“What? No!” Kaitlyn blurted out. “Oh my gosh, no! Ammu would never!” At the very idea of it, Kaitlyn started laughing.
“OK,” Mackenzie said, mollified. “Just checking. You’re acting like you saw a ghost or something.”
“No. No, I…” Kaitlyn grinned wryly. “I just have an overactive imagination sometimes.”
“But nothing bad happened?” Mackenzie almost winced just hearing herself ask. She wanted to believe she was only looking out for Kaitlyn, but she knew there was more to it than that. She liked Ammu, but he seemed mysterious somehow, in a way Mackenzie couldn’t quite put her finger on, and as far as she was concerned that made him unpredictable.
“No,” Kaitlyn said, smiling now. “Definitely nothing bad. But what happened with you guys while I was gone? Why’s Sam so upset?”
“Who knows?” Mackenzie said, shrugging. “Does she even need a reason? I don’t think she likes the idea of having to work with anybody else. Like she thinks we’re beneath her or something.”
Kaitlyn pursed her lips as though she were thinking about it, but in the end she didn’t comment either way, taking another bite of her sandwich instead. Continuing to eat in silence, they both watched as Ammu came into the main hall, walked directly up to Sam, spoke with her for a brief moment, and then led her out toward the new classroom, just the two of them. Alone.
? ? ?
“Oh, now this… this will not do at all,” Ammu said as they walked into the classroom together. He looked back and forth between the chairs and the whiteboard with obvious disapproval. “Is this how you were sitting all morning?”
“Yeah,” Sam acknowledged, shrugging. “So?”
“No, no. This… this is how disconnected we have become from the unconscious mind,” he said. “Look! The seating has been arranged so the chairs have their backs to the door. If you sit here, you have to turn all the way around to see anyone coming in.” He sat in one of the two center chairs and turned his neck and shoulders far enough to face the door, demonstrating.
“You see?” he asked, but Sam just shrugged again.
“The unconscious mind hates this arrangement,” Ammu declared. “It allows the unknown to approach from behind.”
He got back up and began pulling the chairs over to one side of the room, one by one.
“The unconscious mind, you know, is actually very, very old,” he said as he worked. “It is only recently in our evolutionary history that the rational human mind has become so advanced. The unconscious mind has been a part of us for much, much longer, protecting us by watching for threats, and helping us by scanning the environment for food and other opportunities to enhance our chance of survival.”
Once he had moved all the chairs out of the way, Ammu wheeled the whiteboard over to one side of the space, placing it with its back to the temporary partition that had been drawn across the room to section it off from the rest of the large conference space.
“As modern human beings,” he continued, “we train our rational minds from birth to filter out many messages from the unconscious mind. When we are asked as children to enter a dark basement, we become frightened. The unconscious mind is signaling us to be cautious. We must tell ourselves, ‘There is nothing to be scared of. It is just a basement.’
“We learn to ignore these signals so completely as adults that we can walk into our basements without any hesitation, but try to walk into someone else’s dark basement, and hopefully you will find yourself on alert all over again.”
“Why ‘hopefully’?” Sam asked. “Why would we want to be scared of imaginary monsters in somebody’s basement? Nothing personal, but that seems kind of stupid.” She continued to watch him as he set about rearranging the chairs to face the whiteboard in its new position. He paused for a moment and looked at her directly.
“Yes! That is the question! Why ‘hopefully’ indeed! If we spend so much of our lives learning to ignore the impulses of the unconscious mind, why would we want to hear them again? Yes! Good, Samantha!”
Sam knitted her eyebrows together in confusion. She was not used to adults praising her for calling them stupid.
“Because the unconscious mind is not stupid,” he explained. “In fact, it is highly intelligent in its own right, and in a very different way than the rational mind. When we can merge the two intentionally, learning to hear what our unconscious mind is telling us and filtering out only that which we decide to filter out, that is when we begin to reach our full potential.”
“There,” he proclaimed. “Much better. Now we can sit more comfortably.” He sat again in one of the two center chairs, and this time his left side was to the door instead of his back. When Sam sat down, purposefully leaving a chair between them, she realized that the door was now well within her peripheral vision. She didn’t like to admit it, not even to herself, but he was right. This position was more comfortable.
“So,” he said. “Samantha. I believe that the test has done precisely what it was designed to do. Your scores on the IAB indicate that your conscious and unconscious minds are, in fact, communicating to a significant degree, whether you realize it or not. It might take us some time to identify the pathway by which this is occurring most directly, but I do believe that such a pathway exists for you, and I remain dedicated to discovering it.”
He paused, as though waiting for some kind of reply.
What am I supposed to say to that? she thought to herself. Am I supposed to tell you I think you’re wasting your time? That I can’t have a very good pathway if everyone else instantly knew what theirs was and I have absolutely no idea? That even if you find it, I’m probably going to be so far behind in learning to use it that you’re going to send me home eventually anyway?
“OK,” was all she said.
“Good. I’m sure you spent some time last night thinking about hobbies and interests and the like. Did anything in particular occur to you?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “I do well in school. That’s the only thing I can think of that I’m good at, but that’s not unconscious. That’s a formula. I read the assignments. I do all the homework. I study before the tests, and I do well on them. That’s it. There’s nothing unusual about it. I’m just better at it than most people.”