Rationalizing New Age slogans

[Carl-Richard]

How "scientifically accurate" are cliché New Age statements like "raising your frequency" or "everything is energy"? You'd be surprised.

 

As the frequency of tone/pitch can be described as rhythm, harmony can be described as polyrhythm.

A tone is just a rhythm that is sped up. They're just different orders of magnitude of the same thing, connected in a fractal relationship. Actually try to notice this while listening to the video clip. It's quite remarkable.

Similarly, our different sense modalities essentially detect the same thing: different energy levels of rhythm, vibration or waves (frequencies):

Haircells in the ear canal: frequencies of acoustic/material vibration.

Photoreceptors in the eye: frequencies of electromagnetic vibration.

Heat receptors in the skin: frequencies of thermodynamic vibration.

A vibration is the simplest representation of information: up-down, on-off, 1-0. Higher frequency means higher information density (higher energy levels of vibration). Not coincidentally, "raising your frequency" relates to how receptive you are to different energies of vibration, i.e. how much information you can take in and process. Distributed across different formats, this produces different phenomenological states (e.g. internal and external experiences).

As sensation relates to external stimuli, perception and cognition relates to the internal representation and processing of sensory information. Seeing or hearing an internal picture or sound is you recreating the same information, albeit in a different format. Here the informational/computational analogy also applies: you can have different sound formats: mp3, wav, midi etc., but they all fundamentally represent the same information.

 

To summarize, life is a diverse collection of vibrations in different energy levels and formats. To paraphrase a comment under the youtube video from above: "as life is a collection of rhythms, tones and harmonies, life is a symphony." So maybe New Age slogans are not so vacuous after all

[Tim R]

I think it's so interesting how people who subscribe to the new age want to make connections between their jargon and the scientific world, especially the world of physics (given that people believe physics to describe reality in the most fundamental and truthful way). It's like they try to accommodate their views to mainstream ontology in order to make it more accessible and more easily digestible to the mainstream. 

I think that's both admirable and at the same time not always quite necessary. Assuming the mask of scientific rigor isn't always appropriate. 

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Tim R said:

I think it's so interesting how people who subscribe to the new age want to make connections between their jargon and the scientific world, especially the world of physics (given that people believe physics to describe reality in the most fundamental and truthful way). It's like they try to accommodate their views to mainstream ontology in order to make it more accessible and more easily digestible to the mainstream. 

I think that's both admirable and at the same time not always quite necessary. Assuming the mask of scientific rigor isn't always appropriate. 

Then you also have to factor in that there exists actual connections, be it metaphorical or metaphysical, that get filtered and watered down through the strainer of pop culture. You start with the clear streams of scientifically literate mystics in the upper echelons of academia and end up with the sewagey bong water of some socially privileged teenage stoner . It's the same with pop science: carefully formulated statements reduced down to absolutistic troop signals.

[BipolarGrowth]

Everything is on and off. 1 and 0. Sensation and cessation. Life is flickering in and out of existence faster than you can currently perceive, at least for now. 

[Guest EmptyVase]

@Carl-Richard

Love how you framed that. The infinite world of sound. Amazing!

[Carl-Richard]

48 minutes ago, BipolarGrowth said:

Everything is on and off. 1 and 0. Sensation and cessation. Life is flickering in and out of existence faster than you can currently perceive, at least for now. 

So cessation or void or samadhi is when it's all 1 (or 0). No on and off: only on (or off)  No differentiation of form, no information, no vibration.