Senses of the Mind

"From mirror to mirror - this is what I happen to dream of - the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)
 

"The senses are the tools of the mind
and the mind is the tool of the Spirit
When the mind becomes confused, it is
Spirit that brings back clarity and harmony.
...
A master who puts his senses to sleep is able
to perceive the unseen emerging from Spirit
Even in his waking state he dreams
dreams that open the gates to Divine Truth.
...
Do you know what you are?
You are a manuscript of a divine letter.
You are a mirror reflecting a noble face.
This universe is not outside of you.
Look inside yourself;
everything that you want,
you are already that."

- Rumi (1207 - 1273)

"To be" is to Inter-Be

"If you look deeply, you will see that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. 'Interbeing' is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix 'inter-' with the verb 'to be,' we have a new verb, inter-be.

...

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

...

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not difficult to see, because when you look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also. So we can say that everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here – time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. 'To be' is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is."

- Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926 - 2022)
The Heart of Understanding

Postscript. As is likely obvious to even casual visitors to my humble blog during the last week, I am currently immersed in the world of cymatics (although my wife thinks of it as more of an obsession). "Cymatics" refers to the study of sound and vibration; specifically, when the two are combined in a way that creates complex patterns in different media such as sand, water, or - what Swiss physician Hans Jenny (who coined the term) liked to use - corn starch in water. For example, if a metal plate is covered with a thin layer of flour or sand and is made to vibrate at specific frequencies, so-called standing-wave Chladni patterns appear in which the flour or sand collects along "nodes" (i.e., lines or points that undergo minimal vibration), while areas that undergo the greatest motion (i.e., the "anti nodes") are effectively left empty as the vibration pushes the flour or sand away. Chladni patterns are named after physicist Ernst Chladni who performed the first such experiments in the late 1700s.

I thank my left-brain/day-job as a physicist for introducing me to cymatics in the late 1990s when I stumbled across this paper describing what (at the time, were never before seriously studied) complex emergent patterns in vibrating layers of small granular media (e.g., cylinders filled with BBs from a toy shotgun). One line from this paper immediately grabbed my attention when I first read it and that still haunts me (both as physicist and photographer): "These excitations [called "oscillons"] have a propensity to assemble into 'molecular' and 'crystalline' structures." I remember musing, Whoa!, pump energy into an otherwise static structureless pile of 'things' and get self-organized geometric patterns?!? It was during my (absurdly slow, pre-Google days) search for related experiments that I discovered Jenny's work on cymatics, the underlying dynamics of which has a far-from-superficial overlap with the physics of oscillons.

So, having known about cymatics for about 25 years - and having even posted about it briefly in 2006 on this same blog! - why has it taken me so long to photograph it? I have no easy answer to that, just as I cannot explain why I never photographed my dad-working-as-an-art-restorer when he was still alive, which is something that - 23 years after his passing - I now profoundly regret (see Postscript 1 in this post from 2010). The creative process and the muse that guides our path are both mysterious and ultimately unknowable, which is as it should be. So, I'll leave it at that. But, whatever the reason(s) for my flurry of recent purchases of frequency generators, vertical vibration generators, lights, and more plates, goblets and petri dishes than any sane photographer has reason to own (and our kitchen cupboards have room for), I am - at the moment (and for the foreseeable future) - completely and utterly "obsessed" with cymatics. The reason is simple enough to state: cymatics is a quintessentially perfect amalgam of all three of my aesthetic and intellectual passions - physics, photography, and mysticism. 

The first two separately play obviously critical roles. The physicist-side of my brain is giddy over the vast phase space waiting to be explored: vibration frequency + medium (type + mix type) + vessel (type + diameter + depth) + ... And the photographer side is not too far behind: light (type + source(s) + directionality) + angle-of-view + f-stop + exposure time + ... But it is the idea of "cymatics as creative bridge" between seen and unseen, between energy and pattern, and between physical and spiritual that I resonate most deeply with, and is most ripe with creative possibilities. (For example, it has not escaped my attention that, in a "mystical" sort of way, the energy that the universe ineffably pumps into an otherwise structureless bag full of 'elemental things' gives rise to an emergent multidimensional dynamic cymatic-like sentient geometry called "Andy")

Since I've only started exploring the cymatics-scape universe, I have no idea what patterns await to be discovered and/or how long the search will keep my interest. But, given that I'm still looking for synesth-scapes after being mesmerized by reflective patterns in my mother-in-law's Nambe-like metal salt and pepper shakers in 2009,  cymatics may take a while 😊

For those still reading this, here is a link to a newly revised version of Hans Jenny's opus, Cymatics: A Study of Wave Phenomenon and Vibration. This version includes both volumes of the original work, as well as new chapters that include a biographical sketch of Hans Jenny, a non-technical primer on the physics of cymatics, and commentaries by researchers, sound therapists, designers, and artists. Indeed, I strongly recommend perusing the entire CymaticSource website, since it is a veritable storehouse of additional information, books and videos. (I am not affiliated with this website in any way. But, having recently purchased the aforementioned reprint of Jenny's revised Cymatics volume, I can personally attest to its quality - it is a stunningly beautiful book.)

Multitudinousness Minds

"Mahamati, since the ignorant and simple-minded, not knowing that the world is only something seen of the mind itself, cling to multitudinousness of external objects, cling to the notions of being and non-being, oneness and otherness, bothness and non-bothness, existence and non-existence, eternity and non-eternity, and think that they have a self-nature of their own, all of which rises from the discriminations of the mind and is perpetuated by habit-energy, and from which they are given over to false imagination. It is all like a mirage in which springs of water are seen as if they were real. "

- Lankavatara Sutra (c.350–400 CE)

Near Symmetry of Nature

"So our problem is to explain where symmetry comes from. Why is nature so nearly symmetrical? No one has any idea why. The only thing we might suggest is something like this: There is a gate in Japan, a gate in Neiko, which is sometimes called by the Japanese the most beautiful gate in all Japan; it was built in a time when there was great influence from Chinese art. This gate is very elaborate, with lots of gables and beautiful carving and lots of columns and dragon heads and princes carved into the pillars, and so on. But when one looks closely he sees that in the elaborate and complex design along one of the pillars, one of the small design elements is carved upside down; otherwise the thing is completely symmetrical. If one asks why this is, the story is that it was carved upside down so that the gods will not be jealous of the perfection of man. So they purposely put an error in there, so that the gods would not be jealous and get angry with human beings. We might like to turn the idea around and think that the true explanation of the near symmetry of nature is this: that God made the laws only nearly symmetrical so that we should not be jealous of His perfection!"

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)

Vibration of Quanta

"The quanta of gravity, that is, are not in space; they are themselves space. The spin networks that describe the quantum structure of the gravitational field are not immersed in space, they do not inhabit a space. The location of single quanta of space is not defined with regard to something else, but only by the links, and the relation these express.

...

Space is a spin network whose nodes represent its elementary grains, and whose links describe their proximity relations. Space-time is generated by processes in which these spin networks transform into one another, and these processes are described by sums over spin foams. A spin foam represents a history of a spin network, hence a granular spacetime where the nodes of the graph combine and separate. This microscopic swarming of quanta, which generates space and time, underlies the calm appearance of the macroscopic reality surrounding us. Every cubic centimeter of space, and every second that passes, is the result of this dancing foam of extremely small quanta.

...

In the world described by quantum mechanics there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. It isn’t things that enter into relations but, rather, relations that ground the notion of ‘thing’. The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events. Things are built by the happening of elementary events: as the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote in the 1950s, in a beautiful phrase, ‘An object is a monotonous process.’ A stone is a vibration of quanta that maintains its structure for a while, just as a marine wave maintains its identity for a while before melting again into the sea."

- Carlo Rovelli (1956 - )

Surging and Ebbing

"All mass possesses inertia, all force tends to persist. Owing to this universal property and condition, a body, be it at rest or in motion, tends to remain in the same state, and a force, manifesting itself anywhere and through whatever cause, produces an equivalent opposing force, and as an absolute necessity of this it follows that every movement in nature must be rhythmical. It is borne out in everything we perceive—in the movement of a planet, in the surging and ebbing of the tide, in the reverberations of the air, the swinging of a pendulum, the oscillations of an electric current, and in the infinitely varied phenomena of organic life. Does not the whole of human life attest to it? Birth, growth, old age, and death of an individual, family, race, or nation, what is it all but a rhythm?  All life-manifestation, then, even in its most intricate form, as exemplified in man, however involved and inscrutable, is only a movement, to which the same general laws of movement which govern throughout the physical universe must be applicable."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)
The Problem of Increasing Human Energy

The Unimaginable Universe

"On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realized that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a back yard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand...

...

I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet...

...

I saw a Persian astrolabe; ... I saw the rotted dust and bones ... I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; ... I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)
The Aleph

Portals of the Temple

"You were within the portals of the temple ...
to enter the wilderness and seek,
in the primal patterns of nature,
a magical union with beauty."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Zen Compositions

"The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.

...

But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.

...

Trying not to grasp is the same thing as to grasp since it's motivation is the same, my urgent desire to save my self from a difficulty. I can not get rid of this desire since it is one and the same desire as the desire to get rid of it."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Postscript. My last post explained what my recent series of "autumnal abstracts" has to do with quantum mechanics. This post is meant to convey the complementary explanation of what my autumnal abstracts have to do with Zen. Leaving aside the unintentional recursivity of the word "complementary" (since the concept has a formal meaning in quantum mechanics), here is an alternative summary of how using knee-high waterproof boots to get "up close and personal" to patterns of leaves in the creek - ostensibly to get better compositions - failed miserably. As I explained in the last post, no matter how slowly I approached a clump of leaves, invariably, the ripples induced in the water by my boots would dislodge one or more of the key elements of whatever composition I saw in my mind's eye. By the time I stood over the spot where I saw the original pattern, most of the leaves were gone. Here is where the Zen side of story begins...

The first day I donned my boots, it took me about a dozen attempts to learn how to "minimally disturb" whatever it was that caught my eye; to emphasize, not one, two or a few tries, but an embarrassingly many attempts. It was vastly harder than I anticipated. At some point - after my 3rd or 4th failure - I dejectedly poked my tripod into the water, angry with myself at being unable to do such a "simple” thing. So there I stood, knee-deep in water, immersed in a euphonious Siren call of delicately beautiful patterns I so wished to capture but which vanished the instant I approached them, when the absurdity of it all finally struck me like a Zen-master's cane! I doubled over with laughter, as multiple versions of Alan Watt's "the harder we try to catch hold of the moment..." aphorisms leapt to mind.

Adding to this genuinely Zen-like moment was the fact that two joggers just happened to be close enough to see and hear me. They both turned in unison to see what the source of the absurd laughter was. Without breaking stride or uttering a word, they just stared at what from their perspective must have seemed a "not quite all there and possibly drunk photographer" and ran off into the woods. I laughed for a few more moments, resolved to remember this little creek's Zen lesson, and resumed searching for interesting and evanescent patterns.

So, are my (still ongoing) "autumnal abstracts" a lesson in quantum mechanics? in Zen? or something else entirely? In the end, it's all just a matter of perspective 😊

Quantum Compositions

"Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object ... Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.

...

Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means at our disposal. In this way quantum theory reminds us, as Bohr has put it, of the old wisdom that when searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both players and spectators. It is understandable that in our scientific relation to nature our own activity becomes very important when we have to deal with parts of nature into which we can penetrate only by using the most elaborate tools.

...

Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer … we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal."

- Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976)

Postscript. At the end of my last post, I promised to explain what my recent series of "autumnal abstracts" (which I started in mid September) has to do with quantum mechanics (yes, quantum mechanics). The simplest explanation (sure to induce a mild groan in readers) is that since my left-brain "day job" is anchored on my being a physicist, physics in general, and quantum mechanics in particular, is never far from my thoughts 😉 But no, that's not the full explanation. The real connection is part whimsy and part serious (the serious part is expertly summarized by one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg, above). As I explained in my previous post, I've recently been "rewarding" myself after long work days by driving to a local trail that runs along a shallow leaf-strewn creek, and spend however much time remains before the sun goes down searching for intimate compositions of leaves, rocks, and reflections within the water.

For my first few outings, I had no issues. I would park myself on the little bridge I need to cross to get to the trail from where I leave my car, set up a tripod, and use a telephoto zoom to isolate patterns of interest. Here is a taste of what I see from the bridge:

Of course, I didn't limit myself to just standing on the bridge. I prowled around the area surrounding the bridge, and explored different perspectives made accessible by positioning myself somewhere along the left and right banks of the creek. And, indeed, in this way, I usually walked away with at least few decent keepers. But I also noticed that the best compositions (at least in my mind's eye) were always just beyond my reach. I needed to get into the water! And that's where quantum mechanics comes in ...

The solution was simple enough. I put on a pair of knee-high waterproof boots, tucked in my pants, grabbed a waterproof (well, water resistant) tripod, and started composing "up close and personal" in the water; or so I thought. I immediately ran into an unexpected "quantum mechanics"-like problem: after seeing some pattern of interest (say, some combination of leaves, rocks and reflections), I would naturally walk over to get a better look and see where to best anchor my tripod. But no matter how slowly I approached, invariably, the ripples induced in the water by my boots would dislodge one or more of the key elements of whatever pattern caught my eye. By the time I got to the original composition, the pattern was either gone and/or replaced by another only less than half as good. This happened over and over again, no matter how slowly - ever, so slooooowly - I walked toward some entangled leaves. A text-book (albeit, whimsical) example of the well-known, but no less mysterious, quantum mechanical "observer effect." The analogy actually runs a bit deeper: while observer-induced perturbations also happen in "classical" physics, the difference is that quantum mechanics does not allow the observer to reconstruct what the "true state of the system" was after observing it; the act of observing the state irretrievably scrambles it. Just as, in my case, "seeing and moving toward a" pattern of leaves irretrievably destroys it. (BTW, at the risk of overloading most readers of a photography blog, it is worth mentioning that entanglement - a subtle nod to which appeared in the phrase "entangled leaves" - is another inherently quantum behavior that is best left for a future post) 😊