The Emotional Gravity of Dissonance & Binary Stars

It’s always there affecting me, but I never notice. It is the same as the air I breathe, the light of the sun coming with each dawn. I take it for granted like a sub-routine running in the deep background of my unconscious and so I don’t waste any time at all ever thinking about it.  It keeps my feet on the ground, helps me water my lawn, and keeps my clothes hanging neatly in my closest. Of course, I’m talking about gravity. What would we do without it? We’d probably just float away, but we probably would never have been here at all. Gravity keeps the air in place, keeps the earth’s atmosphere close to the earth where it belongs. And gravity is a strangely universal force that works the same no matter where you find it in the cosmos.

It’s not that easy to recognize dissonance when it’s staring us right in the face. We may be working with it, coping with it in our day to day struggle to survive, or we may be married to it. For some, they may have given birth to it, or escaped it when they left home so many years ago. For most of us, we probably work each day with a great deal of dissonance since most people hate their jobs and are doing it “just for the money.” Dissonance is that phenomenon that happens when two or more things don’t vibrate at the same frequency. Dissonance is experienced when the salmon swims upstream to spawn. It’s like spitting into the wind. It’s the thing we experience while driving to work each day or standing in line at the grocery store. It mostly happens to us when we get locked inside our own biorhythm and the world view our thoughts produce. It’s that thing that happens when our illusions collide with what is actually physically happening around us and we are slapped out of the oblivion of the daydream back into real time. It’s a psycho-social, mental, emotional, physical joyride where the car jumps completely off the tracks and we are in freefall against a chosen course. Somehow, we spend an inordinate amount of energy struggling against the flow of time trying to accomplish whatever it is we think needs to get done in order to deliver some kind of payoff for all the effort we’re putting out. This kind of thing rarely works out for the best. More often we end up shattered and broken, more broken than our latest dream.

When we cannot even think because of the roar of time raging by and raging against us and against our intentions, we somehow know, on some level, we’re going the wrong way. The problem is we’ve locked onto the prize for all our efforts. Somehow winning the prize or getting what we want is enough stimulation and motive to help us ignore the dissonance around us. The dissonance that I inherited came to me through my father.  Of course I never recognized it as dissonance. I only understood that my dad was pissing into the wind and as the eldest son, I simply assumed it was my job to take over for my dad someday. And boy did I try to succeed where my dad may have failed. That’s how things go in this life. They go from father to son, from mother to daughter, and we don’t even think about it. It just happens and then one day, we wonder why every single thing in our life makes no sense at all. That’s when we have to sit down and feel our way through our thought system. I say “feel” because that’s how we store the memories that shape and direct us. Until we are willing to face the music in our heart, we will continue to play the game of life in the safe role we crafted for ourselves.

The dissonance in our world today is almost invisible. It exists as background noise in our very busy lives. We accept it, embrace it, and navigate around it as if there is nothing we can do as individuals to change it. We simply rationalize it away as the way things are nowadays. The question is: how to we change the dissonance into resonance? How can we all find the path that leads us to begin to resonate at the same frequency? How can we align the energy we are channeling into the world in a way that creates a melody or a song rather than a cacophony of noise?

 Binary stars are two stars that have formed a single system. They’ve come together or always were together and they will never be apart. Some stars may have started out on their own, traveling through the cosmos, swirling around their galaxies, following their own single, solitary path. At some point in time, they come together, their paths cross, they are attracted to each other, and begin to swirl. It’s not love. It’s just gravity and the proximity of physical mass to physical mass. It’s not personal. It’s physical.  During their courtship and throughout the entire lifetime of the relationship, binary stars affect each other in strange yet predictable ways. They share a common space. They revolve around each other, attracting each other into a shared gravity, a common purpose, a cosmic dance.  They not only reflect light from the other, the big one sooner or later sucks the light and energy and stuff from the other. When one star projects itself outward toward all things, some of its energy and stuff passes an imaginary line in space called the Roche Lobe Line. This creates what is referred to as “Roche Love Overflow”. One star gives and one star takes.  Sooner or later the little star is absorbed into the bigger star and they become one.

This magnificent cosmic image is not wasted on stars alone. The same cosmic dance occurs all around us every day in the form of another naturally occurring phenomenon called love and marriage. Life finds most of us pursuing our dreams, charting our own personal course through the cosmos of society and setting our own orbits. We do that long enough until one day, she walks in, or he walks in, and then our trajectory changes. It’s time for a course correction and we are pulled into a close encounter and set up a mutually attractive gravity field and we start swirling. It’s the most exciting time in our life. We are in orbit around that special creature that makes the sun shine during the day and the moon come out at night. We are headlong into the gravity of love.

If this dance goes on long enough, there is usually marriage and then the orbit is set for both stars. They have been revolving around one another for some period of time and now they will share their gravity and alter their own personal path through the cosmos together. They have become a sort of binary star system right here on earth. The most hoped-for balance is one where both stars learn to identify where the Roche Lobe Line is and they respect it. Neither star seeks to pull energy or matter from the other. There is a sort of celestial intentionality and foresight into the future path for the two companions. A path that let’s both stars remain intact as they circle each other.

So many times, two people are mis-matched with one being bigger than the other, having more mass, more gravity, and both not knowing about the Roche Lobe Line. When this happens there comes a time when the line is breached and one star begins to lose energy and matter. Over time, they become a shadow of themselves and become powerless to escape the gravity of the other. They will no longer fight the gravity, but stay in their orbit and allow the inevitable. Eventually you see them and they have no more light of their own. They are defined now by whatever light is given off by their companion star.  

Hopefully in matters of love and romance, we count ourselves fortunate to be coupled and paired with a partner “of equal size.” And when this fails to happen, well, we all know couples that can be defined by “him” or “her”, with the significant other being little more than a shadow of their former self. It makes you wonder what the initial attraction was, what specific value created the impetus towards, and what emotional gravitational field was set up to keep the whole constellation in place? Did the imaginary Roche Lobe Line start out equidistance from both celestial bodies? If so, when did it shift and move and how did one companion manage to increase their specific gravity and begin to feed off their mate? This is only one of the many mysteries of the universe yet to be unraveled.

It is in this gravitational field where we can more closely examine the effects of dissonance and hope for a cure. Even in a relationship where the gravity of both partners is unequal, there still may be an opportunity for resonance. Resonance is that great equalizer that offers a harmonic melody throughout the cosmos and brings order everywhere it goes. It is resonance that provides the foundation for growth, for wonder, and for the blossoming of all things to their fullest potential.  The hope is that binary star systems can achieve some sustainable level of vibrating on the same frequency or wavelength and establish their own unique harmonic resonance. It may even be possible that both stars can contribute to their own new relationship in the same way that couples, even the weak and the strong partner can establish an equilibrium where the two together become more that the sum of their total. In those moments we may be witnessing a kind of constellation of sorts where the weak force and the strong force affect each other in a way that creates a synergy of brightness that can be shared by all. At least I hope so.

Act Three & The Magical Stent

 After all the festivities had died down and the guests and well-wishers had cleared out of my hospital room, I laid there in the dark adding up the cost for this whole thing and realized the curtain had just gone up on my own act three, and the only wardrobe change required was a little metal stent hidden very carefully in my heart.   

The mystery and excitement of life is in discovering who we are and why we came here, and what we are being called to express in our authentic being. When we get it right there will be incredible energy flowing as we connect with others. If we don’t do this, life sucks. If we’re lucky, we get a wakeup call somewhere around the beginning of act three that teaches us to get busy with whatever the hell we were born to do.

The truth is, no matter what sides of the looking glass I find myself on, I always want to get to the other side.  The instant I connect with the oneness, the collective unconsciousness, God, the universe…once I get to that center point of focus, the other side of the rainbow, I’m ready to run off in my body and live for a while someplace nice. I want to take that small glimpse of eternal clarity and gobble it up right now.  I always have my own little plan for myself just in case God’s plan doesn’t work out.  It’s my backup plan if God gets too busy with other things. And when that doesn’t work out, which after a while, it doesn’t, I want back into the circle of eternal bliss where maybe I can get whole again. God waits patiently for my attention. He has forever.  We have an average of 80 years to cram in the whole experience. Life is like taking your kids to Magic Mountain and as soon as they hit the gate, they’re gone, until they want something, and then they’re back. We’re too busy doing stuff to spend time with God. He’s waiting for each one of us to get to the end of ourselves, to let our curiosity run its course and run out of ambition, to ride all the rides in the park, so we can finally be together.  It’s only then that we even consider making time for Him. This process usually involves struggle, suffering, and several humiliating defeats and retreats before we’re willing to throw in the towel. There is no easy exit from this place! Sooner or later we must all do the work of the soul. Some people never do. 

And there is the gravity we all try to escape! Gaining enough velocity, enough centrifugal force to escape the pull of our past mistakes and misery and breaking into the brilliance of the present moment to be ourselves. But how do we shed all the weight and pull of the past, of the womb, our infancy, past the family dynamics and dysfunction? How do we outrun our karma? Where do we begin to attack the ghosts of yesterday that haunt us and stalk us every waking moment? We simply want our wounds to heal so we can go on living and yet, have no clue how to get healed up. We have no idea that we’ve spent our whole life spinning a protective cocoon where we can hide in relative safety from all the barbs and sharp words from those who claim to love us. It is always our loved ones that hurt us the most. We have given them the power and the keys to the kingdom of our hearts and they don’t even wipe their feet on the mat before they come inside!

There are laws of physics and mathematical formulas that govern the universe and all the quarks, neutrinos, planets, stars, bosons, and galaxies. So where are the laws that govern us? What are they? How can we derive a mathematical certainty about everything we do, everything we are? We remain undefined and always in the superposition, never knowing which way we will go.  What is our mathematical equation? Science and mathematics moves closer and closer each day to unveiling a new truth about the universe we live in. There is a concept in science that discusses something called the Akashic Record, which is a signature of information for everything that ever was. The theory goes on to describe the possibility that all physical matter is blessed with specific knowledge or in-formation about itself and its relationship to the rest of the universe. The term they use to define the relationship is called “coherence’. How do we discover this “coherence”?

We turn to the ancient philosophers, theologians, and wise men from the East for our answers, but, we don’t accept anything they have to say. Somehow in our modern world filled with all the new conveniences we no longer ask the right questions. We don’t need the answers. We don’t care about the answers. They are no longer relevant to our everyday life as they have no power to define us.  The modern mind has become so self-absorbed that we define ourselves now in every narcissistic moment and who we are changes with our clothing. That works for a while as long as the merry-go-round keeps turning and we can keep the illusion in focus. Eventually, we slink back into our own heart, look deep down where we hid the grief and pain, and have to face the music. It’s the only way out of our dilemma if we have the will and stamina and faith to take it. It is the journey of a single subjective lifetime. It's time to do the work our heart demands of us!  

Finding Our Authentic Self In the Butterfly Effect

Every minute of every day the storehouse of human knowledge grows bigger, and yet we still have so many questions. New theories are emerging from ancient beliefs that are changing the very foundations of our sciences. Specifically, progress is being made in mathematics, cosmology, and a new science that investigates something called the “Akashic Field” or “Akashic Record”, which may eventually evolve into a theory that explains everything. Mathematics, physics, medicine, and even history itself changes each day as new discoveries are made and ancient relics are uncovered. The truth is; what many people believe to be the truth about something may change radically with each new discovery. The truth is; as the collective body of human knowledge grows, the knowledge of what we don’t know grows even larger. Every question we answer raises more questions.  So this is the dilemma; the more we know the more we realize there is so much more we don’t know. Understanding the dynamic ratio of the known versus the unknown is the beginning of true wisdom, and the sign at the entrance to the rabbit hole.

Sometimes life is strange and unpredictable, and we aren’t so sure of our next move.  Maybe its chance or Karma, when life itself seems to takes us in directions we never considered.  It could be that we interpret everything based on an invisible set of rules from long ago. It is this dynamic reality of life, of a single, solitary life that has not been considered thoroughly. How is it possible to quantify the value of subjective human experience?  How can we share a single experience with everyone else? How can we ever know for sure if we’ve had a good life? How do you measure that?  How do we know what we know and know that we know it? These are questions for the theologians, for scientists, and psychologists.

Many of us have our own personal theory that explains what everything means and the truth is, each theory is a little different and a little bit the same.  How do we ever really know other people? How do we ever really know ourselves?  Some of us believe that we know who we are. We’ve already figured it out and found our authentic self, but we haven’t. We’ve only settled for who we think we are and fooled ourselves into believing the persona we created is our real self instead of discovering the true and authentic person we really are.

For most of my life, I felt there was something wrong with me. Something was broken, but I could never put my finger on it. I spent most of my spare time and effort studying and searching for “the system” that would define me, heal me, and help me find my exact spot in the world.  Searching and studying is what I do. Questioning everything is what I’ve learned to do.  I haven’t found anything outside Christianity that offers such a complete explanation of who I am and what my life means. Christianity helps me understand my place in the universe. I’ve studied Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, the western philosophers and many eastern philosophers, and while I appreciate what they teach, they never quite answered all the questions like Christianity does for me. What I now understand is that each one of us is a unique holographic fragment of the universe. It’s interesting to me that when I reconnected with my authentic self I gained a “legitimacy of self” to all the other belief systems, even agnostics and atheists! Through the lens of my authentic self I began to better understand the priceless value of each single human life in the story of our history. How is it possible that each of us plays such a critical role in the grand scheme of human history? This concept seems fantastic, unfathomable, and crystal clear at the same time! I am only one person and such a small part of humanity. How can I ever make a difference?  How can I matter at all in the history of the world? It becomes possible to understand when the perspective of the questioner changes from a general point of view to the experienced insight of a single life lived.

In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that all he could promise him was the truth. My hope has been to find truth and meaning in my own life and to “know myself” as Socrates challenged us to do. The truth is, many years ago, each of us very carefully and cleverly hid our real self someplace…a place we knew we would never ever return to willingly.  My prayer is that you can discover and recognize your own truth in my collection of thoughts, ideas, and feelings. My hope is that I can share with you how I found my way home and maybe that can help you do the same.  No one can do that for you, but we can help each other in our journey. We must each do the work for ourselves. With less than six degrees of separation between us it makes sense to say the whole world is depending upon you to find your authentic self. When you find your path in life, you will know what you were born to do. But the path will not appear until you are calm, clear, centered, and willing to accept what appears before you. Spend some time with yourself, examine what you believe to be true, and test it to see if it’s real.

In The Matrix, Neo was “the one”. Unlike the movie, each of us is “the one”.  We are all more interconnected than we imagine. Believe nothing you see, hear, or feel, but test everything to determine if it is real and true for you.  I hope my words and ideas will help challenge you as I have been challenged, and then, dig deep inside and find what is there and witness it. You must want to begin the journey and believe that at some point you will find your extraordinary self, or you will never make the effort. You are “the one” and we are waiting for you to show up. We only ask for you to share your real self with us and show us who you are.

In Praise of Our Elders

In most cultures around the world, the elderly are revered as sacred, valuable, wise, and even essential to a healthy society. They have lived longer than the rest of us, and therefore, have learned things we have not learned yet. Our elders have developed a special wisdom of living and by virtue of their days on earth, deserve respect for surviving the rigors of everyday life in this world. After all, we suspect they may know something we don’t, not having traveled that road yet. Fortunately for me, I grew up with my great grandparents. I remember studying my great grandmother’s hands. They were wrinkled with very thin skin, so much so that her veins stuck out. They were beautiful! My hands didn’t look like that at all. Even at such an early age, on some level I marveled at how long my grandma had to live to have hands like those! They were very special hands. They were the hands of a very old lady who had lived a long and full life. “If I’m lucky someday my hands will look like that,” I thought, holding one of her hands in mine. My great grandmother had a wrinkled face and I’m told she was about five foot three inches tall, although I remember her as a giant! She had an ancient calmness about her that cast a magical spell over whatever she was doing. I watched those hands put bread in the toaster and then spread butter on the toast and open the jam and put just right amount of jam on each piece. She always knew how to do that! I so grateful I got to spend my first five years of life with seventy-somethings! Maybe that’s why I love the elderly so much. I don’t see them as old. I see them as regular. There is something to be learned spending time with our elders as they go about their daily business of dressing, fixing meals, and taking time to sit quietly to watch the sun come up or to listen to the birds in the trees. Fixing a nice simple lunch and taking a short nap afterwards is an absolutely beautiful way to prepare oneself for an afternoon to do nothing except enjoy being alive. For seventy-somethings and little boys, it seemed like the good life! None of us do that anymore. Who has the time? We’re all too busy with important stuff. We can’t be sitting around wasting time doing nothing! Now we have to take classes to learn how to let go and do nothing. A lot of my friends now are seventy, eighty, or even ninety-somethings! Far from being old, they have more life in them than I do. I can only hope to have that kind of energy if by some chance I manage to make it to their age. I’ve studied these folks and find they all have one thing in common: on some level they’ve come to realize that their best days are ahead of them! They are just now starting to deliver on the gifts they are intended to give to the world and they give them with joy. They aren’t getting older at all-they’re all getting better at living and they have so much experience. Being a sixty something is kind of an in-betweener-not young anymore and not really old either. Not to take anything at all away from the young, but being twenty, thirty, forty, or even fifty isn’t that hard when you see it in the rearview mirror. Like my friend Bob told me once, “You’re not a real stud until you turn seventy!” That was ten years ago. I’m starting to understand what he was talking about. I hope I can measure up someday and can’t wait for those hands like my great grandma’s!

The Light Bearer

People say they don’t exist. They say they’re a fairy tale spun by the brokenhearted to give them hope. They say there used to be many of them, but now they are all gone out of the world. Now we live in a civilized world, an intelligent world defined only by scientific fact. The world we live in today has been stripped of every myth and legend ever known. No one believes in fairy tales anymore, except what we see in the movies. The big screen is alive with superheroes, myths, and legends…tales of every strange and weird creature imaginable. That’s great for entertainment, but where is the food for the soul? We are all starving now. Somewhere just below the surface of our awareness, comfortably inside our consciousness, are the instructions for bringing light into the world…for becoming a light bearer. The problem is…we don’t remember how to access it. We don’t even believe it is possible, except that once in a while, we encounter a person that brings light into our world and we wonder how they did it. In those moments of crystal clarity, bathed in the brilliant light of their serenity, we know it’s still possible. We’ve experienced it! Then mostly, we shy away back into the shadows from where we came, pondering the mystery of the light and hoping we get to see it again. What we don’t expect or even look for is the possibility that we may become light bearers. We like to imagine ourselves as some kind of superhero, but never seriously expect our selves capable of greatness, yet we are. We all are…capable of greatness. This superpower comes at a very high cost. It is a cost most people are unwilling to bear. The cost is nothing less than a near elimination of the ego. We must become as nothing, or more exactly, we become a mere presence, an awareness; a watcher of things. Our thoughts and opinions mean nothing apart from a focused attention. There is no substance in them anymore. They don’t matter. All that ever matters is becoming more aware of this present moment and bearing witness to it. If you do that long enough the light begins to shine in you and through you. Sooner or later we all get an invitation to become a light bearer. We will mostly ignore it or not recognize the value of the offer, but one day, one day it becomes painfully obvious that was always available to us, but we didn’t honor it. Once we make a conscious choice to embrace the light, to let go of the pain and anguish and fear, and allow creation and connection to work in us and through us, we become transparent beings. We no longer concern ourselves with self-preservation, rather, we simply trust nature to unfold our path before us and take us where we need to be. Once there, the only single requirement is to be fully present in the moment and allow “it” to happen…. whatever that means. The only way “it” ever happens is when we are flooded with gratitude. There are only two ways to get gratitude: one is to receive an undeserved dose of unconditional love from someone, the other way is to give someone undeserving a dose of unconditional love. Giver or receiver doesn’t matter much-the result is the same. Being fully bathed in a miraculous moment is enough to make the transition. It’s always the same when waves of gratitude flow over you and through you and you realize you are the richest and luckiest person in the whole world. Before you even know it, you are giving light to those around you through your focused attention and concern for them. You almost forget you have any of your own problems at all. Congratulations- you are now a light bearer! We seriously need more light bearers among us.

Residual Self-Image

Looking in the mirror just now turned into a semi-religious experience. I know the guy looking back at me was not my dad, but it wasn’t me either. It’s not that I don’t recognize my own face-I do! It’s more like it just doesn’t seem to be me anymore, at least not the way I think of myself. As I apply the shaving cream to my face and then perform the ritual of shaving, which I’ve done faithfully for over forty years, everything seems familiar, so familiar that I almost never cut myself anymore. As I finish up my shave and rinse my face, taking a sideways glance at the face in the mirror, the images of all the days and places seem to offer themselves up right in front of me. It was a surreal moment of brilliant insight that left me reeling from seeing my life flash before my eyes. Where does the time of our life go to? It seems to slip by so slowly at first and then one day you wake up and you’re on a roller coaster hellbent on jumping the tracks. I remember all the times, all the days spent working, fixing things around the house, going on vacation, family birthdays, baptisms and funerals. I remember all the holiday scenes and Christmas presents and the family and friends that are no longer with us and all the new babies in the family. Maybe it’s a trick of memory to suppose that everything in the past happened in its own time, unfolding without hurry or bother, as it was always intended. It could be that things have changed in the world so much that now we don’t have time to cram anything into our already crowded schedules. I mean, when I go on vacation now, I need four power cords to charge my two cellphones, Bluetooth, and Nook! What’s up with that? Checking in with myself at age sixty is both rewarding and perplexing. As I grow older life itself seems to deliver up gifts I never imagined, never could have received in my youth; patience, perspective, and a slower pace more amenable to actually getting something meaningful accomplished each day. It is finally possible to begin to experience a sense of rhythm in life. Some of the unintended consequences include all the medications, doctor visits, and the stuff that comes with it. There is also something else that showed up in my life when I turned sixty: the need to reinvent myself or rediscover who I really am! Sometime in the past year, a new image of me has come into focus: it is a faded residual image from my youth of me actually conquering life or something like that. Anyway, this morning, the image in the mirror realized that I had almost accomplished so many things in my life. I almost completed my educational goals. I almost helped my parents in their old age. I almost succeeded in business. I almost went bankrupt. I almost became a pastor. I almost went to Europe. I almost became a writer. I almost became a ballet dancer. I almost lived my life. I don’t know how much time I have left to live, but I’ve learned to be fully grateful for each breath of air I breathe, for each bird song I hear at sunrise, and to watch the sun go down and just sit on the patio basking in that indirect sunlight time of day we call twilight. Having found my authentic self, time no longer seems to matter, as each day unfolds on its own, in its own time and me along with it.