picture in my mind

I no longer feel like I'm stuck in a rut. I'm just, just, out of it, standing at the edge. But... this new position that I'm in isn't much better. I feel like I can get somewhere, but there's too many obstacles and scary things and I'm afraid. I feel like I can move forward and I want to, but am going too slow! And am half thinking that the rut down there, seems better than this.

I really have a terribly overactive imagination.

Have mentoring later, and am going out for lunch first with granny and sis. Feel somehow energyless today. Sigh. Keep thinking about how the coming week will be here soon enough, and all the crap will pile up and start again. It just goes on and on and on. And am getting scared because I keep thinking how they'll give out common test results soon and then I'll have to face my horrifying grades. Why do I have to live like this.

Borrowed a book called "The Sense of Being Stared At And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind." I just keep flipping here and there because reading it diligently from beginning to end is boring. So far, studies have shown that 55% of the time, people know when they're being stared at. That's not much at all when you take it isolatedly. If it was a matter of chance, 50% of the time, we'd guess that someone was staring at us. But what makes it mind boggling is... It turns up as 55% for separate experiments everywhere. If the same experiment turns up the same result repeatedly, it has significance. Hm.

Then there's some talk about envy and how many cultures of the world have their own word to mean the "evil eye".

Sir Francis Bacon says in his essay "On Envy" published in 1625:

There be none of those affections which have been noticed to fascinate or bewitch, but love and envy; they both have vehement wishes, they frame themselves readily into imaginations and suggestions, and they come easily into the eye, especially upon the presence of the objects which are the points that conduce to fascination, if any such there be. We see likewise that Scripture calleth envy an evil eye... There seemeth to be acknowledged, in the act of envy, an ejaculation, or irradiation of the eye. Nay some have been so curious as to note, that the times when the stroke, or percussion, of an envious eye doth most hurt, are, when the party envied is beheld in glory; for that sets an edge upon envy. ~ Pg 185

Pg 192, Rupert Sheldrake, the author, (Ph.D in BioChemistry from Cambridge, studied natural sciences in Cambridge and philosophy in Harvard and a Research Fellow of the Royal Society) says:

Although many people equate science with the rationalist ideology, others, including myself, do not. Science is not a dogmatic belief system or an ideology; it is a method of inquiry. In this spirit of inquiry, we can investigate whether phenomena like the sense of being stared at actually exist... But such an investigation is inherently controversial. The sense of being stared at was long ago classified as a superstition, and surrounded by an intellectual taboo, a boundary that should not be crossed. No educated person wants to be thought superstitious, precisely because this undermines his or her claim to be educated. To go against this taboo is a serious loss of intellectual standing, a relegation to the ranks of the uneducated, the childish, and the superstitious.

True, isn't it?