"The state of the world is really bad," I overheard someone say again today. I've been hearing this sound a lot. It has been a refrain since my childhood, 50 years ago, but the pace and volume of the mantra is on the rise.
When I was young I learned about climate change (back then the experts were sure another ice age was imminent), the communists, and the looming menace of global thermonuclear conflagration that would immolate life on earth. In first grade, I caught the tail-end of a ludicrous exercise foisted on children: To practice hiding under our desks as we visualized nukes exploding outside. With all these looming threats, my childhood emotional life was woven with a sense of doom bolstered by an assurance that the end of the world was at hand.
In my teen years the counter-phobic impulse impelled actually dangerous exploits. I rode my motorcycle too fast, solo-climbed difficult rock walls hundreds of feet high, and took too many drugs. Something in me was daring the world to end.
In time, the threats did not materialize, and I began to relax. I stopped worrying about global catastrophe because I could see that worrying not only did me no good, but it even destroyed possibilities for really living. Relaxing the tension of concern for abstract, potential dangers, I became more available to myself, and to what and who was in front of me.
Now when I hear someone decry the state of the world, I try to fathom which world they are referring to. Is it an abstract world portrayed by educational and media mythologists or is it a domain of direct experience?
A friend bought a run-down log cabin down a long driveway, on a hill overlooking the Shawangunk Ridge. Between jobs, he has given his time to restoring the building. He's dehumidified, rebuilt, painted, and reappointed almost the entire house, which is nearing completion.
"This is starting to feel like my whole world," he said last night as we stood on his recently finished deck. "I'm doing the work as a prayer, bringing order where I can."
His words struck a chord and I had the image of a fractal, in which each part is a miniature of the totality. In this nonlinear view of space-time geography, the work we do in the domain we inhabit reverberates out and in, up and down. My friend's work to raise the level of the cabin was at the same time raising the level of his inner life and the larger world at the same time.
The air was filled with the litany of the peepers, cicadas, crickets, and night birds. My friend and I stood in silence, listening.
"They are tuning the atmosphere," I commented, and he agreed in a way that showed he was thinking the same thought at the same moment. We sat a bit longer in silence and then began to speak in tones that allowed our voices to mingle with the concerted voice of the singers.
We spoke about the illuminating science of cymatics, experiments we observed in our high school physics class. Sound is amplified through a flat surface on which some responsive substance like sand, mercury, or water is laid. The vibration of a specific wavelength causes the substance to assume a corresponding shape. Interestingly, many of these forms are recognizable in old stained-glass windows in cathedrals, and yantra from the Vedic tradition.
The experiments show that vibration precedes form, that matter takes its shape from a substrate of sound vibrating through it. The sound takes the same form in air, in sand, and the glass of the Rose Window at Notre Dame. The subtler media always precedes and organizes the cruder. And, as the Gospel of John begins, in the beginning was the word.
We are accustomed to seeing the world as an interaction of matter and objects. We see our daily activity as the manipulation of bodies and gadgets and doodads. We think that matter magically structures into bodies to become a vehicle for the subtler vibration of life. But the demonstrations of cymatics show that in fact the opposite is true. Vibration and energy underlie and inform the manifestation of the material world.
This is also the principle of the Vedic concept of karma, which describes a living economy of vibrations and the lawful return of waves we set in motion through speech and deeds.
We are swimming in a soup of sound that also circulates within us. It suggests that the body and its state of balance and vitality is related to the substrate of thoughts, emotions, and sensations oscillating in our inner life, and that those inner experiences take form on the basis of the substrate of consciousness.
Is it possible to be cognizant of this more causal world, this domain of resonance? If so, how may this be done?
