Quote Originally Posted by Sageous View Post
Why couldn't this event have been nothing more than an amazing coincidence? After all, your hand may have flung the ring, but at the moment it did, were you suddenly filled with dread that your partner was moving on? Shouldn't you have been? Did you make the connection before or after your partner told you what she did? If not, then was there really any communication going on? If your subconscious found a way to tell you something but you didn't listen, did it actually tell you? It is all you, after all. Why would it be insulting for you to believe that sometimes things just happen, things that have nothing to do with your mind -- conscious or unconscious -- at all?
I'll try to illustrate with another anecdote and an analogy....I had a lucid dream once where I was playing go, and was outsmarted by my opponent. I didn't just dream the thought or feeling of being outsmarted, I was aware of the sequence of moves, and after the last one it was clear that my opponent's board awareness had been better than mine. I had other dreams on that theme also, illustrations of the independence and versatility of the intelligence that creates my dreams. And the meaning isn't just implied by the image in the dream, I feel the intent also. With very few exceptions, I never have a dream more than once. A point is illustrated one time, from a particular standpoint or within a particular scope, and that's it. I remember the experience, so there's no reason to have it again. But I can ask internally about what is behind the image, and I get information that way. Although my limitations and preconceptions do skew my interpretations, the image doesn't hang off in space by itself, with the meaning being entirely a matter of speculation.

In my job, I'm the only person that I'm aware of, in a group of about 15 people, that doesn't have a PhD. Fortunately, for the most part, when I attempt to communicate an idea, people hear what I'm saying. They don't twist their interpretations to fit their preconceptions about what I'm smart enough to be trying to say. But I have worked with academics in the past that have done that, and found it frustrating, as if they've conspired to turn me into a special needs mime. My sense of what my subconscious does or does not do has been taught by my subconscious, through a long series of lesson-like experiences. Its not as if I had one weird coincidence, forced that to fit some preconceived pattern that I read in a book by Carlos Castaneda, then kept doing that ever since. In the ring example, its not like I just jumped and a loosely fit ring flew off. My arm spasmed and whipped in a bizarre manner, somehow getting a snugly fit ring over a large knuckle. There isn't even anything supernatural about this, since we're not addressing how my subconscious knew what it knew. Maybe I picked up on some subtle clues that I overlooked consciously. And yet you're suggesting its a coincidence. Why? Do you want it to be for some reason? Otherwise, objectively the 'coincidence' interpretation seems to be pretty implausible. Is it common for your arm to act like it has a mind of its own? Its as if someone slapped me across the face, and you say "maybe she wasn't really mad at you, her hand just slipped". Or your own hand slaps you on the face, and you say the same thing. What could be motivating such an interpretation? You don't like it when people derive exotic conclusions from limited data, or based on faulty reasoning. Yet you know I haven't derived my perspective from this one anecdote, I've shared a lot of other examples with you also. And you know that I think for myself, and maybe you've noticed that I'm critical to a fault. It almost seems that you're not speaking to what I'm saying, but to someone or something else. Are you afraid of your own subconscious, that it might start acting in an embarrassing or erratic manner, and you'll look like a fool or go insane? Or maybe we'll rend the coherent rationality of our cosmos, and open up a portal to spirit possession and chaos (or worse, religion)? Or are you just concerned about people getting too wrapped up in weird phenomena, and missing the more important part of the picture? I'm on board with that to a very significant extent. But it needn't compel us to discard objectivity about what we experience, even when, or especially when, it doesn't seem to conform to how we would like the world to be.

But if the point that you were trying to make wasn't that the ring experience was 'random', but more that it was an event that was in harmony with what was going on, without an aim or motive behind it such as a person might have when talking, then I could agree with that. My subconscious does produce events that have definite points to them. However, my motive is not entirely independent from it, so if I were to change my way of thinking about this, those patterns would change to some degree also. We see this same sort of issue with communication between people. Usually when i say something, I'm not trying to push someone towards some particular choice or decision, I'm trying to provide information or perspective that I believe is relevant to the issue at hand, so that they can make a better choice. If I persist, its usually not because I object to the choice they're intending to make, its because it appears to me that the information has been misunderstood. (Though in recent years I'm a lot more indifferent about that also.) Some other people try to interpret everything in terms of the pursuit of a goal or a policy, "what is he trying to get me to do". So if I point out something that weighs against a particular action, they'll assume I'm advocating an alternative action. But often I'm actually favoring the first action, I'm just trying to get all possible downsides on the table so that we can be confident its the right one. So if they're trying to interpret everything in terms of what I'm trying to get them to do, a lot of confusion will result. I can see these kinds of misunderstandings with muses also, and maybe that's a big part of what you were getting at.

To answer the rest of your question, no, I wasn't suddenly seized with fear that my relationship might be ending. But the event did help draw the truth to the surface a lot sooner than would have happened otherwise, which enabled me to adjust a lot easier and at a lot more favorable time. In my previous relationship before that, I did not understand what was going on when my flame's affections began going elsewhere, and the deception and resulting confusion made it quite a bit more difficult for me to deal with. Also, the ring experience was a relatively early illustration that my subconscious knows stuff that I'm not consciously aware of. Not that there's anything revolutionary about this, but it was a step in my self awareness.

On the question of how my subconscious prefers to interact....That's not an easy question to answer, since the way my subconscious thinks and experiences the world is very different from how I do. Obviously, there is the everyday, every minute process of thoughts springing out of darkness, consciously coalescing into choices and results, and falling back into the darkness and seed the next cycle. Obviously that's quite a bit more fundamental than the occasional oracular event, since we wouldn't even be intelligent without it. Beyond that, I think its probably desirable for me to shift my vantage point or identity so that I'm interpreting experiences from a standpoint more akin to that of my subconscious, or at least to be able to do that more. In metaphysical circles there's a lot of derision about 'mere words', where all the important things are deep and ineffable. I don't share that view: words and concrete things seem to me to be as important as anything else. But its still seems that a person can build up a vast structure of word-ideas without much understanding to show for it. Look at almost any philosophy written by by academics in recent decades (centuries?) as an illustration of this. So I guess my subconscious would like to see me step back and experience simple things that it knows but which are nevertheless new or foreign to my way of thinking. Part of that process of course is to be temperate in the formation of judgments. Every thought I hold about how things definitely are inhibits my becoming aware of alternatives. And on the other hand, if I'm all pothead-like and hold only vague thoughts which I evaluate solely on how they feel, I won't develop in the way I want to either. So I try to have some fair and fluid sense of how much my various thoughts are true and how much they're conjecture, so that I've got something that can grow, but I don't harden it into a dogma and kill it. This was the lesson of one of my first transcendent experiences, which I probably mentioned earlier, and its naturally a recurring theme.

My subconscious is also like conscience or intuition that informs my thinking. For example, while I said "I don't share that view", I paid attention to how I felt when I said that, because my subconscious would object if I was misrepresenting my true view, or speaking against what it feels and knows to be true. And then a thought would form articulating that objection. Maybe I've eaten most of the obvious, low hanging fruit in this regard though. So what's left is largely what I don't hear, what I don't understand how to interpret. I do feel there's something there though, that I'm not hearing. This is part of why I said I "mostly" agree with what you said before, is it was a suggestion to relate to the subconscious in a different way, not trying to treat it as if its an invisible conscious intellect.