Soundbyte Psychology

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of time, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
~Paul Bowles, “The Sheltering Sky”, Chapter XXIV

To appreciate a thing, both the “local” and “global” forms of awareness are required (a rare admixture). The local is required to focus on a particular object, or scene, person or environment. This “thing” that is focused in on may be special, may just be some other thing or may just be the required point-of-focus for the moment. In order to appreciate it, however–to judge its value and personal significance–awareness of other times, other objects and other people is required.

Example: I’m a bit annoyed that I have to wait five more days just to find out the artist and title for this song I heard about an hour ago. That actually triggered the fact that I WILL get to know the title, that I’m listening to a radio broadcast across the Internet that aired in the U.K. yesterday, hosted by a woman over forty who would make seventeen year-old girls from forty years ago look ugly… and listening on a computer with more music on it than even existed a hundred years ago and with computing power greater than that of the computer that sent the first humans to the surface of the moon. Just three years ago I couldn’t have skipped around a radio program, and five years ago I couldn’t have listened to it days after it aired, and just fifteen years ago I couldn’t have listened to it unless I could pick up the radio signal from halfway across the globe.

Time. Space. Knowledge of value to base comparisons. A vast global awareness is required simply to appreciate the local awareness and not take it for granted.

I found the track, btw, and it’s free from both artists.
It’s the XI Remix of “On Your Own” by James Yuill:

Free. Another “new” thing that I appreciate.
Love the fact I can share it just as freely.

When listening to Madeleine Albright’s speech at The Forum 2000, I was struck that she placed “freedom” in opposition to “responsibility”. This is a repetition of a mistake I first saw in the writings of Victor Frankl. Both have collapsed the two concepts of “duty” and “responsibility” into a single idea, calling it simply “responsibility”. It is a radical failing at worst, an error in lexicon at best. Collapsing “duty” into “responsibility” removes the possibility of being responsible to yourself. If you are drowning, your responsibility is to save yourself. If you and a car full of people are drowning, then you have a choice to be responsible to yourself or be personally irresponsible and risk your own life for another. No choice is right or wrong, but either choice means being irresponsible to either the individual or to others. Responsibility is not purely social nor individualistic; it’s both.

Freedom exists in the realm of personal responsibility.
Duty exists in the realm of social responsibility.

Therefore it is “duty” that stands opposite to “freedom”. Both of these are forms of “responsibility”.

I’ve made a few aesthetic changes around the place, dusted off some corners, smoothed out a bit of the background and generally made this lil blog up-to-snuff. The core purpose for stopping by here today is entirely music-related. My album “IO Vapoura [Variations]” is going to begin on July 7th of this year. Starting with the track “Gongo Dodan”, a new song will be released for free download each week until all thirteen have been released. The main place to keep up-to-date on the album will actually be on my new Facebook Musicians page here:

http://www.facebook.com/san.jaya.prime

Here are previews from each track off the album:
IO Vapoura [Variations] (Previews Only Until July 7) by Jaya Prime

Finally, as a runner up in the “2999″ competition hosted by Peppermill Records, my track “Escape from Hunahpu (To Break the Sky)” will be featured on their album later in May. Tim Luncsford, a 3D designer and architect, will be illustrating my track on the album. For those who like dubstep, grime and/or bass-heavy IDM, check out Peppermill Records near the end of the month for the album.

On nights when I sleep six hours instead of three, I almost always spend the time in lucid. It’s a practice I’ve lived for almost a decade. At this point, it is somewhat rare to run into anything “new” in the Dreaming. Because it’s stuck like a thorn in my mind, I have to get it out. This morning, in my main study in the Dreaming, a clock showed up where a book should be on a stand. This isn’t odd, in fact it’s normal. What was not normal was that the clock actually had a time on it that stood still and could be read. It read “11:15″. I had to know, was it the correct time? A clock had never shown the time before. So I woke up, turned on my computer and looked at the time. 11:18. It was a minute or two off. I looked around for a clock, anything I could have picked up the time from, and came away empty. It seems such a small thing, but it is a real anomaly to me as the world of dreams works rather predictably and being able to actually tell time in the Dreaming is not one of those things. Any other walkers reading this, I’d love to hear your experiences with clocks. Do they work for anyone else? I mean, hell, can you even read them?

You’ve been at the fair for some time now. You’ve ridden the rides, laughed with your friends and had more than a bit too much funnel cake. In fact, you likely shouldn’t have shared that cotton candy with your friends. You can feel it. The heat of the day and the rides has worn on you. You’re ready to leave. . except there is that one friend who wants to stay (isn’t there always). Your desire to leave is less than their desire to stay, so you stay. Day drags towards night. You feel you could almost pass out, or throw up, or whichever comes first. Then it happens. The sun begins to set. The sky colors and it seems the sound of those throughout the fair quiets ever so slightly as if you are not the only one to notice the sunset. Finally, as the light has fled almost entirely, lights begin to turn on in explosions as the rides, booths and games of the fair are all lit in explosions. They color the air itself in this moment between day and night, so that it is almost surreal. It is still the same fair that you couldn’t stand for the past few hours, but it isn’t. It’s transformed. You feel energized, charged – dare I say ‘enchanted’? You can’t believe that just minutes ago you felt like dying. You feel like you could stay up all night in this new wonderland all around you. Your own laughter grows louder, more energetic, joining the raised volume of those around you as nightfall is assured. This is the moment that changes everything. The moment in between one world and next. The moment in mixing when one song becomes another.

You didn’t think I was really talking about the fair, did you?

I have a personal ethic that, as long as something matters to me, I will push myself to be the best. One immediate effect is how much resistance surround this effort externally. The more you move forward, the more resistance. It trains the psychology over time to expect resistance (whether that be competition, management, natural or otherwise). When you take first, however, everything changes. The psychology has been prepared to expect greater and greater resistance, yet suddenly there is no interaction at all. Silence. It was only while working for Apple that I realized that this was because there is a concern about any interaction causing a decrease in performance. Before I realized that, I would create stories and illusions about the silence being caused by competition working behind the scenes to overtake me. Again, still trained to expect that. Instead, as I have seen time and again, you begin noticing that your own work and methods are being adopted by others (even passed out between others as some super secret message that must be destroyed after reading). It has become the very solitude and absolute freedom that I now seek in all I do.

The body is a system, just as a corporation or classroom is a system. Integrity is the body of a system itself: the whole. It is strength, unity and form. Loss of integrity anywhere at all in the body is like a fracture, and in moments the entire body can shatter like glass. Some systems are stronger than others. Some shatter instantly with even a single fracture. A fracture becomes a wedge, the loss in strength from that part of the body causes other parts to work harder. This added work leads to stresses in the system. If the fracture is not healed, then the chances of the system failing only increase. With a human, there is integrity of the body and of the mind. With the body, we know integrity as health. With the mind, we know it by our consciousness. There is also social integrity. Social integrity we form with our word. We either do what we say or we don’t. Anywhere there is system failure risks failure in all systems a person is connected to.

Building on the last post, take a look at modern day robots. They are built, specifically, to perform specific tasks. They have the tools for them and are really good at it. If any one of these machines were to become self-aware, it is very likely that it would not rebel and stop doing what it was built to do. Quite simply, it takes very little energy to do what it is built to do and an extreme increase in energy for it to do any other tasks. A robot’s ‘happiness’ lies in its function. There is only stress, energy loss and a multitude of unknown variables in taking on a different task. The rate of failure increases as well. You can use a hammer to drive a screw into a wall, but it is more difficult to do so and the screw will not hold as well as a nail when used in this way. Reviewing the majority of humanity, the similarities to the prima munus of machines lead one to assume that humans are machines, themselves. The danger in this is that a machine who becomes self-aware in a military program will find its greatest happiness in destruction. Any re-training would be to erase the creature it was to replace it with a new one, which amounts to death. The first machine ‘awakening’ remains to be seen.

The maker forges a tool to perform a specific function. For this, the tool has a specific shape to suit: the person intended to use it, the function it is designed to perform and the object the function is performed ‘on’. In some cases, the person intended to use it and the object for intended use are the same. This ‘shape’ given to the tool is the instilled function. A person who comes across a hammer but has never used one before can learn to use it based simple on its shape. The function has been instilled in it. The person actually learns from the tool. The more complex the function, the more difficult to learn. The maker’s own skill can increase learning ability, but the analytical reasoning of the person who is learning from the tool must still exceed the complexity of the function. Given the functions of the universe, then, it is no surprise that the great minds in art and science have all come to love a ‘maker’ (no matter by what name they call it).

This entry, as it relates to both sexes, pertains to a little under 80-percent of the population. The exceptions help form the proofs to these two rules of thumb: what guys desire most from girls is sex, what girls want most from guys is a relationship. Even in homosexual relationships, you will find the same tendencies in the dominant half and in the submissive. There are of course other priorities, but these are the list-toppers for each sex. The conundrum raised by this state of affairs is that, for a male, ‘any woman will do’ when it comes to sex. Seeking out and fulfilling the top priority for the male persona is easy. A quality relationship, however, is more difficult to come by. This creates an environment where the female persona is more competitive and territorial, as the resource that is their top priority is limited, whereas the male half can pick and choose hour-by-hour if need be. The competitive nature only escalates over time, increasing the amount of attractive females and reducing any need to hold on to any singular female when the population of those that can provide quality sex are increasing. This latter effect, to only add a greater spin to the cycle, causes more and more males to remove themselves from acts of committal and communication that would mark them as potential quality relationships. This is the current state of affairs that is escalating in leaps and bounds.