This past weekend I went to the Dowsers convention in Killington, Vermont.
Jeff Volk had let me know that he would be speaking there, so I went and spent the weekend and saw his talk on Sunday morning.
He is a great speaker. What I was most impressed with was his ability to take complex topics in Cymatics, physics, mathematics, and other ‘big ideas’ and put them into quickly absorbable context.
For example he was making a point about order and chaos in the universe. He described how, many people are continually trying to become more ‘peaceful’ and to have more order in their lives, but no matter how good they get at that there are always moments of chaos that come up to disrupt everything…but how that is a good thing because chaos is what injects creativity and newness into the established order of things, without that things would become stagnant. (He put it better than I am).
It related to Hans Jenny’s cymatics film footage he was showing in that cymatics show how things are always coming from and trying to return to a state of order, but that chaos is interjected at certain points, say when a burst of high amplitude is applied in an otherwise steady sequence of ordered patterns.
It made me realize that I often think of the universe as ‘chaos that one imposes order upon’ – but that in reality, it appears to be ‘order that one interjects chaos into’ – and that is not a bad thing, given that chaos is the great clearer, leveler and seed of creativity and new growth.
I purchased several good books from Jeff relating to cymatics, the one that I am reading now is a small, beautiful book called “Harmonograph: A Visual Guide To the Mathematics of Music” by Anthony Ashton. A harmonograph is an instrument created during victorian times to reveal the patterns found in music…I don’t have time for a full description now, but I will talk more about it later.