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.