Divine

I've always been intrigued by the flakey communication between the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds. And by unconscious, I don't mean when we're asleep but rather those parts of our thinking that we can't access directly.

I remember reading a book years ago that referred to a 'ring of truth', which was concerned with the phenomenon of working towards a solution and at some point being sure that you have found the right one before you've actually proven it. 

The author suggested that this was due to you subconscious mind being ahead of your conscious mind's more procedural thinking. (I very much doubt that phenomenon is anything like 100% reliable but I have experienced that mildly euphoric feeling of "this is it" when in the process of designing solutions.)

It also seems obvious that our unconscious minds are capable of reaching conclusions that our more rational thoughts prevent us from accepting. I suppose you might look at this from the perspective of making a difficult decision: on some level you know what is right, you just can't bring yourself to do it. 

(In the early days of my business I was torn between with fact that it clearly wasn't working out and my stubborn refusal to give up on it. I found myself getting angry when anyone suggested folding the business, precisely, I think, because I knew they were right!) 

I wonder whether one way of bypassing the conscious mind is divination, that process of taking tea leaves (or entrails!), for example, and looking for patterns, the idea being that there is not an actual solution mystically present in what you're looking at but, rather like a Rorschach test, your mind interprets what it wants to see. The seems to me to be a possible method of accessing the unconscious mind. 

Of course, we're programmed to look for patterns from when we're babies, which is why we see faces in things. Today's picture is of my lava lamp in that stage of its warming when the wax has burst up through the paraffin and rapidly cooled. It looks to me like a figure (with a long nose) setting off on a journey, carrying its staff at its side.

****
-9.2 kgs
Reading: 'Kraftwerk: Future Music From Germany' by Uwe Schütte