a lot of sense to me. He also talks about doing things like walking in a receptive state - being open to signs and messages from the universe.

To me, majik is similar to a lot of things in life. I don't really believe that when spiritualists channel spirits, they are actually talking to the dead or that people can perform spells as such. I'd love to be wrong, but I see no evidence to support it.

My belief is that majik, along with many other disciplines, like cold reading, fortune telling, apparently psychic abilities etc, work in a different way. I think what happens is that you make a direct connection with your subconscious. The subconscious is a wierd and wonderful place that we really don't understand. Your subconscious, so I am told, never develops past the age of 6. Kids of 6 are full of majik and wonder. I've read some bits about left and right brain theory too - the left controls language, mathematics and reason, the right controls creativity and abstract thought. The right brain works in patterns only and has no sense of time, so when you suddenly think of the answer to a problem three days later while sat in the bath, it's because your right brain has been working on pattern matching in the background while the rest of your brain has been busy with language and how much change you should get from a 20 after buying a round of drinks. (Left and right are terms and do not necessarily map to those sides of the brain in reality.) I think the left side of the brain corresponds to conscious thought and the right subconscious thought.

So, we have a part of our brain, (perhaps 'mind' is a better term,) that has no sense of time, (hence why when many artists are working on a project, they kind of zone out, or go into a trance like state and could not tell you how long they've been working until they look at the time,) and is permenantly 6.

Thing is, because the subconscious works on a pattern matching methodology, it's a very powerful problem solving tool - only the lack of a temporal sense counterbalances this. People under hypnosis have been able to remember events in astounding detail, say for example, the registration of a car that hit them thet they themselves didn't even think they'd seen.

It seems to me that our perception filters are mainly, or possibly exclusively for use with our conscious mind, enabling us to live without getting bogged down in trivial detail, but the subconscious, unfettered by these filters, picks up on many more details and then assembles them into patterns based on previous matches.

Hypnosis is a way of tapping into the subconscious via the conscious mind and I think things like affirmations, positive reinforcement, majik and the like offer a similar interface.

Because we view our world through the conscious mind, which is in turn partly fed by the subconscious, we see patterns everywhere: for example, the two punctuation marks :) become a smily face. It's a colon and a bracket, but we transform that into the pattern of a rudimentary human face. If this is true, there can be no such thing as coincidence, only the value we attach to patterns we ourselves create. This is not to say these patterns are without value, but that they have no objective or intrinsic value in and of themselves, but only subjective value placed on them by the observer.

So anyway, I was in my kitchen yesterday and I was thinking about my recent break up and the situation surrounding it and wondering what to do next. I was in a fairly receptive state obviously, due to being deep in thought. I found a sock of mine on the floor that had fallen there when I had taken my washing out of the machine. It was kind of balled up, so I shook it to even it out.

At the time I was wearing a bracelet of beads that I had bought whilst on holiday in Greece with the girlfriend I had before the last one and it had come to symbolise certain things about that relationship. As I shook the sock, my bracelet flew off my arm and I watched as, seemingly in slow motion, it hit the floor, the elastic snapped and the beads sailed into the air in random directions before bouncing to a halt.

This completely stopped my train of thought as I wasn't expecting it and I found myself just staring at all the beads for a second, thinking about how it had come to symbolise a previous break up and it broke while I was thinking about my current break up.
As I stood there I realised that I didn't know what to do. Should I carry on putting my sock up to dry or should I sort out my bracelet first?

Suddenly I heard the answer in my head, (in my own voice I might add,) as clear as crystal. In fact the thought was so isolated from anything else, it was like hearing a church bell in the dead of night when everything else was quiet. My brain is usually a fairly noisy place, so the significance was not lost on me when it said,

"I should pick up the pieces."

and there was my answer. My subconscious was telling me what I should do, both about the bracelet and the current situation. Coincidence? Wierd? Not really. I think we all have our answers most of the time, locked away in our subconscious until such time as it's ready to let your conscious mind know and being in a receptive state, whether through majik, or excercise, or prayer or positive thought can help facilitate getting these answers.

Just a thought.