The Parable of the Invisible Hand

When I was growing up, I was fortunate enough to have an adept and kindly mentor, who helped me past some of the more difficult spots in my spiritual development.

I'll call him Mike, since that might have been his name.

I had some wild and crazy adventures with Mike. Some of them have already been sanitized and clarified and rendered meaningful to the masses.

Some of them haven't.

See, the thing is... Well, the thing is that some of my adventures with Mike just... disappeared.

Yeah. I'll think about Mike, and I'll think about some of the crazy things we did, and I'll know that I'm deliberately missing something.

Sometimes I'm sure that we did something terribly important, and that for some reason the memory of that event is quite completely locked away. Like I'm a character in some psychological horror novel.

Sometimes I can catch brief glimpses of it... riding in a car down a winding country road, with a river on our left. Going somewhere with a sense of purpose.

But then there's a hole.

I could ask Mike about it, I guess. Just give him a quick ring and say "Hey Mike... I just thought I'd call and see how you were doing. How's the job and the girl? Yeah, everything is pretty cool here, thanks. I can't wait for you to come and visit sometime. Oh, and by the way Mike, there's a couple of black velvety spots in my brain dating back to about eight years ago... I don't suppose you'd be able to fill in a few of those blanks, would you Mike? I don't suppose you'd care to refresh me on a few details, like where the hell we ended up that Autumn night back in, what? 94? Where did we go, and what did we do when we got there? And why can't I remember a damn thing about it?"

I can anticipate exactly the sort of smile he would be wearing while he gave me an answer that wasn't an answer at all.