Understand now, the force and shock of the discovery is not necessarily in what's been discovered, but in the fact that one's mind can, successfully, for an entire lifetime, block out something on the order of "2+2=4," the sun's shining in the sky, the idea that if you eat when you're hungry you won't feel hungry any more. That kind of stuff. That kind of incredibly basic stuff.

And if your mind enters into that game of hide and seek, it has to adjust all kinds of different attitudes and convictions in which, for whatever reason, the basic 2+2=4 plays a role. For example, I now realize (since Friday's session) that I have had a lifetime prejudice in favor of establishment institutions that seek in whatever kind of way to impose on the general public a particular mindset with regard to their existence or products. I begin with the assumption that there's a good reason for the status quo (which I now realize that in many cases is simply ridiculous) and look at attackers and their arguments with a very jaundiced eye.

The above occurred to me yesterday, when for one reason or another I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Critical Psychiatry, an anti-mainstream group that descends in great part from Laing and Szasz. Now I've always simply brushed away Laing and Szasz and stuck with the mainstream. And reading this article yesterday I could immediately see very positive, very respectable thinking under way in a very anti-establishment manner. This shocked me, as it would never have happened to me before. And when I thought about it, I connected the change in me to Friday's revelations.

So I'm wondering how this change, this news, is going to reverberate among and between all kinds of thoughts and attitudes and feelings I've had for an entire lifetime. The news itself is quite somber. The excitement and the positive aspect of the situation comes simply from my best realization so far of how the mind can twist you into a pretzel without your noticing anything amiss. I'm reminded of all those people who are trained to tie themselves into amazing human knots. Minds can do that too. And when you can step aside and get a view of your OWN knots, well, it's mindboggling. Take care.