When the Whole World is a Nail

Archived from the former firedocs blog. 29 March 2006

There is the old saying about how when you give a man a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail. It's the delight of a new tool which you can apply, and seeing everything in the light of how it relates to your newest tool. Or bright idea. Or belief. Or, in the case of RV, your new data-recognition.

I've noticed it before but it came up again recently. I suspect it's the same for many viewers. You'll be going along, minding the universe's business with your viewing (I mean we can hardly say we are minding our own business can we??), and you get a relatively clear sense of a certain thing. It doesn't have to be a big, complex or complete thing. Just a thing.

Example: a sense of architecture roof/window molding/trim/frame. And say you get this fairly clear sense and it turns out you're totally right, that's not only in the session, but it's the actual target-focus. The ego, utterly DELIGHTED to feel a sense of control in a process in which it is mostly excluded-confused (when not literally beat into submission) promptly "runs with it." Hike! It has that damned football and it is not stopping until it's in the endzone.

So it becomes your hammer, your mind's new tool. And every target promptly becomes a nail. It doesn't matter what you view for a bit; you're going to see that data show up again and again for awhile. Even if your session data is totally correct; even if it's described quite differently; some part of you will be going Yep! See? There it is! The mind is so delighted with its new knowledge, and applies it like crazy every chance it gets.

This isn't limited to sessions; I think it is probably also common for viewers to notice things in the regular world much more clearly once they have really nailed them in a session.

Philosophy

When I thought about this, it started making sense, aside from just being both funny and exasperating. There are only so many physical forms in the world, shapes, relationships, geometries. There seems to be a limit to the core quantity of patterns, and just infinite variance in the detail (or, as a friend says, in the 'dimensions'). As I look around here where I'm sitting, I can 'graft on' some of the same data basics of that example data (a framing, a thick border, the outside is stronger than the inside, the inside seems to 'open up' to something else) to my printer, my monitor, my desk itself, my armchair, all the drawers next to me, the shelves, even the carpeted cat tree. The 'basic elements' that comprise the data, even in combination, are found all over the place. Between physical qualities, conceptual qualities, relationships, function, purpose, composite (materials), etc. it's just a matter of what % of a given 'thing' varies from the 'thing' in question.

I'm a musician so I think of it like chords. Say you have an A chord; you might think, "that's an A!" about many sounds, but it might actually be an augmented 7th, or a minor 3rd, or a major 4th. Often only one note has changed or simply been added, or the sequence of the notes in scale are inverted. When someone is new to the sound, they recognize the leading tones, the main effect of it. As they get more used to the detail, they begin to be able to instantly recognize the variants, and what accompanying notes (such as bass notes below the primary chords) are doing.

It is the fleshing out of an entire language. But it has to start with the building blocks of notes, which in RV I equate to entry-level (and often useless on its own, but it may be accurate) data like "slanted" and "high" and "flat" and "curved" and so on; and then into the base architecture of chords, which in RV I equate to 'things' that have multiple interrelated elements yet may still only be 'components' of other things depending on the target they're found in.

In a way I have come to see this as a good thing to recognize; when I get a data correct and then it starts showing up all over, even where it doesn't belong (--but I can see the reasons 'why' this happens in the similarities of certain points of the data), I think it's a sign that the subconscious has genuinely learned a new "composite sense".

Alrighty then! Another one down. Rinse. Repeat 20,000 times.