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The Consideration of Randomness
 
For each of the following exercises, use several small pieces of paper (or an individual window for each question if using a computer system) and hide the previous one before writing the next one.
The first test:
- Think of a number between one and ten
- What is your favorite number?
Are they the same?
Now, answer the following questions as quickly as you can - if you don't know the answer then simply write down a number:
- Think of a number between one and ten thousand..
- When was the Battle of Hastings?
- How many teaspoons are in a cup of water?
- What is the square of 12?
- Write pi to as many digits as you can (without decimal points)
- How old are you?
- Using numbers 1 to 26 to represent the letters A to Z write your mother’s maiden name without spaces.
Now, without trying to remember what it was and without looking at any of the earlier entries you made – without consideration and without referring to the first question, write down the number you first wrote down.
Is this the actual number you wrote down? Compare the two. There’s probably at least one digit off and, if you completed the exercise properly the whole number is completely different, although it may be similar or even, perhaps, a number that you wrote down for one of the other questions.
Consider the second number that you wrote down. Imagine that you have the true ability to completely forget within a matter of moments (which you, of course, do not – otherwise social discourse would be utterly impossible) and imagine that you never saw the first number. Imagine that you are without the context of the questions asked. Would not the second number appear completely random, relative to the first?
Consider the first exercise. Does it not make sense that a random number you select would be a “favorite number”? We are without the power of voluntary ignorance, and yet we find ourselves ignorant all of the time, even to evidence that has been already presented to us - we forget, as was demonstrated in this exercise. In the first case we may have remembered the first number so we pick it as a favorite number. Or we may have remembered that we already chose that number so we picked another one. In either case, our choice in the first instance affects our choice in the second.
In the second exercise, we're so distracted by the subsequent questions that we forgot the first one which was a random number between one and ten thousand. When so called "randomness" comes from our mind we find it difficult to not be affected by previous information but when distraction is introduced then it's easy to forget. How often have you been distracted by something and realized that you'd forgotten to do some other mundane task, even if that distraction is voluntary?
The same is true of our Spirit - it is constantly engaging in self-distraction and, as such, forgets its previous instances. This is its nature and with it comes a duality - to engage with previous instances and, at the same time, to voluntarily be distracted from its first-hand experience of previous instances so as to perceive the acts of said instance as somehow "random." This is not the randomness of throwing the dice or drawing a card, but the randomness of a seemingly arbitrary decision, but like all decisions, it is affected by previous experience.
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