I've been thinking about the Derren Brown show I watched the other week about betting on horse racing. In the show a person was convinced that she had been given a fool proof scheme for winning. Problem was that she was part of a large manipulation of people and of minds, and this has gotten me to thinking if I can trust any experience I have had.

I need trust in myself and experience gives me the confidence to carve forward, but if my experience is not true, if I am being manipulated by a greater force, then my experience is not worth a grain of salt. The things I believe are not true, despite me witnessing them, it's like i'm being controlled and guided to do things that don't make sense but for me they are logical and correct.

For the paranoid and controlling this must be a real headfuck, for to believe that you never had control over your own beliefs and the hierarchy of facts in your head is false, is maddening. For me it's okay, I can live in the chaos, and if it's not some guiding force controlling me then it is chaos itself, and i'm happy with that.

What is interesting to me is that for every success I have; there's a percentage of other people not being able to understand why they failed at the same task. For me the experience and my actions that caused it stay confirmed, but for others their world is turned upside down.

I believe in the Sherlock Holmes tenet; Expect the unexpected, and when the unexpected happens one will still have to collapse your truth structures, but you will not collapse mentally, and be able re-evaluate to carry on. It is easier to do this if you never write anything down, as the path from one thing to another can easily be forgotten. If you do write it down though you can maybe step back over the writing and determine why certain decisions were made, and who it is that is laying a trail of breadcrumbs. I often find that I have the feeling that things were meant to happen to me, well perhaps they are being made to happen by someone else.

So taking my first theory, that someone is manipulating me, or at least the facts i believe. Who would this person be, and what would they want with me? Certainly the question of God could arise here, but on a more human level, who is it that wants control over me and the population at large? The government? The illuminati? The Freemasons? the Jewish?

I'm reminded of the 1984 subject of double think which states:
Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary.

If you find a mental blockade but no physical one, do you obey it or do you continue on, maybe loosening the mental hold that the construct holds. For example if you find that your way is blocked by a sign telling you not to enter the loos, but there is no physical blockage and you can see that the inside is as it always was when you were allowed in, should you go in? I quite like the idea of breaking some of these mental rules and screwing up a few people around me who will no doubt say "but, you can't do that!". Maybe breaking a few of these belief systems will reveal if there is anyone in control? Maybe the man behind the curtain will show himself!

One final thought, even if my truths are incorrect, I still have to proceed with them until I know better. This is the way my mind works, possibly why we are susceptible to this, and I will proceed in this fashion until my dying day. However I will also record my path and use it as a history of where i've been, unlike many others who just plain forget where they came from.