Soundbyte Psychology

While working at a certain fruity company, I remember the effect it had on me when I saw an entire cluster of plants literally killing themselves to reach the little amount of sunlight that reached them during the winter day. They stretched so far towards the light that they were uprooting themselves. One had already lost too much rooting and fallen. Some of the plants were reaching over other ones and likely blocked out light to those, but they were killing themselves over this limited resource of light. Then, looking out onto the field, I saw a single tree out in the light. It had grown into an almost perfect half-circle, completely balanced. It had non-finite resources and no competition. It was whole.

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?

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).

‘If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.’ Or so goes the saying. This is especially true in corporate franchises, which create clones of stores for their customers. A new opening is just more of the same, except that it has now taken that space in existence and filled it with something that is not new at all. This is how the world becomes smaller, when the finite space of the world is filled, more and more, with ‘just more of the same’. This danger comes at a cost of losing the world itself, until only uniformity with less variety remains. Shop independent.