It was night, Joe sat with me at the deserted cafe, each of us nursing a mug of beer. I was recounting to him my memories from the past 3 years. Joe listened, distracted for the time being from his own woes. I was somewhat confused by my own memories or rather the different versions of my own memories. I was using him as a external reference point while I jogged through all these different versions.
After a whole 30 minutes, Joe reflected that each and every version was a coherent whole and each and every version sounded true. He concluded that there might in fact just be one version of the truth, if I honestly looked within my heart I will know which one it is. Well, here is the joke. It is common for men to loss the key to the heart of women's, while I avoided this common problem, I lost the key to my own. Or maybe I never really ever did have this key in the first place.
Hmmm... sitting in front of the computer right now with just this conscious thought itself, has activated my subconscious mind to immediately retrieve bits and pieces of my personal memories just to support this thought to make it a "fact". How helpful the subconscious mind always is.
Sharon from years ago saying "are you sure you lost your phone, you don't even seem to look sad?"
My response to Sharon "Yeah, I think maybe I am... Hmmm... but actually I am not very sure."
Alena during dinner "I seriously cannot tell from you expression, what you are feeling at the moment about what you just said."
My response to Alena "I think you are right, I am undecided on what I should be feeling about this at the moment. Or rather, I don't know what I should be feeling about this."
Nica saying to me "Oh my god, if I were you in that situation, I would have already broke down and started crying." when she heard about the time I spent 2 days in a jail cell in Azerbaijan for arriving without a letter of invitation.
My response to Nica "Really. It can't be that bad right? My mind tells me that there is no possibility of them passing a death sentence on me, neither is there a high possibility of them retaining me in the jail cell, for something that did not even amount to an minor offence, for a prolonged period of time."
Or when my mom admonished me at the funeral of my grandmother "why are you not crying, don't you feel a thing after all that she had done for you while you were young?"
My response to mum "I don't know what to feel. If there is anything at all, it is definitely not something that will cause me tears."
Enough with the side tracking, back to the main issue at hand, my conscious mind knows not what my heart really feels. Just a speculative thought, it might actually be a "psychological deformity" from my childhood. Then again, who am I to judge, the only things I remembered from my childhood are the long hours spent behind bars at the world outside, wishing to soon grow independent and no longer suffer from being caged in.
This "psychological deformity" is made worst by my dabbling in the entertainment industry over the years. There is this thing about "getting into character" when doing such entertainment gigs. Through conscious effort, the person wills himself into a certain character and thoroughly convinces himself, he is in fact feeling what he has willed himself to feel. The original set of emotions he is feeling prior to this mental exercise is thus obliterated to be replaced by the new set of "desired" emotions. This mental exercise, has in fact become somewhat of a second nature to me, that even when not performing any gigs, I am doing it. And now when I jogging through my memories, I realized that I am doing it so often and so unconsciously that I don't even notice myself doing it anymore. The subconscious mind just sizes up the situation, automatically presents a role that will be viable to the situation to the brain and the brain just plays out the role accordingly. The only hint, that it ever happened is the fact that I feel so tired after such situations and attempt to find for myself a quiet place to sleep till the weariness wears off.
So in essence, the emotions has been so seriously subordinated by the thinking brain that it has become a mere tool to be deployed in the form and manner where appropriate. So the person is becoming somewhat of a machine then. This statement thus begs for the next question- do I actually have a soul or am I lying to myself about the existence of one?