Aire on the Bell-Shaped Curve

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Foster Harmony is first tenet of Distilled Harmony because it is the primary task of our lives.  The other tenets, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm can certain serve as guiding principles in their own right, but they all serve the ultimate goal of fostering harmony. Given that assertion, everything we do should point to, or be interpreted in the light of the first tenet - everything.

Meditation is a task that most would assert is inherently linked to fostering Harmony. Yet, meditation does not mean the same thing to everyone - and, yes, there is a delicious irony there, that we should aggressively debate the tranquil nature of meditation. But let us leave that for another day.

I understand that for many the object of meditation is to empty the mind - to stop thinking. But that need not always be the objective. Meditation can be guided meditation - you can nudge meditation with both music and gentle focus. Rather than emptying the mind, the proces is more like stepping aside from the mind - letting go of the idea of authorship. Perhaps a better analogy is getting a seat in the front row, first balcony, and watching the performance your mind provides if you just nudge it a bit. The show that unfolds is multifaceted.  Naturally the music you select to aid your meditation provides a bed of Harmony, but images and phrases make their contribution as well.

Recently my view from the balcony has provided some delightful interactions among a variety of harmonious elements. Foremost has been the bell-shaped curve. The bell-shaped curve is a simple graphic representation of the normal distribution of anything.  Having been a teacher all my life, my most common interaction with the bell-shaped curve has been in the way in which it uncannily depicts the performance of students in my classes.  Despite the current farcical grade inflation infecting our education system, when I construct a legitimate, discerning test for my students - no matter if it is a small graduate class of 20 students, or a large undergrad survey course of 200 or more - the grades will fall along the bell-shaped curve: a handful of As, a larger chunk of Bs, a whole bunch of Cs, a chunk of Ds (quite similar to the number of Bs) and a handful of Fs. It is quite amazing. It is a most harmonic depiction. It simplifies one aspect of a diverse group of individuals. It distills complexity. Ah ha.

The Bell-Shaped Curve

I began to consider the potential insights one might gain by viewing other aspects of life through the lens of the bell-shaped curve, and it struck me that there may be a distillation within the distillation. Consider this: there is often a maturation, or an "increasing insight" variable attached to the bell-shaped.  The most callow, uninformed students loll beneath the F and D portion of the curve, most students reside under the C spot, while a deminishing population have struggled to claim spots beneath B, with only a few finding their way to an A.  Hence the curve not only describes the number of individuals who will be placed at particular spots on the curve, it simultaneously indicates the extent to which each person on the curve has mastered the content, or come to the understanding that the curve describes.

Consider a brief, albeit important, example, and one perhaps in flux in the digitally redefined modern world: life and friendship.  And here I reach back to my own life and lives of my children, so the example is admittedly culturally skewed, but the idea retains broader validity nonetheless. 

When a child is born their world is relatively small. Perhaps as small as the family unit.  That portion of the bell-shaped curve hovers barely above the baseline. Then the child begins to encounter a wider group of "others."  Maybe informal "others," children in the neighborhood, maybe more formal groups, preschool, what have you, and the curve begins to rise.  As the child grows toward adolescence, the number of people beneath the bell shaped curve also increases.  The increase is both numeric and experimental.  Numeric is obvious.  We meet more people, at school, at work, and in a variety of voluntary affiliations - religious, political, extra-curricular, or extra-employment groups. These last become those who swell the experimental aspect of the curve.  We experiment with a variety of interests, a variety of identities if you will.  It is during this time in our lives - past adolescence and into our adult life - that the curve rises to its highest point above the baseline.  We have more people "in our life" than we ever have had before, or will ever have again.

After that the curve begins to descend again towards the baseline. The driving factor is selectivity. Our areas of interest contract. The child who was carted from music lessons to team sports practice to play group to study group to whatever and whatnot, has decided where their true interests lie. The college student who changed majors 5 times, finally settles on one. The adult who has moved through four or five jobs, becomes more clearly focused on one path.  All areas of our lives contract as the focus becomes not quantity but quality.  The number of people in our lives becomes far less.  They become important in the ways in which they enrich our lives, the ways in which they make us smile. In the ways in which they are truly our friends.

So this descent down the far side of the bell-shaped curve is a distillation.  From the complexity of the herd we distill the value of the few, the vital, the harmonic. It is true that mystery lurks where the curve meets the base line.  Does the final dip define us alone as we internalize all our life's experiences into a single purely harmonic chord?  Or is that intersection with the baseline a transcendent moment? Do we, at that moment, flip our existential poles, like the Earth flipping its magnetic field and what was the end of one bell-shaped curve creates the beginning of another?

Perhaps it never was a single bell-shaped curve but rather a series of waves, each of which charts both population and insight. Perhaps we mistake the numerical peak for insight, when it more truly reflects the mentality of the herd.  Perhaps we lack the patience to travel the longer road to the selectivity at the far end of the curve where we encounter far fewer numbers of far greater quality. 

Most likely, life is a process of repeating distillations. Each distillation begins with a seed, a magic bean, perhaps a singularity which expands into a plethora of potentials. We winnow those to a precious few, distill those few to the essence of the current distillation. And that essence becomes the singularity that fuels the subsequent distillation. A fundamentalist believes they understand and/or represent the "last distillation.” Deeper reflection reveals that we have simply turned a corner, discovering the beginning of a new distillation.
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Who Are Those Guys?

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OK, I need to admit right up front that, yes, I do talk to myself.  Come on, admit it.  We all do. Otherwise life would be an endless ride in a crowded elevator, staring at the lights above the door, watching them change, avoiding eye contact, turning inward.  Hmm. Interesting thought, the Zen of elevator riding.  But I digress.  Back to talking to myself. The only problem is that I occasionally do it out loud. This, coupled with the fact that both my wife and I are "acoustically challenged" creates some awkward moments: 

I'll say something to me, and she will ask "What?"  

I (realizing that I had been talking out loud,) "Nothing, just talking to myself."

She: (out loud) OK (internally) Jeeeeez.

Still, the tendency leads to some interesting internal dialogues. For example, couple of nights ago I woke up from a dream.  It was not one of those powerful dreams that won't let go, a dream that follows you into waking, demanding that you pay attention.  It was a softer kind of dream, involving, but hazy around the edges.  

So I said to myself, "I don't even know where we were."

"What do you mean by ‘we'?" I asked.

“You know, 'we' .  .  . the people in the dream.” I said.

"Who were they?” I inquired.

"Ah, yeah. I don't know that either." One of us fell silent, the other fell asleep.

What has followed me into my waking life is the realization that while my dreams do often include "real people who are known to me," just as often they are "peopled" by entities with whom I interact very humanly, but who, upon my waking, retreat into ephemeral, emotional chords. Presences without a specific identity. Hence the question remains: Who are those guys?

I have scratched the surface of enough psychology, psychiatry, brain studies, theology, philosophy, etc., to be able to state categorically and without doubt that, like Butch and Sundance, we really don't know who "those guys" are.  I, of course, love that as it allows me wide latitude to spin my own theories.  I guess the best place to start is with who I believe they are not: Dreams are not neurological static - phantoms generated by the random firing of neurons.  That would certainly be an easy answer - asserting truth in the face contradictory or incomplete evidence.  Sort of like the Creationist paleontologist who recently discovered a fish fossil that mainstream paleontologists date at about 60 million years-old. “Yes,” asserts the founder. “It is an ancient fish. But since the world was created only 5,000 years ago, it can’t be any older than that, and everyone who disagrees with me is wrong."  If we, similarly, write dreams off as being merely random scratches in the gray matter, ignoring the collected data and reflection that argue to the contrary, it becomes hard to assert that they have deeper purpose or meaning; or to hypothesize as to what that purpose or meaning might be. But since our sleeping brainwaves, while different from wide-awake brainwave, seem more extensions of the waking world than the arrival of a radically different state of being, the seemingly more logical - and irresistible, for me anyhow - temptation is to try to understand them. Hence, we constantly seek to unlock the apparent mysteries of these familiar ephemera.  

So let us give it a shot. Physicists assert that the standard model of physics must play by the same rules throughout the universe. I’m good with that. Hence, in my worldview "those guys" have to be all about the pursuit of Harmony. I certainly have no evidence to the contrary, and in the general interest of symmetry I would assert that, as in "walkabout real world," the world on the other side of the consciousness curtain - the world of dreams - is also driven by the four tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. But the relationship between tenet and player is not always as direct as it seems in light of day. Hence I tend to shy away from being too “waking-world centric" when I consider the more gentle shades of dreaming. 

Let me jump - seemingly without segue - to fireflies.  I have never encountered anyone in whom the first glimpse of the evening’s fireflies failed to elicit an “Oh! Fireflies!”  Here, in North Carolina evenings, they seem to fade in and then magically fade out, only to reappear somewhere else. Yes, at a distance, but still close enough to their exit point that even small children can reach out and capture them.  However, the fireflies of both Tennessee and Malaysia are something quite different.  They begin, as do their more common backyard cousins, with a few random flashes, but soon they congregate in thousands, and gradually their flashes synchronize until entire trees blink with all the gaudiness of a Times Square marquee.

And how do we bring that back to dreams?  Well, let us remember that in our dreams - at least in mine - the “players” usually divide into two broad classes.  On the one hand we have recognizable entities who often “play" themselves - your spouse, children, parents, lovers, antagonists, etc.  On the other hand we have “tonal entities” - entities with whom we interact quite comfortably, but who, upon our waking, swiftly fade - disappearing completely by the time we find a cool spot on the pillow, or return from the bathroom.  I have come to feel that the “real people," living and deceased, who populate my dreams are like the single mysterious flashing of lone firefly at the end of the garden.  They are less themselves, and more manifestations of their dominant chords; e.g. my mother in my dreams is not simply my mother. Rather she manifests/represents/demonstrates a distillation of the dominant notes she performed in life - a spiritual, comforting gentleness.  The recognizable players in my dreams, I have come to believe, all follow that model; they sound the chord which they most clearly play/played in "walk about waking world." This applies to both dominant harmonics and dominant discord. Those we love may play themselves, as may those who currently fight the Harmony of our chord. Yet, strangely, they rarely play the leads in our somnolent dramas.  They are “supporting characters.” But supporting in the manner of the old theater assertion that “There are no small roles, only small actors.” In our dreams the “supporting characters” support the dreamworld - they are the solid, constant notes of our chord which hold both sides of consciousness together.

The leads in dreams are played “those guys,” composite entities who manifest chords that contain notes that have been contributed by a host of significant others in our lives. These are the synchronized fireflies of Tennessee and Malaysia. They flash with admirable glitz,  but are currently clusters of fireflies with either insufficient mass or syncopation to coalesce into a recognizable entity which - counterintuitively - would allow them to take their place as the calm, supporting notes upon which our world - both dreaming and waking - rest.  Instead they are notes still seeking their place in our chord.  We try them out in our dreams.  So, ironically, it is those still uncertain notes that become the Darth Vaders or Princesses Lea who start us awake with racing pulse, either anxious or fearful to rejoin the swiftly fading dream.

All of which still begs the question of why they are there at all? Why do we dream? Distilled Harmony leans strongly to a rather simple explanation: dreams are there to aid in our pursuit of transcendent Harmony.  And, as experience does in our "walking around” life, dreams teach with both the stick and the carrot.  Dreams are the carrot, nightmares the stick.

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