To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Tuesday, May 19, 2020
 
Does it happen to you that you forget to do a routine activity and then some time later, suddenly, out of nowhere, the fact that you haven’t done it enters into your consciousness… and then when you go and check… yes, indeed, you have actually not done it! I am referring to something as routine as for instance: I tend to soak a few almonds in water before finally retiring to bed to have them first thing in the morning (why I do it is a separate matter…). This is such an everyday activity now that it comes quite naturally to me to do it but there are rare days when I might be distracted and I might not do it. When I start to fall asleep or in other words my mind starts going a bit blank, almost out of nowhere, I get the intuition that I did not soak the almonds! I am saying “intuition” rather than that I remember because I feel to remember I need to have consciously thought of it but this is just a vague sense that jumps to the surface of my consciousness as if some helpful person is telling me that, you know, you forgot to do this. I have another instance: In the morning, soon as I wake up, I tend to switch on the gas to put the water to a boil and frying pan to warm while I go brush my teeth. There are also other rituals that I perform during this process, so sometimes, though very rarely, I miss switching on the gas. Then when I am brushing my teeth something in my mind will snap into awareness of the fact that I did not switch on the gas. Again, I am baffled by this. It is such a small routine step that I don’t think I can consciously “remember” that I didn’t switch the gas on and if I had to remember consciously I’d have to “think about it” I guess. I am not sure where this sudden awareness of the fact that I didn’t do this routine action comes from! And every time I get this awareness, it turns out to be right, so it is not a false memory or a trick played by my mind either. One time I actually got myself out of bed because I had an awareness that I had put the almonds into the little glass vessel but forgot to pour water in it to soak… and when I checked (because I had to…), it was true.

What seems obvious is that if you do something every day and it becomes a well-orchestrated routine, you just do it so mechanically that you’re not conscious of having done it. But what boggles me really is that that being so, how does the fact of not having done it become conscious in the mind? It has something to do with the transfer of message between the subconscious and conscious, I would think; the activity is so routine that it doesn’t really require one to be conscious of it so if one misses it one assumes it is the subconscious that is in some way aware of something amiss but the conscious mind isn’t… which is why when you suddenly become aware or conscious of the fact of not having done it you really do not understand where this intuition or awareness is coming from because you are not conscious of “not having done the activity” nor do you have any conscious recollection of it till this awareness sort of pops up out of nowhere. And then when you are forced to think of it you feel that there is something to it...

I have something more to say on this matter but I think I will keep it for my next post…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 7:17 pm 0 comments
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