While I know little of myself, there is one aspect of me which I assume I know quite well: that I believe in cause and effect and in the laws of physics. What this means to me in everyday life is that if I see someone standing near me, who is supposed to be say, a thousand kilometers away, the first emotion I would feel is disbelief. I believe that if a problem can be taken apart and explained, then it is possible to solve it.
Mostly.
These days, I have been noticing that a lot of things around me are not easily explainable. For instance, after a long day, I was leaving the lab, and saw two students decked out for some event. They were wearing opulent, silky clothes which accentuated their slender figures. Hair combed neat, lips painted, faces blushing. I felt a little sick. I wanted to get out of the place immediately. Which I did.
I shared this with a friend and he told me that this was an experience familiar to him. I asked him to explain to me the mechanism behind this feeling. Why did I feel a need to leave upon sighting the students? He told me that these experiences were the way they were precisely because they can’t be explained.
So I tried asking my therapist. She explained it a little bit by referring to the mental associations we make with attributes such as opulence. She rounded off the explanation telling me ‘That is how it is.’
This is just one example. After a couple of similar experiences, my fundamental and subtle belief in causality has started eroding, bit by bit. I still cling on to cause and effect, but there are these points were I cannot explain why events happen and things take specific forms.