"I contain 10 people, and one of them is always screaming"
mind - body - cymatics
"I contain 10 people, and one of them is always screaming," I heard someone say once.
Above is a demonstration of cymatics: a frequency is played underneath a plate of water and cornstarch mixture, and it comes alive. Like it has various minds of their own, coalescing moment after moment into different beings that have their own goals, directionality, volition, eventually passing away back into the soup, to recombine and arise anew.
It’s a good metaphor for what happens moment after moment in the perceptions, the thoughts, the feelings — especially in the thoughts and feelings, as they are particularly sticky and can appear substantive. They can appear like they have varied, autonomous minds of their own, for a time.
When I watch this chaos, it feels like suffering. Naturally the being would want to be free from this, if this is what it is like inside. But try to control it, and it just becomes worse, more disturbing, more chaotic.
Frank Yang said something like “objectify everything in your experience”. But that never quite worked for me. “Objectification” feels too cold, remote, and dissociating. Rather, I find it useful to treat everything that arises in inner experience as aliveness, that can have its own directionality and egoic pull, subtle or intense. Aliveness that arises and passes away.
I find when inner phenomena are treated in this way, they stop being so sticky, stop being so chaotic in their rising and falling. Occasionally they even appear to be suddenly embarrassed by their own sound and fury, signifying nothing, and calm down on their own, in an interesting unexpected dropping of volition.
When these risings and fallings are treated as not-me, not mine, in this way, there can be access to deeper, more subtle carrier waves of experience. Hear the hum of the universe. Feel its fabric. Here, experience can feel more esoteric, it can feel like the regular assumptions of space and time do not apply. Phrases like “everything being nothing” and “nothing being everything” start to make sense. Let that settle too, into nothingness. Let the self and the world disappear, until it appears again.
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More cymatic patterns:
more on cymatics here.
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Loved this. Thanks for teaching me a new word. Resonates with my current interest in attunement.
Thanks for the follow on my Substack. Interestingly, cymatics has been asserting itself as a muse lately and I don’t know enough about it to do anything but notice. I picked up your book, thanks for sharing it. Looking forward to reading more of your writing.