Gebser’s Project \ Integrative Explorations Journal
FROM CONSCIOUSNESS TO TECHNOLOGY: CYMATICS, WAVE PERIODICITY, AND COMMUNICATION Thomas W. Cooper Emerson College For a man (sic) to change his basic, perception–determining beliefs—what Bateson calls his epistemological premises—he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. This is not an easy or comfortable thing to learn, and most men (sic) in history have probably been able to avoid thinking about it. But sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions. 1 Mark Engel
TECHNOLOGY AS A PRODUCT OF ATTITUDE Consider the figure of speech that technology is an "echo” of consciousness. In this essay, that suggested relationship will be considered in the light of 1) common sense reasoning 2) examples of cross–disciplinary agreement and 3) evidence from the new science of cymatics, a branch of acoustics which considers vibration, wave periodicity, and their effects. During the twentieth century, numerous schools of thought have held that visible forces such as machines, classes of people, social institutions, bureaucracy have controlled or shaped the consciousness of humanity. Skinnerian determinists, strict Marxian materialists, and some technocrats have argued that consciousness is the offspring, not the parent, of technology, or of social programming assisted by technology. The thesis of this paper does not contend with their assumption, but rather holds that theirs is a special case within a smaller context. Below, a much larger context will be examined. Within that larger context it may be suggested that just as vibration produces form, so attitude produces technology. In symbolic scientific shorthand, this hypothesis could be abbreviated V/F = A/T or vibration is to form as attitude is to technology. Later concrete evidence for this claim will be provided from the science of cymatics. At the outset, however, it is necessary to understand the conventional perception of technology and consciousness. OPTICAL AND COGNITIVE ILLUSIONS A primary illusion within human perception is the imagined reality that technology and other physical materials exist in a solid state, rather than within a liquid, gaseous, mixed, or undefined state. Such an illusion holds that machines, media, buildings, and other objects should be excluded from the wisdom of modern physics, which holds that sub–atomic interaction, electro–magnetic fields, wave mechanics, and energy transmission are ubiquitous. Human beings appear to be solid. Yet we know that persons are comprised primarily of liquids, that their survival depends upon gasses, and that their atomic and molecular structure involves dynamic energy fields difficult to fully comprehend. Like people, machines only appear to be solid within the range of daily perception: in the redirected words of Erick Jantsch, "Structure is an
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