Broken Clock People

I had a dream a few years ago which I apparently did not record, but to which I refer often.

As a disembodied awareness, I approached a vast wall of clock-beings. This was in a psychedelic reality which contained only the wall.

The beings were mechanical, operated by gears and springs, but with such great complexity that they were sentient. At any one location, I could see that they were all the same model, yet natural variation was such that each was subtlety different from its neighbors. At far ends of the shelves, the differences were obvious.

The situation was this: A clock may be assembled a billion different ways; only one works perfectly. There are perhaps a dozen other ways to assemble the gears, such that they work, albeit with some gnashing and friction. All of the other configurations result in no functioning mechanism.

As you move farther from a functioning clock, say, to the left on a row of clocks, you observe increasing dysfunction until you observe no function at all — a vast number of non-functioning clocks — then slowly you observe some signs of functioning, until at last you arrive at a different, functioning, model. In other words, it was a desert of non-functioning clocks with oases of functioning clocks.

What I saw, in this disembodied state, was that some clocks were dysfunctional because that was simply how they were assembled. Each location on the shelf corresponded to some possible assembly, and no place could be vacant, as each represented a possibility. No clock could hope to become what it wasn’t, since some other clock occupied each other position.

There was only one thing the dysfunctional clocks could do, which is to create some narrative of their dysfunction. In some cases, the narrative was that they were victims of misfortune. In other cases, it was the outside world that was dysfunctional.

The dysfunctional clock beings were crying out to me, to attract my attention. They were suffering and wanted comfort. That comfort was not intended to fix them, and it couldn’t.

Of course, this has made me think of people in waking life. There are people who make bad decisions because they cannot decide better, and then comes the question of who is to blame.

Consider the example of a political extremist who blames foreigners for his own lack of success. The causes for his lack of success are ignored, and a narrative of blame is developed and shared with other unsuccessful people. They liberate themselves from the frustration of being inherently below average.

No matter how hard everyone tries to be above average, there are always going to be below average people. If you are looking at the heights of a hundred people, there are a hundred slots, going from the shortest to the tallest, and someone must be in each slot. What it means to be below average in height is that there are too many people taller than you. If they were gone, you’d move up without changing anything about yourself.

You can vilify taller people and come up with excuses for their removal. You must call out to others to share your narrative. Even if you are below average in height, you might be above average in, say, singing. Instead of working on your gifts, by blaming others, you are working on your deficits. Every minute spent on blame is a minute not spent on personal development. In the process, you become the kind of being who promotes such narratives, it becomes part of your identity, and you do not wish to be rescued from it. To be rescued from it is to take responsibility of your now atrophied gifts. Any rescue is worse than the problem.

In this dream, I saw the inevitability of brokenness and the dark emotions that narrate it. The ‘solution’ would be to convince people of their inferiority and the necessity to accept it. Who wants that job? I realised that there is no solution to this problem; it is part of any reality in which there is freedom.

I think, there must be only the possibility of finding people who want out of the ranking system and who also have no interest in dark narratives. Every system must have its crumbs. We can share a life raft. I hope this blog serves as my personal beacon on this dark sea.