Social experiments
Lately, I've been trying some social experiements from Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising. It's sorta like a self help book, but not really. Instead of giving you feel good exercises or spirit raising soup, it helps you understand how your brain functions and how your perceptions (or reality tunnel, as Wilson calls it) colours your reality. In a nutshell, the book explains how we decide to perceive only certain parts of our reality. A good example would be my room, it's messy, but I decide not to register the mess half the time that I'm in it. Anyhow, the experiment that I've been trying is re-perceiving myself as someone who you can open up to, and so far it's worked. I've met a couple of strangers in lines, at restaurants, stores, whatever that end up telling me about their boyfriends, their cares, their lives, whatever. Interesting how that works, eh? Strange world.