Vibrations

Are all Vbrations Good?

Of course not! Do you feel good when you listen to the vibrations of every single voice you hear? Don’t the vibrations of high-pitched, nasal voices get under your skin? When you meet someone with bad energy, doesn’t the vague and queasy sense of dark vibration emanating from them creep you out? How would you contrast this to the feeling of vibrations that stream from a mountain lake surrounded by trees? It is not just the vibrations of color and visual sense that give us reason to make quality judgments about vibrations. Some vibrations have the power to elevate a person’s consciousness. We can hear this in a favorite piece of music, a beautiful nature scene, and the vibrations that emanate from crystal singing bowls. Other vibrations can make a person feel downright lousy. We instantly turn the radio off when it gets filled with too much static because these bad vibrations cause us mental and emotional stress. It’s funny, because the day I wrote this blog, “Good Vibrations” came on via shuffle syncrhonistically on my Ipod.

Resonance in My World

I am a singer who practices bhakti yoga and chakra chanting.  Resonance makes its peculiar presence known to me when I chant next to my crystal singing bowls and hit a frequency that activates the toning of the bowl without even touching it. When I think of resonance, I also think of emotional and energetic resonance (or lack thereof) upon meeting people. Like frequencies attract similar frequencies when it comes to befriending people. There is a sense of familiarity we have when we meet certain people, and part of this is because we have a vibrational resonance with them. I wondered how was it that anyone would ever want to hang out on the corner of Mission and 16^th, a block in my neighborhood where all the crackheads hang out. Even if you were a crackhead and needed to score some dope, why on Earth would you to want to hang out on this corner for fun after you’d gotten your fix? And the answer to that is very simple. Everyones’ vibrations find resonance- or similar frequency- to similar vibrations, in this case, the vibrations of the crackhead and prostitute corner.

Connections I Can Make between Energy and Qi

Though most people think of Qi and energy as interchangeable phenomena (and certainly Qi can be energy), my TCM professor says Qi is matter. Knowing the e=mc(squared) equation from Einstein- which says energy is matter times the speed of light squared- we can see the intimate connection between matter and energy and perhaps draw less distinction between the two. Have we grokked non-duality or what? To play devil’s advocate, let’s say that duality exists and that Qi isn’t energy; Qi is matter. If we think of matter in terms of sub-atomic particles and quarks and say that Qi is those sub-atomic particles, even then, we cannot conceive of those sub-atomic particles as static particles that don’t have an incredible amount of energy that moves them to and fro. When we think of the energy that moves them around, as laymen- as opposed to advanced particle physicists- we don’t really separate the movement of those sub-atomic particles from the particles themselves. We cannot therefore- even really conceive of matter as not being infused with energy. If that is the case, then Qi is energy AND matter.