The Light and Sound Experience Part 1: - Sound

December 19, 2023

 Mind your P’s and Q’s


Are manners anything more than an outdated British custom of social airs and graces, for fear of upsetting the other? 

 Manners have for many years ruled the behaviours of the civilised British gentry, with records dating as far back as the early 18th century. Over time, these customs have trickled down from, ‘on-high’, and form the profoundly ingrained set of etiquacies; that make up the backbone of our social interactions today. From forming orderly queues, to quite literally begging for pardon: - manners seem to have found their own way of tidying up the world in which we live.
 

As the radicals and anarchists, the liberals and freedom fighters began to philosophise about life and its loves, the confusion for many lies in the rational of it all. For instance, does it really make sense to excuse ourselves, or to limit the freedom for self-expression; for exhibiting mere natural behaviours? I mean, if folk want to get offended, that’s their problem, right? 


I’ve travelled to distant countries, where the idea of manners, really have felt like a long way from home. I’ve been pushed out of the way by grandmothers and grandchildren alike, almost sat on, on top of buses and experienced the total non-existence of customer service at the best of times… and I can say, it felt bloody annoying. Indeed, nothing made me appreciate more, the stiff, uptight, and people pleasing ways of life back in Britain.

In this muddle of inter-cultural, personal, and eccentric behaviours, we can’t, by any means, control what fancies folk might perceive to find annoying. But manners appear to be less about the perceptions of the afflicted and more about the righteous and careful consideration in which we choose to move about and respond to in this world. When we hear an unwelcome noise, or are ruffled up the wrong way, there is nothing quite like the sounds of a sincere apology, to help clear the tension in the air. Words and sounds quite literally carry energy, with the rarefaction and compression of air molecules emanating first through a mechanical vibration. When we speak, energy is departing the vocal chords of one person and headed straight for the eardrums of another! In this way sound is a process of energy transfer, and the absorption of this energy into something or someone else. 

The aristocracy didn’t just make a point of speaking to each other nicely, they also had a thing called finishing school.  They determined that how we carry ourselves and the development of a gentile character, would be a pretty darn important asset to cultivate in life. Just ask a magician whether words carry power and you will soon find out. Sounds can certainly invoke feelings in the recipient, and in turn sounds are released in accordance to the feelings of the originator. So is it possible that the energies of our emotions are being carried with these words too?


From the way that we speak to each other, to the utterances that make up the mudra of our personal being, how we hold ourselves determines the energies that emanate. Manners are a form of awareness and respect, they are the all-encompassing expression of ‘seeing God in everything and everyone’, to take that ultimate reverence for the divine and to apply it to all others.



The Light and Sound Experience Part 2: - Light

December 19, 2023

 

 

                                                           The Split Personality of Light

Forget military service, or a year’s work experience in industry. Why even bother to take a gap year out to go trotting merrily across the globe? Nothing in my opinion would enrich our lives more than if we all took a year off, in the contemplation and study of the very real *dichotomy and strangest behaviour of light.


Thanks to Gaven Pretor-Pinney, author of The Wavewatchers’s Companion, I have been, ‘mind blown’, over the past five months, knee deep in the reading and research of such a fascinating and mind-boggling subject. Because still to this day, “most scientists who have worked in the field of quantum mechanics would be at great pains to say, that they too have found the nature of light as bloody mysterious as the rest of us”. 


Since the mid-18th century, the predicament most physicists found themselves in, was the argument of whether light was a particle or a wave. Over the centuries, reputable scientists such as Newton, Young and Einstein, were able to convincingly theorise new evidence that would periodically overturn societal thinking of light’s behaviour at the time. This alternate - ‘is light a wave’ or ‘is it a particle’ conundrum continued steadily for over three centuries. But then, in 1923, the bonkers behaviour of light was finally revealed; in the famous double slit experiment conducted by Davisson and Germer, who discovered that light had all this time been leading a double life... inconspicuously moving around as waves, but behaving like particles, only while being observed [naughty].

                      

                                               
Davisson and Germer’s brilliant experiment didn’t, however, reveal that light’s behaviour changed through the mere act of looking at it. It was in the analysis of light, that had given rise to its duality and curiously still, this phenomena not only occurred through the mind of the human observer, but the same was true when the experiment was performed only in the presence of a machine. 
 

The peculiarity of light remains to this day bizarre, and there is no end in time and money spent in its continued pursuit. Could it be less of a question of ‘why’ does light behave like this and more of a question of what could the conscious self have to do with it? Where does the answer lie? Maybe not at the end of the Hadron Collider, but perhaps at the end of a very long and deep meditation. Is it that sometimes science can only bring us only so far, and that some things will remain as unanswerable as magic! 



Sometimes it’s far easier to forget the unfathomable than to continue to keep figuring it out. But in the thought, study and fascination of our magnificent universe, isn’t it marvellous that we are able to bring a little meaning into the mundane. Owing to this strange wave – particle phenomena, my studies have been endlessly fascinating... life doesn’t always require a million-dollar scientific set-up to reveal to us it’s great mysteries, or to find in it your own truth.
So is light a particle or a wave? It’s most definitely both and we just don’t understand it. Some might also ask, “did God create the universe or did we just evolve here”? Well maybe it was both and we just don’t understand it… because it wasn’t one or the other… it was most definitely everything. 


*Dichotomy – a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.


There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Hamlet.



End of Days

August 07, 2023

 In the end times of prophetic lore, we will do as they say and not as they do. Hypocrisy will be found in all societal teachings, from governments to religion. Good will be bad and right will become wrong.

 
 
when you're a vegan and haven't told anyone in 8 minutes

I attended a talk once, from a well-known spiritual movement. The subject being the vegan diet as oppose to the correct vegetarian one and basically how our dear vegan friends had got it all wrong. Because what those vegans fail to realise, is that not a day goes by without every one of us causing the deaths of millions of living creatures aka bacteria: - when we do things like boil water, cook food or clean up. So the grand vegan principle falls down because we all kill, all day long! In order to live there must be death… or something like that: - it was actually quite a long time ago and I’ve slept a lot since then. 
 

And I do honestly quite get what the dude was saying. Eastern theology teaches that death is part of life, in fact it enables life. And life is merely a karmic pact that we have made with ourselves in order to learn lessons and advance on the great wheel of birth and rebirth. Lifetime after lifetime, until we transcend the senses and eventually perfect our individual human consciousness, known as reaching enlightenment.

Living creatures and plants are all made up of food and in the pecking order of life, a great number will end up on someone else’s plate! And that’s just the natural order of the universe. It is this same principle of factual dispassion that is fundamental to the spiritual approach to vegetarianism, a diet for the sole benefit of maintaining purity of body and mind. Because nothing gets in the way of god consciousness that connecting to the deep emotional sympathies of animal suffering, especially when were trying hard to maintain a cool detachment from the miseries of this worldly plane. 

 


Historically, the intellect is often viewed as being vastly superior to the emotional sphere, and much of our cultural and societal experiences have stemmed largely from this traditional patriarchal form of decision making. The intellect and feeling are largely different tools but both equally as valuable and invaluable together. Without this balance there has been much evidence in our history that has seen categoric failings in the morality of mankind… If humans are capable of great compassion then we must use it. 

When we delve and dissect into the realms of intellectual superiority, the truth is we can make a case for any argument. Any narrative divulged in complex philosophical thought, can argue that black is white and white is black; where over thinking becomes over complicated, even to the point where we can no longer determine what is right or wrong. But at the end of the day a wise man once said... only believe half of what you read and if something is obviously right – then do it.


We Come from the Heart

June 27, 2023

 I am not scared of the main stream media. I’m too old, too obnoxious, and far too ‘on the fringe’ for trifles such as that. I say what I like and I like it that way.  It’s not going to bring me any favours and probably much less support… but I have always rolled on the edge, and that’s exactly where you’ll be finding me… trying desperately to make sense of our reality today. And as the decades roll by, I remain ever the more bewildered.

I’m a brown girl; born to Indian parents. I grew up in a white working class area, and when I was younger I’d have much preferred to have been white – like all the other kids in school. When I reached my teens I wouldn’t have even minded being black, because black was cool, black people were on the telly, reading the news and excelling at sports… But brown people, well we were just an undercurrent of unassuming corner shop owners (Paki’s to some) who needed to go home. 

But you know what? Most of the time I actually thought I was white! Because it’s easy to forget what you look like when you’re out and about – you can’t see yourself! I was exuding the whiteness of my western brain in thought, word and deed, until the occasional rebuke of “Paki”, put me back in my place. But it wasn’t only those hateful words hurled from afar, that put me back in my place. That seemingly innocent but dreaded question of “where are you from”, was always far worse. Because to someone who is spending most of their time denying being brown, this is a question that politely reminds you that, try as you might you will never be able change your Indian featured face. There I would be, thinking very ‘English’ and talking very ‘English’, while some nincompoop would have the audacity to single me out. Not only for being different but also for not belonging to where I though I belonged and only because of how I looked! 

So I went about life with this confidence crushing complex of trying to be un-brown, but then in my late 20’s everything changed. No, not a face transplant, but I started doing yoga and at the yoga centre, I found that they actually loved brown people! I mean you would almost think these folk wanted to be brown themselves. They revered in Indian philosophy, culture, history, food, music, ‘everything’. It was odd, but quite pleasant and it was only then that I started to take a little interest in my own cultural heritage. I had finally found a place where being brown was cool, but that wasn’t the best part it… I got to learn about the great Vedantic mysteries and the practice of non-attachment to the transient material body, which turned out to be the very skills needed to navigate through the great challenges of life.  Because when we shed away the layers, we are ultimately neither white, brown, male or female, not our emotions our qualifications or even our social standing: - we are simply limitless spirit soul having a human experience and it sounded good to me!

Nowadays life is chill, but my years of unhappiness are still not fully over - inequality and judgement continue to exist, but I now know that it is not my body that I need to change. Unhappiness lies in the mind and it is only in the acceptance of ourselves, that we can truly be free. Sadly, it is from our earliest beginnings, that we are subject to the conditioning nature of ‘want’, our options limited as we consume our way out through life. This is a societal culture of ‘short lived’ satisfaction, where vast amounts of money are exploited from our desires to improve our ‘lot’ in life.
Growth and evolution are wonderful qualities, otherwise perhaps we’d all still be sat in caves! But I am glad that ethnicity reassignment surgery does not exist. Because ultimately it is only in the acceptance of ‘who’ we are and in gratitude of what we already have, that lasting fulfilment is truly possible.
Definitions and categories and boxes, let us throw away the labels and let us all be free. Free to express ourselves in any way that we wish. Because whoever we are and wherever we’re from, let it be that we will always come from the heart.