Tuesday afternoon I absentmindedly poured boiling water on my foot. Thursday morning I wrenched my lower back while carrying heavy boxes. Since then I've been in constant pain, or some variation thereof. As a result, focusing on keyboard practice has been difficult, so my last two sessions have been short and not all that productive.

My mishaps remind me of the book Accident Prone, A History of Technology, Psychology and Misfits of the Machine Age. It posits that people who are susceptible to accidents could be manifesting an unconscious intention for self-destruction or some other radical change in their life.

Take for instance the guy who was hit by a truck. Was it because he so desperately wanted to be rich that his unconscious manifested it in the only way he could?

I'm not saying either way, but I do know that unresolved emotional-psychological issues lurk underneath the threshold of consciousness and influence our decision-making in very real ways. I designed Critical Stimulus (based on Carl Jung's Word Association Method) to expose these complexes.

I will probably use Critical Stimulus on myself tomorrow and see what it unearths. You can read about other complexes it has uncovered at CriticalStimulus.com.

On a related note, this morning before work I listened to Bill Evans Trio while reading The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece. It provided the perfect soundscape for the book. Bill Evans was an introvert, and he played piano with his head down so low it looked like he was trying to hide from the audience. How he expressed himself was through his improvisations and signature chord structures, and by the sounds of it he lays himself bare.

There's more to say on this, but I'll leave it for later.

Time bookstanding today: 40 minutes Quality of meditation (out of 10): 5