Moses walked alone into the desert and prayed, beseeching God.   "O Lord, for many years I have been Thy faithful servant, yet Thou hast never entered my house, nor broken bread with me.   Wilt Thou not come and sup in my house?"
              And God was well pleased with the request, and answered him: "Yea, Verily!   Truly thou hast been My faithful servant, and so I will come this very evening to thy dwelling and break bread with thee!"
              Moses was delighted that he was to be granted this special grace, and made swiftly for home, ordering his household as to the preparations, and cooking with his own hands a great feast worthy of the Lord.
              When all was in readiness and the supper hour drew near, Moses dressed in his finest robes and waited outside his house, pacing in his eagerness.   Many of the people were about at this hour, returning home from their day’s labors, and they bowed in greeting as they passed him.
              He returned their greetings distractedly until an old man in the crowd, a beggar, came up to him and bowed low.   He was clothed in rags and leaned heavily upon a staff of sandalwood.   "Great sir," said the old man, " will thee not share some small portion of thy bounty with one of lesser fortune?   By the adab , the tradition of courtesy, I ask it."
              "Yea, yea…" answered Moses kindly, but impatiently.   "You shall have your fill, and coins for your purse also.   But you must come back later.   I await an important guest now, and have no time for thee."
              So the beggar walked on and Moses waited.   Hour after hour all through the night he paced and waited, but the Lord did not come. Now Moses was greatly disconcerted.   He wept exceedingly and slept not at all.   The very thought that God had forgotten him struck him to the heart. At dawn he again walked into the desert.   Weeping, he rent his garments and prostrated himself upon the ground.
              "O Lord!" he cried, "How have I offended Thee, that Thou did not come to my house as Thou had promised?"
              "O Moses," said the Lord,   "I was the beggar who leaned upon his staff, whom thou bid depart. Know ye that I am in all My creation, and what thou apportion to the least of My servants, thou apportion to Me !"

http://www.masterofthejinn.com/

‘Sleeping on it’ best for complex decisions

19:00 16 February 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Gaia Vince

Complex decisions are best left to your unconscious mind to work out, according to a new study, and over-thinking a problem could lead to expensive mistakes.

The research suggests the conscious mind should be trusted only with simple decisions, such as selecting a brand of oven glove. Sleeping on a big decision, such as buying a car or house, is more likely to produce a result people remain happy with than consciously weighing up the pros and cons of the problem, the researchers say.

Thinking hard about a complex decision that rests on multiple factors appears to bamboozle the conscious mind so that people only consider a subset of information, which they weight inappropriately, resulting in an unsatisfactory choice. In contrast, the unconscious mind appears able to ponder over all the information and produce a decision that most people remain satisfied with

Ap Dijksterhuis at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues recruited 80 people for a series of lab-based and “real-world” tests. The participants were provided with information and asked to make decisions about simple and complex purchases, ranging from shampoos to furniture to cars.

Snap decisions
In one of the tests, half of the participants were asked to ponder on the information they were given and then decide which among similar products to buy. The other half were shown the information but then made to perform a series of puzzles including anagrams and simple arithmetic. At the end of the puzzle session, the participants were asked to make a snap decision about the products.

“We found that when the choice was for something simple, such as purchasing oven gloves or shampoo, people made better decisions – ones that they remained happy with – if they consciously deliberated over the information,” says Dijksterhuis.

“But once the decision was more complex such as for a house, too much thinking about it led people to make the wrong choice. Whereas, if their conscious mind was fully occupied on solving puzzles, their unconscious could freely consider all the information and they reached better decisions.”

Expectation counts
However, the unconscious mind appears to need some instruction. “It was only when people were told before the puzzles that they would need to reach a decision that they were able to come up with the right one,” Dijksterhuis told New Scientist.

If they were told that none of what they had been shown was important before being given the puzzles, they failed to make satisfactory choices.

“At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we’re not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things,” Dijksterhuis says.

Journal reference: Science (vol 311, p 1005)