Experiencing the Power of Sound
Seeing is believing
Today I woke seeing sound.
I experienced the banging of a door shut by the wind as a blast of colour and patterns and vibration. I was just emerging from sleep… but by no means was I awake. In that slither of consciousness that runs between the two states. In this instant less than a second, the profundity of sound as a medium struck me (literally). I tried to recreate the experience once fully awake by slamming doors, banging pans etc with my eyes shut just afterwards. But I just couldn’t “see the sound” again.
I have been delving lately into trying to deepen my understanding of sound, how, why people are turning to ‘it’ as a healing modality. Why I for many years have been pulled by singing and chanting as a way to enjoy the path of spirituality, connect with others and an otherwise conceptual divinity. In recent times this practice has simplified, often to just sounding long vowels and Om chanting which I have found optimises the mileu of my body and mind for meditation. In a less romantic sounding way, its like the petri dish of my experiments to understand myself, find myself, becomes like chocolate agar. But instead of being the optimal conditions for pathogenic bacteria, I find the seeds of conscious awareness get nourished and start sprouting faster and more happily there.
A nicer analogy might be of just creating the right nutrient soil for beautiful flowers to grow… lets go with that! I just wanted to bring in the science part, as I found through my explorations so far, that the understanding of sound is somewhere where western science and eastern spirituality seem to meet and have a merry dalliance of agreement.
Today I am simply pondering the cellular and physical possibilities of sound.
The experience this morning was a meeting of streams of understanding.
I have been enjoying a book called, “The Humming Effect” by Jonathan & Andi Goldman. Here the authors summarise very nicely the current scientific body of research on sound.
One of these instances is the use of a ‘cymascope.’ Where sound gets played through water producing incredible mandala like shapes.
You only have to search this term on youtube to see these amazing patterns. Here are a few examples.
But what astonished me this morning was what I saw… was indeed cymascope like patterns blasted across my visual field in my semi-coma state.
This was just within a single split second. And I am not describing this as some otherworldly spiritual experience, but just that perhaps for a split second I was not in my head and still merged with my body and its full spectrum of subconscious electro chemical signals when the door slammed. Sending a wave of vibration through the cells (comprised of mostly water! ) Which for some reason in that moment I was able to see. And felt the vibrations all through my body concurrently.
This is something like what I saw this morning (in this split second) (but tinier) (and less detailed)
In this wonderful humming book, another awesome initiative is described, where cancer cells are seen under a microscope to shatter when notes of a scale are played up and down.
The principle behind this is that cancerous cells tend to be more rigid and irregular than healthy normal cells. This means they are more prone to destruction at resonant frequencies — akin to the well known example of a wine glass shattering with the sound of a soprano singer.
Pure hypothesis alert: I wonder if I was only able to “see the sound” this morning when in a state of not thinking and dwelling in the ocean of fluidity that is our natural cellular state? I.e perhaps once we wake, stand and start our personalities up for the day, the lists and ideas activated we somewhat encumber this fluid naturalness of being? Perhaps we are in fact human cymascopes but spend our days living in the head where more rigid constellations of matter are preside over our experience?
Underpinning the aforementioned concepts of cymatics and resonant frequencies is amazing and beautiful science which I plan to write more about another day. But for now, I would like to highlight this also well known notion. That ‘everything IS sound’ and that through itself it can travel.
That doesn’t mean that we as humans can hear the sounds of everything as the frequencies are beyond the human capacity (but if you listen, the world is anyway full of sound. It is indeed very rare/impossible that we would ever experience an absence of sound unless in a vacuum!)
Disclaimer (I am not a physicist and the following is a summarised simplification from understanding what I have read from several sources on the physics of sound and physics a level over 10 years ago) Some times you can’t prove everything to the nth degree, you can only inspire the inquiry…and that is my aim.
From the physics perspective, sound = vibration. Since every ‘thing’ is comprised of microcosmic solar systems of electrons spinning around protons and neutrons and that even these are comprised of even tinier entities — quarks, photons all in constant motion, then we can say that even a rock which is composed of mostly carbon atoms — is vibrating. And I remember this mind blowing moment in physics where we each calculated our own wavelength… it was very very tiny! But there is actually a formula for it based on frequency and velocity.
The reason for breaking it down this way is not to get technical, but to convey my ‘wowness’ at this to one’s childlike sense of awe. Not to the head — which might get stuck on wanting to understand the nuances of calculating ones own wavelength (as I also suspect this was a somewhat theoretical exercise.)
And why be in awe? This is a point where the “spirituality” meets “science”. Because if we could scratch the surface of what currently is in every moment and experience everything that is going on right now, then it must be a total sensory experience of this profound science of life and the heart expanding through the wowness.
Personally it has not been enough for me to experience one or the other. In that when I was studying A level physics I got a “wow” in my head but it was completely disconnected with my reality.
Even with spiritual philosophy — its sometimes so easy to just take on new concepts to kind of cushion and cajole our current perception life. And even “everything is connected” can also just go the head. These things must be felt, and if you cant feel them straight away, then experiments and further inquiry can really help.
That’s why I love this doorway of vibration. If you dive into the word meditatively you can go from gross to subtle.
Experiment no.1
Close your eyes
Take a few deep breaths
Observe with your body and all the senses.
The breath entering and leaving
If there are loud sounds see if you can feel the impact on your physicality
Ask yourself...
Can I experientially sense the current of vibration within myself? Does it ever stop?
This was just a few thoughts that might make one experientially (rather than theoretically) think about the inherent power of the phenomenon of sound.
That which moves like the waves of the ocean and at the same time is the water and the motion simultaneously. That which has the power to influence and every atom and molecule it encounters. That phenomenon where science and spirituality encounter one another…
