Your order has been receiiiiived

Sometime in the Fall of last year, T-Mobile announced a special deal - something along the lines of "Unlimited Text/Calls/Data for $39 a month. Zero contracts". Intrigued, I read the details on the T-Mobile website, and I thought I'd try it. So I called T-Mobile, and I was attended by a calm-sounding guy whose name I can't really remember. But for the sake of narrative, let's call him Brian.

I proceeded to inquire details about the program - whether it would work with my current AT&T iPhone, whether I would need to buy a new phone or could use an old cheap one, what kind of obligations would I acquire, what kind of coverage did it provide, etc. Brian was very polite, and answered all of my questions. About 20 minutes later, I was sold, and I ordered a package. Brian said "you're in luck, we have a promotion today, you'll get a free cheap phone, and you'll only need to pay for the SIM card, which will be $1.99". I said "awesome!", and gave him my card details and stuff. After a few seconds of audible typing, Brian told me, in his calm and polite voice: "All right, Mr. Antonio, your order has been received".

At that point in time, just around the last syllable of "received", I experienced a mental shift. Whether in attitude, in perception, or in my thought processes, I felt a sudden change in me. Somehow, what Brian was telling me was a factual truth. Not that it really wasn't, but in that moment, I perceived his words as unquestionable fact. It's a little hard to describe, but imagine having information fed to you directly, unfiltered by the brain, by doubts or mistrust or questions or inferences or reasoning or subsequent emotions about it. It was simply true, my order had been received, and Brian was letting me know. How simple. That last syllable even sounded longer. "Your order has been receeeeeiiiiiiiiiived" (Ok, not that long. But long enough).

The feeling did not last too long - maybe between 1 and 3 seconds. Shortly thereafter I began thinking:

• Wow, Brian is talking so matter-of-fact'ly.
• Why do I think that he is talking so matter-of-fact'ly? Did he say something special, or in a special way?
• No, he didn't. He was just talking and I suddenly felt like he knew exactly what I was to know, and that I was learning an important piece of knowledge.
• What was THAT all about?
• Oh, wait, did he just ask me a question? What did he say?

And then I resumed my conversation with him, regular style. My T-Mobile phone and SIM card arrived a few days after, I never used it myself, and I activated it only months later for a friend who arrived in Pittsburgh and needed a temporary phone.

The whole incident might have faded into oblivion, but this mental shift has happened to me at least 2 more times since then. I believe one time was while I was in a park. No one was talking to me that time, but I experienced the same inflow of perception - everything was true, I had no doubts or questions or even thoughts, and the feeling faded quickly.

And tonight, I decided to skim through a music theory workbook before going to sleep. I skipped a long prefix that explains the main notes, the basic time symbols, and other basic music concepts, and began reading the section of the circle of fifths. I was going through a section that explained how some notes can be written in different ways, like F#=Gb. As I read that equivalence, I experienced the same mental shift. Suddenly, F# simply was Gb, that was the truth, and that book was the perfect way to learn that. So simple.

So I wonder about this mental shift. Is it good? Can I promote it? Can I exploit it? Is it harmful? Should I avoid it? Can I avoid it?

But I can't summon my unfiltered perception on-demand to have my questions answered in apparent absolute truth. For now I'll settle for an I-don't-know and a good-night from my own self who thinks it's much later than the time that a prudent week-worker should go to sleep at on a Thursday-Friday night.