01 The argument
Maybe peace should not be the goal.
If you can see that war is stupid, and you like the idea of living in a better world, but world peace seems impossible and overly idealistic, then consider that maybe the goal was never peace. It was harmony.
Harmony is not just comfort. A consonant chord, an octave, a fifth. It is also tension. A tritone. Harmony is the constant dance between dissonance and consonance, tension and resolution, discomfort and comfort.
So it is not being soft, docile and boring. It is not holding hands and saying everything is fine. It is not ignoring problems, or pretending they will resolve themselves if we just raise our vibration.
It is not a static peace, not something you could get bored of, but a continuous dynamic process. A constant challenge with endless possibilities.
Harmony embraces the tensions that arise from conflicting motivations, and weaves them together in real time into a constantly evolving cohesive vision.
Harmony is not just the final moment of resolution. It is the entire process.
Where the idea comes from
This is reflected in musical counterpoint, as in the expertly crafted music of J.S. Bach, where multiple independent melodic lines move simultaneously and interact to create a harmonic narrative. Listen to any of it and you hear many subtle tensions and resolutions, which themselves form part of a larger tension and resolution.
Harmony is not flattening down to a static octave. In the same way, we are going to have tensions on every level, from inside ourselves to within our families, communities and countries. As long as we keep listening and adapting to each other, we find ways to resolve them that we could never have imagined before.
02 Inner harmony first
If global harmony still sounds like wishful thinking, start inside.
Each of us has a complex network of interconnected motivational systems, each responsible for driving certain behaviors toward what it perceives to be a desired outcome. The problem is that these are rarely synced up, even inside one person.
You know this already. You say you want to do one thing and end up doing another. One of your sub-personalities is certain it never wants to do something ever again, and then a different one pops up and steers you right back to where you swore never to go.
One motivation drives you toward a short term payoff while another considers a broader context and a longer span. In one moment you feel open, confident and free, in another constricted and anxious, almost like two different people.
They are indeed different sub-personalities. You experience cognitive dissonance when they fight within you.
That dissonance is not a problem unless we stay stuck in it. Dissonance is an invitation to broaden our perspective and act in a way that takes more factors into account.
Self-integration
Bringing the motivational systems together so they pull in one direction instead of fragmenting you.
Union
Which is what the word literally means. Part of the same essence, arrived at from a different tradition.
Counterpoint
Independent lines, each going its own way, forming something none of them could form alone. A continuous process that includes tension rather than a static solidifying.
You do not do what you know you want to do because you are fragmented within yourself, each system pulling a different direction instead of harmonized to pull upward. If we expand our scope to recognize that all these motivations are part of the same symphony, we can keep moving through them, arriving at moments of brilliant resolution along the way.
03 The scope
Harmony is not one subject.
Making a harmonious reality, inside and out, draws on nearly everything. I work where my strengths are, and the rest of it needs people whose strengths are somewhere else.
What I bring
An invitation to presence. Something a whole room can be hit by at the same moment, which pulls everyone out of their own story at once.
Catching the flashes of clarity and getting them down in plain language, so they stay present instead of sliding back out of focus.
Awareness, mindfulness and physical wellness. Because an insight that stays on the mental level misses the point, and the body is where it either lands or does not.
Learning a language is how you enter a culture on its own terms rather than through translation. You start to see how differently people can live well, what each way of life is good at and what it costs, and you can begin to carry something across between them.
Also a long running enthusiast of psychology, philosophy and systems thinking. Not an authority in any of them, but useful at finding where they meet and pulling the pieces together.
What it also takes
The invitation
Each of us is a node in an elaborate network of nodes, and everything we do ripples out. We each have pieces of the puzzle. I am sharing the pieces I have so far and looking for the people carrying the rest.
This is not just a channel to follow. It is a thing to build, and it needs more than one person's strengths.
04 The work
Some of my pieces, so far.
Music
A lifeline to the present moment.
Music is not decoration on any of this. It is the fastest way in. Most of us spend the day inside our own heads, mistaking our thoughts for the world. When a room full of people gets hit by the same sound at the same moment, everyone steps out of their own story at once, into the plain experience of hearing.
That is not an illustration of harmony. It is the thing itself, briefly, and it wakes something up that an argument cannot reach.
Series
Long form, one root at a time.
Each series drills into a different root of the same question. Free, on YouTube, with written companions on the publication.
- 01Demystify the Ego & Harmonize the Mind The deepest root issue I can see is that we are lost in our thoughts and missing what is actually going on. This series digs into what is not working in our relationship with our own minds.
- 02Reasons for Hope in Humanity It is so much easier and faster to destroy than to create, so the fact that we have a society that works at all means the good in us is stronger than the bad.
- 03Music Parallels Life Fractal concepts. Universal patterns that express themselves throughout different domains and levels of existence, and how we can align ourselves with them.
- 04Inner to Outer What is inside you wants to come out. Productivity in service of healthy self-expression, for the benefit of all.
- 05Self-Realization Thoughts about consciousness, awareness, yoga and meditation, from 2014 to now.
- 06AI Music Deep Dive Resistance is Futile. How a technology gets integrated harmoniously instead of becoming pure dissonance.
Practices
Where it gets into the body.
I have been teaching yoga since 2013 and practicing since 2006, alongside meditation, breath work and martial arts. The practices are mostly about awareness, mindfulness and physical wellness, and they are where an insight stops being an idea you agree with and becomes something you actually do.
A proper home for this is being built now.
05 Join
Join if
and only if
- You are ready to bring what is in your heart out into the world with more clarity.
- You want to move through life a bit more skillfully.
- You are passionate about realizing your, and our, full potential.
- You dare to believe we can leave this world even just a bit better than we found it.
A single insight can make all the difference. You know those moments where everything snaps into focus and your path feels clear? They tend to slide back out of focus as fast as they came. This is where they get caught, written down and put to use.
If you work in one of the fields above, or one I have not thought of, I would rather collaborate than broadcast.
What could be more worth doing than making the most of your unique potential in this life, and helping make a harmonious world, inside and out? However far we make it, is harmony not worth aiming at?
06 Who is saying this
Not a guru. Just a guy constantly learning things worth sharing.
Samuel Wexler. Violinist, composer and producer, 500 hour certified yoga teacher, long time meditator, and a father. He has lived in Colorado, China and Mexico, and speaks English, Spanish, French, Mandarin and German at various levels.
The musical background is not decoration on a spiritual idea. It is the source of it. Counterpoint is where harmony stops being a metaphor and becomes something you can hear.
I don't have all the answers, but I feel like I'm asking the right questions.