LIGHT AND MUSIC ON WATERMusic enchants matter. It literally creates through singing. Let us now explore how sounds are able to inform matter, transforming it to produce shapes, images, music, and light. The basic codes that direct molecules and govern bodies are music, but they are infrasound, which we cannot hear. Though it may seem to be a shame that we are unable to listen to the symphonies of things, this music may not be as harmonious as that of our musicians. In fact, it is precisely because we cannot hear these sounds that we can function. Imagine an existence where we heard every single noise, from the vibration of our body molecules to waves of all kinds and the noise of the stars. Dazed day and night, we would not understand anything anymore; life would not be possible. That which is audible to the human ear is the necessary threshold for our survival.
If we dare to go beyond the limits of the filters of Mother Nature, if we go beyond the boundaries of the audible frequencies, we finally understand that the entire universe is music. And what is music? Rhythm. That reminds us that Pier Luigi Ighina told us that matter is rhythm. And rhythm itself? Sufi master Abd alRazzaq alQashani wrote in the fourteenth century, “Let’s take a metaphor. The land that is hit by the sound wave is itself an undulating movement. The wave is the meter, the rhythm is the combination of the tones on this wave . . . The tones are distributed on the measure regularly or irregularly; they can occur in rapid succession, or on the contrary leave vast empty intervals. Sometimes they pile up; sometimes they are distant from one another. These games of the tones on the sound wave, this model of the substance of the wave . . . this is what we call life.”1
Now let’s consider what Pythagoras (who rejoiced in numbers and sequences) did with a simple string. He fixed it at both ends, plucked it, and listened to the sound. Then, he divided the string in half and plucked it; he heard the same note as before, but an octave higher. (It is called an octave because it is the eighth note in a seven-note scale.) He also discovered that the most pleasing harmony occurs when the ratio of the two lengths of string is 3:2 or 2:3. (We call this note a fifth because it is the fifth note of the modern Western scale.) This is what happens when a string lands in the hands of someone like Pythagoras—the musical scale was born.
Observing the Waves on Water
Rhythm is a fragmentation; it is an alternation of tones and pauses, solids and empties. The pauses define the rhythm, the help empties to build the shapes. Mozart—an adept of alchemy and a Freemason—wrote that real music is between the notes. Once again we glimpse the other side of things, which expresses what is in between the solids, as in between the notes. It is into this world of fluxes and waves that we will go to investigate the nature of things further. The science that deals with waveforms is called cymatics (from the Greek κ
μα, “wave”). Vitruvius, the architect of imperial Rome, was the first to investigate the analogy between the propagation of sound and the movement of the waves on a pond; he inaugurated the study of the relationship between sounds and water. At the end of the eighteenth century the musician and physicist Ernst Chladni discovered the relationship between vibration and form. His experiment was simple (the simplification favors the truth): first he placed some very fine sand on a metallic plate; then he played the violin perpendicularly to the circumference of the plate.2 While he was playing and producing sound waves, the sand, as if guided by an invisible force, assumed symmetrical shapes in response to the sounds of the violin. Thus were born the first geometrical shapes described by Chladni that bear his name (fig. 8.1).
Sound waves can restructure masses to produce coherent and ordered images. This discovery must have seemed odd at the end of the 1700s, but let us not forget that it was during the Enlightenment that research on sounds and colors started.3 Sounds move matter by orienting it to produce new ordered shapes, just like in the chemical reactions discovered by the chemist Raphael Eduard Liesegang: if some drops of silver nitrate are poured on a glass plate spread with gelatin and potassium bichromate, the silver chromate collapses in concentric rings toward the outside, now called Liesegang rings.
Chladni’s studies were resumed in 1815 by the American mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, who discovered that the waveforms were created by the intersection of two sinusoidal waves generated by two different sources perpendicular to each other. The so-called Bowditch curves can be observed today through oscilloscopes. Even the French mathematician Jules Antoine Lissajous carried on with this type of research in 1857; he observed that two different categories of images could be obtained, corresponding to the two waves being in phase or not. If they were not in phase (because of different frequencies) more or less harmonious image networks would appear. If they were in phase, the result was a circle. In 1827 the physiologist Charles Wheatstone built a kaleidophone with little pointed metal rods with polished edges, which reflect the light from a source such as a candle, generating different shapes according to the speed of the vibration.4 All these experiments were useful to understand the close link between light vibrations and sound on one side and the organization of combined matter on the other.
Figure 8.1. Examples of images Chladni obtained on metallic plate (from A. Forgione)
The leading researcher in the field of cymatics was the Swiss physicist Hans Jenny; it was he who used sound to produce formations on the essence of turpentine (fig. 8.2). Jenny writes that all cellular life is governed by rhythms, periods, cycles, frequencies, and sequences; it is music, it is the “creative style of nature.”5
Figure 8.2. Essence of turpentine excited by certain sounds (from F. A. Popp)
It is not unreasonable to consider matter the result of pulsating rhythms if, as Jenny writes, “the harmonic systems are reproduced through oscillations, that is, harmonic intermittences, and the forms are the result of rhythms and intermittences.”6 Pulsating fields guide matter in a rhythmical way so that it takes certain shapes. So many analogies can be seen! The configuration taken by the chromosomes at the moment when a cell divides to multiply itself is the same as a scheme of the electric field of an electromagnetic wave aroused in a resonator with coaxial cavity! J. Hartmann discovered that the electromagnetic fields of certain geopathogen areas (variations of the geomagnetic field, potentially harmful to health) can destructure images of crystallizations.7 Therefore, we can deduce that some electromagnetic waves, just as some acoustic ones, are able to record ordered structures in matter, each of which is a result of the information and in turn the message.
Jenny, using crystal oscillators and an apparatus of his own invention called a tonoscope, managed to generate modulated sequential sounds and to observe their effects on mediums of different types (fluids and thin dusts). He also studied the effects of the vibrations of different languages. If the sounds emitted are from ancient languages, such as Sanskrit for example, the shapes obtained are reflected in ancient traditions, as are the meanings ascribed to them. For example, when the seed dust of the Lycopodium fern is spread on a crystal glass and then exposed to the sound of OM, the most famous mantra used by practitioners of the Eastern tradition and meditation, the prolonged sound generates, in the dust, the image of a circle with a central point. This image has always represented the sun, the creative force of the universe, which is the meaning of the mantra itself.8
Jenny also collected a lot of material relating to the temporary images produced in drops of water. Under the microscope, tests were filmed documenting how a single water drop reacts to infrasound (Fig. 8.3). In both the dust of the fern and the surface of water, Jenny was able to obtain images that look three-dimensional; their complexity and beauty corresponded to the type of frequencies used. Starting with low sounds and gradually increasing the frequency, he obtained shapes more complex and ordered, similar to those of Pythagorean geometry, which Pythagoras defined as “solidified music.”
Besides the ordered geometric shapes, schemes such as that of living cells of more complex organisms could also be reproduced. For example, a certain sound frequency could get the water drop to look like a maple tree leaf, while another would transform it into a coin.9 It was these similarities between forms in nature and those induced by sounds that suggested to Jenny that sounds (and vibrations in general) play a role in the organization of the structural schemes of living beings.10 The shapes lasted only for the time that the sound was active; as soon as it ended, the images would disappear. This agrees with our conclusion that sounds create and organize matter according to the information they carry: the shape remains as long as the code remains, and the dissolution of the basic code disintegrates the structure.
Figure 8.3. Reactions of a water drop to different sounds. At low frequencies, the molecules start to curl, vibrating in simple circles or concentric ones; if the infrasound frequency is increased, the complexity of shapes increases (from A. Forgione).
Sound creates, sound destroys: it was the sound of trumpets that destroyed Jericho’s walls. Life and death are the umpteenth alternation of solid-empty that characterizes the world stage. “Everything in the world is inconstant, because everything changes. Only one thing is constant and that is change itself: the Tao”; this is how Lao Tzu started his Tao Te Ching, 250,000 years ago. At any level, the universe is rhythm, pulsation, and its codes are sequences of changes.
What Chinese Taoists call Tao, Indians call Shiva, the god who creates and destroys the world by dancing. Shiva is the cosmic dance, change, rhythm, the process of creation and also destruction. Alexandra David-Neel writes, “All things . . . are aggregates of atoms that dance and their movements produce sounds. When the rhythm changes, the sound changes as well. . . . Every atom sings its song continuously, and that sound creates shapes in every instant.”11
Each atom sings, and that sound creates its shape; this is valid for cymatics, for the TFF, for all becoming, since nothing is excluded from the matter that is produced by sounds and music, as differentiated from the absolute silence that is the matrix. Being elastic, a sound wave moves molecules in the medium in which it is propagated (air); it does the same when the medium is water or other matter, reorganizing it into ordered structures, expressions of basic code rhythms. In other words, the noise that characterizes sound is only a shell of messages that can be translated as images. The alternation of tones and pauses (empties and solids) are numerical sequences—sequences like bar codes—that produce music or images. The secret of life is in the basic code. It is in the numbers. Pythagoras considered all numbers as sacred, divine intelligences. So also is the binary system of cybernetics. The alternation of solid and empty, one and zero, black and white—the entire universe is designed on such alternation, and everything resounds because everything produces sound.
Of these symphonies, the ear only distinguishes a minuscule band of audible sounds. Nature has selected the limited scope of sounds that we need; everything else is lost. Molecules shout, planets echo, stars clash, but we do not hear them. The pulsars are just the tip of the iceberg of the concerts performed by the celestial bodies, the music of the spheres, from the universe of galaxies to the microscopic world of particles.
Where does noise end up? Where is matter silent? Which is the smallest unit capable of producing noise? The quarks? The strings? Everything that has an identity generates noise, even the empty spaces (that are not empty). The only matter that does not produce noise is matter that has never been differentiated, that does not have individuality of shape and is lacking in identity. The only true silence is that of pure matter, as Dante described it, “where the sun is silent” (Inferno, 1:60).
Sound Creators
Throughout the ages people have associated the creation myth with the creative act as a Verb or simply the Word. According to the ancient Egyptian doctrine of Heliopolis, it is the sun god Ra who creates the world with his divine Verb, Hike, which means “magic power of the word.” Hike is the personification of the commanding creator.12 In spell 261 of the Coffin Texts, Hike declares, “I am he whom the Lord of all made before duality had yet come into being . . . you were all created afterward, because I am Hike, the Creator of the order I live in, the Verb that will never be destroyed, in my name of spirit.”13
In the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, God is manifested as Verb (Verbum), equal to the Word (Logos) of the Hellenistic philosophy, to which even John the Evangelist refers. In India, it is the god Krishna who creates through the sound of the flute. Even in the American and African shamanist cosmologies, sound is responsible for the genesis of the universe. The secret appears to be in the interaction between sound and matter; there is correlation between the sound and an organizing principle of matter and the field of informed forces.
There is uninterrupted direction in the background, organizing the huge mosaic that is being composed. The texts from Egyptian, Jewish, Indian, and other civilizations describe the creative action of the basic code as already possessing information regarding form, even before it becomes mass. It could be represented as an immaterial shadow image of the physical body, with the lines defined but intangible and invisible. We can also envision the basic code as a choral work, harmonious and imperious, an astonishing concert of sounds that gives orders to the molecules and receives answers back from them. From the huge atomic holes the shouts of the particles come up, expressions of frightening whirls, until they transform into a harmonious choir, the molecules all singing. There is a continual movement of coming and going between mass and field and back again—the breathing of things.
According to the School of Heliopolis, the divine Verb activates the shape, but it does not produce a sensible reality because God must first see the shapes (just as in the biblical Genesis: “and He saw that it was good”). Hike, the Verb, is the intention: it confers the possibility of existence, having power and shape, but it does not explain things. It is the basic code: a form without substance, invisible to us, the order of the world background that prepares the shapes of the bodies and their individuality. Only after the shape is seen to be “good,” that is, useful in the economy of the universe, can the virtual shape be translated into a physical body and perceived by the senses.14 First, there is the code, and then, if the code is good, the body is produced. There are many possible forms that may not manifest if they are not in harmony with the overall design. It is in the “seeing if it is good” that meaning is decided.
Once it is seen to be good it is named—“The name by which Adam called every living being, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19). The ancients gave magical power to words (nomina sunt numina, “names are gods”).15 Giving a name means giving life; for this reason, kings and religious men were consecrated to enter a new existence with a changed name, as if they were reborn. A name can do a lot: it can create, evoke, or substitute for an object; it can cure. Giordano Bruno writes that the Egyptians knew how to evoke the intimate essence of things through writing and certain sounds. Let us listen to him in the De Magia:
So were the letters of the Egyptian more adequately defined hieroglyphics, that is, holy characters; and they had at their disposal, to designate the individual things, certain images derived from natural things or parts of them; these scriptures and these items the Egyptians used to capture the conversations of the gods to perform extraordinary effects.16
The name is sound, which gives life and creates because it possesses information of the object. Names are never by chance; they express the essence of magic, the informed nucleolus, the basic code that precedes the object, defines it, and creates it.
Water Listens to Music
Sounds can create ordered structures on water surfaces, ephemeral geometries that fade like a sand mandala dispersed by the wind. The Japanese researcher Masaru Emoto carried out experiments on water listening to music. Distilled water was placed between two speakers that emitted music of various kinds: the water was then frozen and observed under the microscope. It seems that the crystal structures described by Emoto were formed for a few seconds during the unfreezing process, when going from –5° back to almost zero.
The music emitted from the speakers is information, which is able to change the organization of the liquid, similar to the results of experiments with cymatics and the TFF. Emoto noticed that different music imprints differently in the liquid, resulting in many different crystallizations.17 The crystals of water that listened to Beethoven were different from those that heard Chopin, or Mozart, or a Tibetan sutra, and so on. The crystals formed by such music are almost always harmoniously hexagonal and attractive. But with disorderly music, such as heavy metal, the water forms intensely disordered crystal structures (fig. 8.4).
Another aspect of Emoto’s experiments is also very interesting. Samples of water from all over the world were analyzed: fresh mountain water, holy water, rain, water from major cities, and also water from polluted rivers. The freezing of clean water forms hexagonal, symmetrical, harmonious crystals, which is not so in the case of polluted waters. It seems that water also modifies its structure in response to pollution information.
Figure 8.4. Crystals of water that “listened to” the Sixth Symphony of Beethoven (on the left) compared with water that “listened to” heavy metal music (on the right) (from M. Emoto)
Further, Emoto states that not only sounds but also emotions can modify matter by sending messages. Water that was daily subjected to words or mental images formed different structures depending on whether moods of love or hate were conveyed by persons sending streams of feeling to it. Receiving messages of love, water seems to answer by forming harmonious crystals, while after receiving bad feelings, it produces images under the microscope similar to those of water that “listened to” heavy metal. Ask yourself what might happen to our bodies, which are three-quarters water, after attending a music concert. In addition, what happens to our physical body when we are feeling hatred, resentment, rage, and so on?
According to Emoto, structural changes in water are observed even when a message is written on paper and applied for at least twenty-four hours to the glass containing the water. It does not matter in what language a message is written to the water, because water does not perceive words, but rather states of mind. A similar result is gained when, instead of a written message, a picture or a drawing or a symbol is applied to a glass of water for a few days, just enough time for the waves emitted from the images to inform the water. The crystallization is influenced by those images.
It seems extraordinary, but this indicates that there is a thread linking the sound waves and the mental and graphic images, for they are all able to inform water so that it crystallizes differently. What force are we talking about here? What type of waves come from a written word or a graphic image? It is not the sign, but the intention and emotion that accompany it that leave traces in the water. It seems that word, sound, sign, or image are equivalent. They convey something that is not word nor sound nor image nor sign. It is information, information from backstage that influences the world stage.
Emoto is not the first to use the forces emanating from written or mentally conceived images and signs; they have been known of and used for thousands of years. The difference is that now serious scientific investigation of their impact is possible. We are not investigating magic, but the other side of things, which—like everything else that is other—is frightening. Let us proceed with our exploration into the interactions between sounds and matter.
Crop Circles and Holograms
Crop circles have been mused upon by scientists, mystics, and alchemists alike. It has been known for years that in wheat fields almost everywhere in the world complex and extraordinary agroglyphs (so-called crop circles) appear. I will not talk about their origin because it has nothing to do with us now. Rather, I want to focus on how they are produced, since many scientists agree that certain sounds and infra-sound may be responsible, with the help of intense heat (water in the underground water stratum also may play a role).18
Infrasonic vibrations between 5 and 5.2 Hz have been registered inside the crop circle formations, even hours after the onset of the crop circle; such vibrations are capable of reorganizing water. If a container of water is left in the center of a crop circle for a few hours, the water crystallizes in the same formation. According to Emoto, even if water is placed on a photograph of a crop circle for several hours, it will do the same.19 What Giordano Bruno writes about letters and hieroglyphs is also valid for the crop circles: the whole is reproduced in its parts, like in fractals, like in a hologram.
Many factors are involved in the phenomenon of information transfer, such as sound, heat, and light. Talking of light, let us see what effects can be produced with a unidirectional and monochromatic light like a laser; then we will examine again the ultraviolets and the ultrasounds. Let us start with the laser, to understand what exactly a hologram is. Holography is a technique used to photograph objects in a three-dimensional way. Invented in 1948 by Dennis Gabor and completed in the 1960s with the discovery of the laser, it presents a goldmine of confirmation for the basic codes.
Here is the recipe for producing a hologram. Turn on a laser and make sure the light beam is separated into two. Take an object, an apple for example, and place it so that one of the two beams, after having bounced off it, will land on a photographic plate. With a system of mirrors, deviate the other light beam to make sure it collides with the first on the photographic plate without hitting the apple. The two separated beams are reunited on the plate after only one has reflected off the apple. What happens on the plate now? Do you think that the image of the apple will stay imprinted on it? No. The plate reproduces something that doesn’t have a shape; it is unclear what it represents. Think about the concentric circles that are produced when you throw a handful of pebbles into a pond. The waves rapidly expand until they crash into each other and create incomprehensible intersected images.
On the plate of the hologram there is something similar, confused waves that overlap, producing alternations of thin black and gray networks. They are called interference patterns or network diffraction. They do not express the shape of the object, but they still contain its information. All that is needed for the apple to reappear is for a new beam of light to pass through the interference pattern. Then the apple reassumes its three-dimensional form, projected in space as a real fruit (fig. 8.5).
Figure 8.5. In the hologram the laser is divided into two beams: one is
bounced off the object (the apple), and the other collides with the
reflected light of the first on the photographic plate.
(from The Holographic Universe, by M. Talbot)
Holograms exhibit two very interesting characteristics. The first is that their three-dimensionality can be so convincing that an observer will believe the image really is, for example, an apple. Try touching it, however, and the apple will reveal itself for what it in fact is: empty space.20 The other is the ability every part of the holographic film has to recreate the entire image. By putting under the laser beam even a fragment (any fragment) of the plate on which the interference pattern of the apple is imprinted, the image will be of the entire apple. Every part of the holographic plate contains all the necessary information to build the complete image (holography derives from the Greek name olos, which means “everything”). Crystals, for example, possess holographic properties because they can rewrite the information of the whole from every part of the crystal lattice; this is why they are used for computer memory. Fractals are also holographic.
Let us remember these properties of the hologram, because, at the end of our journey, on the other side, we will return to them when we discuss the theory of the nature of things. For now, let us return to our discussion on light and water.
Lights and Sounds
Sound and light, mostly ultraviolet, are found in all organisms and things; they control functions and are a means of communication with the environment. Water is capable of emitting light, a weak luminescence in the ultraviolet spectrum, with two bands around 360 nanometers and 410 nanometers.21 This is valid for any type of water, from distilled water to water stored for months. The intensity of the luminescence varies, depending on the preservation time and the addition of trace substances. In water, luminescence seems to result from its own structuring, indicating that water is a self-organizing system.22
Certain sounds can free the light from water. B. P. Barber and S. J. Putterman, two researchers from Los Angeles University, in 1971 commented on their experiments on sound-luminescence, namely the emission of light by a liquid hit by a sound wave: “The duration of the sound-luminescence impulses that we observe is so brief—less than 50 picoseconds—that one wonders if some collective mechanism doesn’t stimulate the molecules to emit together.” What is interesting is that the emission of light behaves almost as if it is controlled by an invisible “orchestra conductor.”23 But who is the conductor? What determines the coherence of the system?
More and more people advocate the existence of some ordering principle in the organization of systems. As mentioned earlier, we have labeled these stage managers who govern the other side of things systems of intrinsic regulation, but, irrespective of what they are called, many researchers have noticed their presence for a long time. Already in 1933, Marinesco and Trillat discovered that a strong ultrasonic field can affect a photographic plate immersed in water; then it was noticed that such a phenomenon was accompanied by a weak luminescence. Other liquids (like human plasma) and even liquid metals can be made luminescent. The intensity is proportional to that of the sound wave and inversely proportional to the frequency.
Using a piezoelectric transducer,*26 Barber and Putterman sent a wave to water contained in a spherical jar of quartz, and it emitted a weak blue luminescence of at least 3.3 electron volts, visible to the naked eye.24 Despite the visible “tail” of blue-violet, the peak of the spectrum was in the ultraviolet range. They also found that, stimulated by ultrasound, water emits light at regular impulses, at each cycle of the sound wave, which is most surprising.
The capability of a precise rhythm to stimulate water molecules to emit light in unison takes us back to the physics of collective phenomena and Preparata’s coherence theory of electrodynamics. As he suggested, molecules can be envisioned as minuscule radio transmitters with small atomic antennas. It is possible that certain antennas with particular frequencies exchange messages. How? By putting themselves in phase: vibrating together with the electromagnetic field of thousands of messages, rapidly increasing the scope of their connection.25 This is just like two cell phones that call each other and manage to communicate because they use the same channel of frequencies. Think about those radio alarm systems that protect houses from unwanted visitors. The central command coordinates the frequencies that the alarm sensors emit at regular intervals in order to stay in communication with each other. Using their frequency band, they talk and tell each other they are fine: they are performing their duty regularly.
As we mentioned earlier (in chapter three), when matter and field oscillate in phase, they produce high levels of consistency and coherence. According to Preparata, water has an exceptional capability of responding to the electromagnetic signals that are sent to it. The famous magnet that is the molecule of water, pulled from both sides by its negative and positive poles, behaves as an electric dipole that emits frequencies while rotating. This is why water is able to talk with any other substance.
Secret Fire
We have discovered that, though it appears simple to our senses, water—“humble, and precious, and pure”*27—knows how to communicate. Its chemical-physical characteristics make it capable of communicating, of recording information and then releasing it, just like when a song is recorded and then played back. Coherent electromagnetic waves (with higher-order information) manage to inform water by imprinting messages. Therapeutic information from a medicine can be transferred (TFF) or from mineral, plant, or animal substances, as in homeopathy (where the effect is inverted because of progressive dilutions with succussions). Sound waves can record complex geometric shapes on water as in cymatics, or in the form of crystals. Particular crystal structures have also been formed by currently unidentified signals, like those emitted by writing, images, or symbols.
The “dialogue” between ultrasound and water results in emissions of visible and ultraviolet light in coherent rhythms, almost intelligent. The ultrasound that frees light from the water reminds us of the Psalm: “The voice of the Lord separates the flames from the fire.”26 There is something miraculous in seeing light being freed from a body that apparently has no light in it. However, light is not only hidden in water but also in cells and in living organisms. We are facing what alchemists called the secret fire that vibrates in all things, which Parmenides called the daimon†28 and philosophers referred to as virtue. Is this secret fire, the flame that bursts forth, not the information of the basic codes? Isn’t it the separation of the flame from the fire that transfers the information in TFF?
To this the alchemist Raymondo Lully gives us an answer by describing the secret of fire like this: “It is an instrument that is in matter and is directed to make what we seek with its movement. . . . It is directed by the informative virtue, which moves the matter toward form.”27 “The informative virtue, which moves the matter toward form”—this is the basic code, which guides the design of the shapes, the map to build the bodies, the control center of the combined matter in the bodies. It also provides the control and regulation system for water. But it is a structure superior to the water, with “decision-making power.” To understand it more clearly, we need to leave the paths where we have found molecules singing, objects talking to each other, medicines telling stories, and music painting on water.
Now it is time to investigate the other side of cellular organisms; along the way we will bump into plants, animals, and living beings. Who will welcome us? I can see an onion approaching . . .