Cymatic Resonance, Creative Emergence, and Fractal Self-Organization

"Science should not lead to alienation, science should emphasize our embededdness in nature." - Ilya Prigogine

"Taken to its full possibilities, mathematical thinking can reveal the physical world to be astonishingly akin to music." - Alan Watts

Through researching the processes of the evolution of form being connected with a fractal/mathematical hidden dimension of order, I started doing studies with sound and the forms and patterns that sound frequencies make when applied through a medium of sand/salt, paint, or other various liquids on a small square board. This field of research is called cymatics, and it shows that sound vibrations and frequencies have very exact proportional-archetypal relationships and possible geometric-vibrational formative principles in nature - that increase the complexity of the form-pattern made on the surface, by an equal increase in a corresponding sound frequency.

Experimenting with this really encouraged my interest in understanding how the cymatic processes of pattern formation could relate to understanding self-organization in the dynamics of the emergence of matter and then life, and in giving a larger unity to cosmic evolution across the physical, biological, and neuro-mental domains as a single interconnected continuum of being and becoming.

Like each higher sound frequency, each change or bifurcation in the evolutionary sequence can be seen as a symmetry break that adds new emergent elements of complexity and pattern interrelationship into a system. A perturbation from ordered equilibrium in a system into a more open and chaotic/interactive state, that then eventually reaches a balanced equilibrium stable state of order (or attractor point), at a more complex level of interaction or system synthesis, and which then again will be transformed eventually, with full or absolute closure of the system always being postponed, and thus perpetuating the open evolutionary dynamic and dialectic.

Keeping an open system state is a dynamic that is fundamental in the study of chaos theory and fractal order, or more precisely called, non-linear dynamical systems theory. It is saying that order, life, and consciousness, come from, and emerge from, within the chaotic dynamics of a complex system, and are created by and through chaos. What we begin to see is that order is not created by an outside cosmic agent detached from and controlling all creation, and that order is equally also not the by-product accident of the blind momentum of machine-like deterministic causality, of an un-intelligent universe, the reductionist view still held by most orthodox/establishment scientists today.

What the new science and mathematics are showing us is that the universe has a logic or dynamic creative mind-like or fractal organizing property stratified within its very nature. This creative property, self-organization, plays a major part in creating new forms of complex systems of order through cyclical perturbations within a system of feedback and interaction. Cymatic-like self-organization helps in showing, quite visually, in how these new forms of complexity emerge and resonate through the destabilization of an equilibrium state, subtle variation, and the reaching of a critical mass or tipping point.

Evan Grant demonstrates the science and art of cymatics, a process for making soundwaves visible. Useful for analyzing complex sounds (like dolphin calls), it also makes complex and beautiful designs.

The insights given by the cymatic processes of pattern emergence give a direct model for a way of imagining something that could be of the universal or transcendental or a trans-dimensional emergent self-organizing factor in the material evolutionary processes, without conflicting with the standard Darwinian evolutionary model of the environmental factors of natural selection. In fact, self-organization and emergent complexity complete the other half of the evolutionary model, helping explain the morphogenesis of patterns and why there are genetic patterns to begin with, that are then selected and carried on. This understanding gained by the very real sciences of complexity, self-organization, and emergence, make the ‘hypothesizes’ put forth by the current sideshow parade of Intelligent Design proponents, a distraction irrelevant to this issue, a threat to education, and ironic pseudoscience.