– Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
This last chapter in the section of music, which precedes the next section of comedy, fuses the arts of music and comedy together, but unlike the traditional musical theater productions on Broadway, which do that in a very different way. Instead, this chapter explains the principles in music of the tonic chord and the theme and variations. It also includes the callback in comedy, which is a repetition of a previously funny joke or story, often used to close a stand-up set. The callback is also featured frequently in episodes of “Seinfeld” or “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” in which a character or a situation introduced in the first scene has a comedic conclusion in the final scene of the program. Both shows were either produced or often written by Larry David. These structures in music – the tonic and the theme – and that of the callback in comedy both are expressions of a much deeper principle in the evolution of human consciousness in life.
From Oneness to Oneness
The arc of human life begins in the oneness of infancy, in which the newborn babe really has no distinction between himself and the world.
In that remarkable purity and bliss of the new visitor to our planet, everything is a wonderful oneness in a pre-verbal paradise. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” wrote the Romantic poet William Wordsworth in his greatest poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”
But
in time, the infant grows, and with that comes a differentiation
between self and other, between I and the world. The little one learns
that there’s a whole world outside of himself,
and what belongs to his friend in the sandbox is his friend’s and not
his. He learns language to further distinguish between one thing and the
other. His sense of oneness in time disappears. Or as Wordsworth put it
more beautifully
than me,
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
His fall from paradise is still not yet complete in childhood for, as Wordsworth added,
he beholds the light, and
whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
But, in time,
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
In school you learn your ABCs, and the separation from oneness continues to grow. You go to college, you get married, you have a family and a career, and duality just grows and grows. Now, if you’re wise and pursue spiritual development, you may – if you learn a powerful meditation practice, like the Transcendental Meditation that I taught for decades and the Higher Self Healing Meditation that I teach now – you can effortlessly tap into your higher Self, your inner Being who is the Oneness that underlies all diversity in your world. If you deepen your inner work, you can build on this fleeting glimpse of heaven, and you may awaken into the enlightened state of Unity Consciousness, in which you regain the paradise that was lost – only now you appreciate the Oneness AND the diversity simultaneously. The bliss of infancy has returned, coexisting with all of the skills you learned in your life – your mastery of language and the ability to manifest what you want when you want it, unlike infancy when you couldn’t speak or communicate your needs and desires. This is the complete arc of human life – from the innocence and oneness of your early days to the innocence and oneness of Enlightenment through the fallen state of diversity. In other words, the course of human life comes full circle – think of it as going from home to home.
So now what does that have to do with the beginning of this chapter? Actually, quite a lot. The tonic in a piece of music is the musical center of a piece. It’s the pitch upon which every other pitch in the piece is based. Simple folk songs, traditional tunes from the troubadours of our distant past, as well as complex sonatas involving many instruments often begin and end on the tonic note. And when the tonic returns after an absence that might be short, as well as long, there is great satisfaction in your ear as listener. It’s as if your listening has taken you from home to home. You have traversed the arc of life in a short musical piece, and enjoy the satisfaction of hearing the arc of the purpose of your life represented, even though you’re not intellectually aware of this deeper meaning.
A similar phenomenon occurs in the structure of theme and variation so frequently employed in many forms of classical music and jazz. A piece will begin with an exposition of a musical idea or theme. Often, the composer will replay the theme with a slight variation, continuing to do so again and again, with variations often dominating more so than the theme. The same principle applies to jazz that might feature spontaneous variations, until the theme on time returns. This return at the end of the piece will have a similarly satisfying effect on your ear as the tonic did. Musicologists will have their own interpretations of why this return to the original idea is so gratifying, but its deepest reason, as I stated above, is that it recapitulates the arc of the life you were born to live.
And the same principle applies even in that most irreverent form of art known as standup comedy. The next time you see a comic doing his set in a comedy club for 15 minutes, or perhaps see an hour-long act on HBO, notice if his performance concludes with a joke he introduced early in his act. If you do, you’ll have an intellectual appreciation of the arc of his routine that is a metaphor for the arc of your own spiritual life.