Today, we are continuing the topic of dissonance. I will cover in more detail the place of dissonance in our lives and how it relates to our perception of even simple day to day things.

What is dissonance? Dissonance is the clash of sound with each other, but it is also any seeming contradiction or noise in life. There is another word that is big in neuro-scientific circles. They have done a lot of research into what they call prosody. Prosody is actually a poetry term describing the rhythm or meter in a poetic work. But in the science, they use it to describe how one appears to understand emphasis and how to put stress on important words to convey meaning.

Ah, like Shakespearian rhythm? Yes. Now this isn’t a poetry class, but as is often the case I have to borrow terms from other sources to describe the ideas we discuss.

We might think as individuals that we would be well off if every facet of our existence were harmonious, but would that really be the case?

It would get boring.

There may not be as much progress.

Don’t they say in science that there are no mistakes, just solutions that didn’t work? I can imagine they might say something like that.

Finding out it doesn’t work is still a success. “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 1000 ways not to make a light bulb.” Thomas Edison. They do still learn something from “failed” experiments.

We can make sense of speech, sound, even vision not by the energy behind them alone, but by how this energy stops and starts, how it’s continuity is broken up.

Timing in speech is everything for a comedian. The comedian conveys more with their timing than they do with their words alone.

So, we like to feel at ease and like our life is flowing along smoothly. People often enjoy things when they are easy, perhaps because handling whatever they are involved in in these moments takes a minimum of effort. We instinctively feel that our well-being is supported when things are not a strain. We associate strain with pain and pain with disease. Our first reaction is to see all these things as bad.

Can make you lazy, either physically or intellectually. Well, there is another side to this as there always is, and even if all your circumstances are ideal, and you can pass your time without ever having any sort of upheaval, your own biological nature will create an upheaval anyway. On a primal level, we crave expression of aggression.

Some people just make drama for drama’s sake. They do. There are people who can’t even feel like they are loved without there being some sort of emotional outburst first. Those couples who fight just so they can have the making up experience. We will test even the most trustworthy things in our lives, and for a simple reason.

Kids who act out to get moms attention away from a new sibling. It’s a part of human nature. Our minds process abstract things really no differently than they do physical things, and gentle things often get to feeling like they aren’t really there, like the light breeze or the shifting sand.

We tell ourselves that things like love and hope are exempt for our reality testing, but I offer that no one is able to completely avoid this relationship with their social and spiritual ideals. The sacred ground that nobody visits ever, how sacred is it really?

It’s forgotten. And this has happened to a good many of the world’s faiths. Many of the oldest faiths that still stand have survived not because of the peace they bring, but because of the strife, the mark left by what they disrupted. Is it always wrong to disrupt things?

Depends on your perspective. I personally do not believe that we are limited to our own perspective. On an equally deep seated level we can sense, if only subconsciously, when an event or presence is hurting the world around it.

Shall we start throwing cream pies? There may be circumstances in which throwing a cream pie is appropriate.

Some think that disrupting the current situations in Africa would be good. Ah, indeed, and often when things have gotten very bad, there is no obviously good way left to affect change.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~