Conclusions: Fourier analysis and the World at Large

January 10th, 2009, Travel Diary

Plane #2, Sao Paulo a LAX

Brazil cultivates kindness like no other country I can remember being in. Every country has its specialty, it seems to me – the calming forests and beautiful waterfalls, the lush living gentleness, have fostered sensitivity and caring. In Germany the dark winters and cold weather have fostered efficiency in meeting needs; the cars go fast, the trains are sleek and smooth, the subways are calm, and the people are subdued and gentle. In France indulgence is unquestionably a virtue of highest regard – the food is delicious, the museums abound with history and talent, and the Moulin-rouge-style passion is both exquisite and infamous. Ghana celebrates the primal rhythms of human nature with music, dance, and clothing so colorful it seems to shine with joy – as does their passionate and joyful vibe of Christianity. Britain’s strong patriarchal heritage is evident not only in its history but in its profound respect for everyone’s right to enjoy the inheritance of all cultures – the British museum is gorgeous, and not only is it free, it’s the only museum I remember that lets you not only touch many precious relics but even photograph them all. Wales treasures the well-being of its populace over material appearances, as did their passionate druid ancestors whose culture of passion and poetry survives in jousting festivals and the annual Eistedfodd. Mexico specializes not only in family but in generosity as well; wedding celebrations are virtuallyt conflagrations of joyous affection, but those who provide the income are willing to leave the world they cherish for one they know full well is hostile to outsiders so they can find

Plane # - ?

**Peace.

Outside the window the world floats by, fluffy piles of cumulous clouds below, soft swaths of blue and grey stretching above. The sound of a movie whispers from the headphones of the passenger beside me; the screen of his seat, turned toward me since I lowered my windowshade when I saw him blocking the light with his hand, has subtitles in Japanese and English with a soundtrack in Brazilian. I love this airline, but as I awaken to the validity of my own truth it is becoming clearer that I love not only all ways of traveling but also all travelers, all destinations, and perhaps, at least in retrospect, all travels.

The truth is trippy, but the way is simple, and the light is the foundation of everything we can see and touch – but by no means is it the crux of who we are. From the cohesion of atomic particles to the amplification of electromagnetic power – from the peace in a child’s eyes to the tingling thrill of a deeply moving symphony, the energy that makes order from chaos follows the same fundamental principles: tension is cold, arousal is hot, and symmetry is the balance of it all. How could it not be? Science does describe the truth; belief does empower it; ignorance, or at least the willingness to relax and re-focus, does define what we perceive. The culture of our origin seeds our truth; the nature of our destination defines its trajectory; our willingness and abi8lity to change our perspectives shape our growth – but in the end the result is invariable: peace.

A child across the plane from me is screeching at a pitch whose frequency, whose wavelength, causes my stomach to tighten – but the child’s crying is not causing my discomfort. My brain is, not hers. My nervous system has been calibrated by the myriad details of my life to respond to the precise sound of her wailing with annoyance – tension, excessive activation, negative emotion – but if I breathe, relax, and pay attention to the tenor of the voice rather than the fist it curls in my stomach, the tension dissipates into compassion, the unpleasant arousal into sympathy, my own suffering into understanding. If I focus on the external stimulus instead of my internal reaction to it, her screeching melts into an emotion I empathize with very well: frustration. In the absence of words, her neuronal design clenches her throat with the same grip that dictates nearly all human interaction: she says what she feels, speaks her truth. If I focus on her emotion instead of mine, the exquisite tuning of the human perceptual systems correctly reinterprets my annoyance as her pain, not mine. Then my tension melts into sympathy, my clenching discomfort into understanding, my angry dislike of the dissonance into a very real compassion.

It is not the child’s crying that forces me to be uncomfortable, it is just my nervous system’s response to her absolutely honest, wholeheartedly innocent way of expressing her own reaction to her experience of the world. If I redirect my focus to her experience rather than mine, my brain responds by mirroring her suffering with a harmless trace of my own. Instead of tension, I tune in to the precise wavelength of her pain – and I feel in my gut that she is not suffering at all. She is frustrated that the world, her immediate environments, is not providing what she strongly feels she deserves to be given. There is dissonance between her desires and her immediate experience, but she is not suffering. If I allow my perception – or truly my own reaction to her perception – to override how innately I empathize with it, my emotion reflects hers rather than mirroring it. As soon as her mother’s behavior shows she is listening, shows the child’s mind that she is understood, she stops crying – the inequity of valence dissolves, her out-of-kilter emotion resolves into the peace of knowing she is understood, and she stops screeching (which she actually did about halfway through this sentence). Until her mother’s body really does come in line with the child’s nervous arousal – for as long as she hears frustration or anger in the mother’s voice instead of the helpless discomfort felt by the child herself – the dissonance will amplify, and whatever wavelength most provokes her mother’s system to respond with sympathy is the wavelength to which the baby’s voice will migrate. With enough arousal, a perfect mirror-mind will gravitate to sympathy. A mind springing from a non-mirror nervous system will respond with whatever emotion is triggered within it. So long as the person on the receiving end is focusing on the message rather than its source or its destination, arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (tension) will trigger mirror neurons in the listener’s brain to recreate the source intension: which is felt by the mother as the suffering it is, so the child’s mind perceives that it has been met with understanding. When the child’s arousal is met with the mother’s empathy, the dissonant wavelengths do what dissonant wavelengths do across the spectrum: they resolve into harmony, and the discomfort dissipates. Pain met with empathy resolves into peace; heat met with cold resolves into the temperature of its equilibrium; agitation joined to its exact opposing frequency returns to baseline. As soon as the mother shows the baby she understands – as soon as their perceptual systems come into harmony, the frustration ceases and both parties fall silent.

The only pain is in the message. Discomfort is the invariable response to discomfort, in exact and perfect ratio to the mismatch, the misunderstanding. Great passion m et with great gentleness resolve into flawless kindness. Passion met with poassion amplifies the nervous reaction until the dissonant wavelengths resolve, which they invariably do. A flat-line apathetic numbness looks exactly the same spectrally as does perfect harmony. They look like peace. They feel like understanding. They sound like they were exquisitely designed to get along. They were.

My annoyance at the squeal results directly from my focus on the endpoints rather than the message, the emotional correlate of the neural mismatch in activation; if I redirect my attention to the message itself, I naturally perceive and respond appropriately.

Pain results from focusing on the source, the speaker, or its destination, the listener. If we pay attention before we respond, we empathize, and we experience neither fear nor anger. If we focus on the message instead of our reaction, we have no biological option but understanding. Passion plus passion equals peace. Fourier analysis can clarify every misunderstanding.

Empathy manifests as widened eyes; so does attraction; so does what we call love. Fear triggers contraction of pupils; I suspect anger does the same. Pupils respond to pupils like mirrors; dilation evokes contraction until the pupils reflect each other perfectly, which is when we feel understood, when we feel safe, when we feel loved.

So why can’t we just get along? We can; we eventually have no choice. Eventually we see eye to eye, no matter how convoluted or intense the process may be. Fear and anger, joy and mourning, agony and empathy reflect each other so perfectly that they are literally predestined by physics to come to terms with each other. Pain, discomfort, is just misperception. Focus on the message and no damage can possibly be done.