Your Goals As Waveform
May 31, 2006
6 CommentsI thought it would be appropriate to use a waveform as a metaphor for your pursuit of musical goals–such as absolute pitch–or pursuit of anything for that matter.
A wave is a disturbance that propagates through space, often transferring energy.
That’s a fascinating sentence. A wave is a disturbance. It is an interruption of space. So everything is just perfect until you get an idea that competes with the pre-existing emptiness for your attention. And this disturbance propagates through space, often transferring energy. So now this little disturbance has not only reproduced and spread, but has moved energy.
Energy
The word “energy” comes from the Greek ενεργός (energeia). The compound ενεργός in Epic Greek meant “divine action” or “magical operation.” In a very general sense, everything is energy and energy is everything. If everything is energy, then everything can be expressed in waveform at some level.
Back to waveforms. Waves have a number of characteristics: frequency, wavelength, amplitude, and period. Frequency is the number of times the wave occurs per unit of time. Wavelength is the distance between repeating units of a wave pattern. Amplitude is the amount of the maximum disturbance during one wave cycle. Period is the amount of time it takes to complete one full revolution.
(Click to enlarge)
How can we express intention as waveform?
Frequency is how often you express your intentions. But not just think about them. How often do you act on your intentions? How often do you hold these intentions in your mind? How often do you visualize their completion?
When it comes to frequency, we can consider all the levels or ways to express our intentions. We can think about them at the level of mind. We can voice them at the level of sound. We can act on them at the level of matter. And we can pray or meditate at the level of soul or spirit.
Wavelength is measured in terms of distance. While not easily apparent how distance can be useful in the achievement of your intentions, it offers another way to look at them. Space and time are inseparable. And much of goal setting is gap analysis. How do I get from point A to point B? So while being a stretch of its true definition, wavelength could refer to the distance between you and the manifestation of your intentions. It is a way of thinking about how to bring the outcomes of your intentions closer to you. And since wavelength has an inverse relationship to frequency, that means if you want to decrease the distance between you and your goals, increase the frequency of your intentions.
Amplitude refers to the intensity of your intentions. How bad do you want them to become manifest? To what degree are you willing to disturb the universe to achieve your goals?
Amplitude can be constant or may vary with time. The variation of amplitude is called the envelope. In music theory, an envelope of a sound is its variation in amplitude over time, characterized by the attack, decay, sustain, and release of the sound.
Attack: How quickly the sound reaches full volume after the sound is activated. Attack can signify your initial excitement and motivation. With what speed and force do you attack your goals?
Decay: How quickly the sound reduces in volume after the initial peak. Most people lose their initial motivation rather quickly. And this can be a good thing. If you went after every single dream that arises in your imagination equally, you probably wouldn’t achieve any of them. But how far are you willing to let your motivation fall? What speed and level of diminishing force is acceptable to the fulfillment of your dreams?
Sustain: The “constant” volume that the sound takes after decay until the note is released. What is the ideal intensity level required to manifest your intentions?
Release: How quickly the sound fades after the end of the note. First of all, you must know when to release. How will you know when your goal is complete? What specific evidence will show you that you can let go?
Waveform period is the inverse of frequency. So if frequency is one expression per hour, then the period would have to be one hour per expression, right? Not quite. If only the crest of the wave is the expression of your intention and the cycle takes an hour, then the peak expression would be rather short, perhaps 15 minutes, with time to lead in to the actual expression and time to cool down.
Perhaps a better way to think of period is in terms of energy commitment. Waveforms have crests and troughs, or highs and lows. What is the commitment required to manifest your intentions? Are the crests equal to hours, days, weeks, or years? A goal of optimal health can have crests at every meal, crests a few times a week when you exercise, and crests every month to review your progress. Writing a new piece of music can consist of 3 2-hour long crests over 24 hours. Managing your finances can be a daily crest of 15 minutes for the rest of your working life. Get the picture?
A couple final points. These waves can affect other waves and be affected by other waves with positive and negative effect. Constructive and destructive interference can be connected to individual and collective human thought and action. Let’s look at both constructive and destructive interference in the individual and the collective.
Constructive wave interference are when two waves join, matching both peaks and valleys. The result is a wave exactly twice the strength of the original two waves–increased amplitude. Destructive wave interference is when two waves join, matching valleys to peaks and peaks to valleys. The result is the waves cancel each other out–neutrality and balance.
Constructive wave interference in the individual is when two intentions come together in support of each other. A cross-training of intentions that becomes a gestalt, the sum being more than the parts. This is a good thing. Constructive wave interference in the collective is when two or more people come together with the same intention and create a mastermind; a coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose. This is also a good thing.
Destructive wave interference in the individual comes in two flavors. Neutral and bad. First, the neutral. You have an intention to self-sabotage. Combined with any intention to counteract self-sabotage and the self-sabotage is neutralized. However, you have to somehow recognize the intention to self-sabotage in the first place. Which brings us to the bad. Let’s say you don’t know you have this self-sabotage intention and you also have an intention to manifest an important outcome. They neutralize each other and you don’t know why you’re not achieving your outcomes. Self awareness and self discovery is of the utmost importance.
It’s the same with destructive wave interference in the collective. Neutralize negative intentions with positive ones. But that alone doesn’t manifest anything positive. It only neutralizes.
The bottom line is to become aware of your intentions on many different levels. How do you see them manifesting and manifested in the world? Be as pure as a sine wave with your intentions and your path will be clear and full of harmony.
(Written with great help from wikipedia.)
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May 30, 2006
6 Comments
Quit On A High Point
May 30, 2006
2 CommentsTraditionally, learning new skills concentrates on rote repetition, reiterating the skill a large number of times until it is consistently performed correctly. But recent developments in learning theory, which have been applied with particular success in sports-training methodology, indicate that the rote repetition concept tends more to reinforce incorrect performance as opposed to developing the proper behavior or skill. Much success has been realized by implementing the concept of quitting on a high point, i.e., when a skill or behavior has been executed correctly, taking an extended break from the training at that point allows the learning processes to remember the correct behavior by strengthening the neurological relays that have been established in the brain by the correct procedure.
Instead of quitting according to the time you give yourself to ear train or after completing a particular exercise, quit on a high point.
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ...Music To Replace Aspirin…
May 29, 2006
ClosedFrom Music ‘can reduce chronic pain’:
US researchers tested the effect of music on 60 patients who had endured years of chronic pain.
Those who listened to music reported a cut in pain levels of up to 21%, and in associated depression of up to 25%, compared to those who did not listen.
Not that we need any scientific proof to tell us that music can change the way we feel, but it’s nice to have studies on the effects of music anyway — Especially for the burgeoning field of music therapy.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...I just finished watching The Secret. What is The Secret? It is feature length movie about The Law of Attraction. As inspiring as this movie was, there was this critical voice inside of me saying how incomplete it was. I truly want to believe in this principle and to a great extent I do. In certain phases of my life it has been a consistent and worthwhile practice. Unfortunately, it comes with that critical voice. So for my own benefit, I’ve decided to see how the law of attraction can fit into my current worldview.
The Law of Attraction states that you are a living magnet. You attract whatever is dominant in your thoughts and feelings. This makes total sense to a certain degree. If I’m feeling bad then I’m having a bad experience. And changing my feelings will create a different type of experience. It’s the same with thoughts I’m having. I’m attracting experiences that mirror my inner thoughts.
Pretty simple stuff. But it’s a reductionist principle. It collapses everything to the upper left quadrant, or the interior of the individual. And it collapses everything to the level of mind. Everything is determined by my thinking. Obviously this isn’t completely true.
So I’ll try to hack through the Law of Attraction according to the AQAL model. But to begin, I’ll stop calling it a law and instead view it as a general principle. If you’re new to integral theory and would like to know more, this pdf a good place to start: Integral Operating System. Also, wikipedia has some good information. Try these links: Integral Philosophy and Integral Thought.
Quadrants
I won’t fully explain the four quadrants here but I will make a couple of points. I already mentioned the reduction of everything to the UL (Upper Left: Individual Interior). Since I am a holon, reducing everything to a single part of my whole doesn’t support an integral principle of attraction. We can agree that there are internal, external, individual, and collective contributions to our existence. There are multiple perspectives to what we attract and what we want to attract.
Lines
How would lines of development relate to an integral law of attraction? I’m going to have a better chance of attracting the health and fitness that I want if I have a highly developed kinesthetic sense. I believe The Secret and proponents of the law of attraction have a good grasp of lines. Maybe not complete, but at least they ask you to think beyond money and things into relationships, health, and so on.
I believe linguistic intelligence is one of the most important lines to develop in an integral law of attraction. How we state what we want is just as important as figuring out what we want. Affirmations are an art. Subtle verb shifts can open our perspective and put things in their appropriate place on our time lines. Many self-help gurus will tell you to make everything present tense. “I weigh 50 pounds, am 8 feet tall, and a trillionaire.” Uh, I think not.
If your goal is to become a millionaire and you were to model a millionaire’s thinking on the path to completing this goal, you would find shifts in thinking and language patterns that occur over time. When I have a million dollars, I can affirm that I’m a millionaire. When I have $750,000 I can affirm that I’m close to being a millionaire. When I have $100 I can be creative and affirm, “I accept any idea that would be worth $1,000,000 or more.” These affirmations don’t create cognitive dissonance and are still extremely effective in focusing our thoughts.
Levels or Stages
Ken Wilber discusses this subject in Grace and Grit (pgs. 261-263):
For example, if you get hit by a bus and break a leg, that’s a physical illness with physical remedies: you set the leg and plaster it. That’s a “same-level” intervention. You don’t sit in the street and visualize your leg mending. That’s a mental-level technique that isn’t effective in this physical-level problem. Moreover, if you are told by those around you that your thoughts alone caused this accident, and that you should be able to mend the leg yourself with your thoughts, then all that is going to happen is that you will feel guilt, self-blame, and low self-esteem. It’s a complete mismatch of levels and treatments.
On the other hand, if you do happen to suffer frrom, say, low self-esteem, because of certain scripts that you have internalized about how rotten or incompentent you are, that is a mental-level problem that responds well to a mental-level intervention such as visualization or affirmations (script rewriting, which is exactly what cognitive therapy does). Using physical-level interventions–taking megavitamins, say, or changing your diet–is not going to have much effect (unless you actually have a vitamin imbalance contributing to the problem). And if you only try to use physical-level treaments, you are going to end up in some form of despair, because the treatments are from the wrong level and they just don’t work very well.
So the general approach to any disease, in my opinion, is to start at the bottom and work up. First, look for physical causes. Exhaust those to the best of your ability. Then move up to any possible emotional causes, and exhaust those. Then mental, then spiritual.
He makes a couple other important points:
What is not helpful is taking the fact that these psychological and spiritual aspects can be very useful, and then saying that the reason you broke your leg is that you lacked these psychologcal and spiritual facets in the first place. A person suffering any major illness may make significant and profound changes in the face of that illness; it does not follow that they got the illness because they lacked the changes. That would be like saying, if you have a fever and you take aspirin the fever goes down; therefore having a fever is due to an aspirin deficiency.
Now most diseases, of course, don’t originate from a single and isolated level. Whatever happens on one level or dimension of being affects all the other levels to a greater or lesser degree. One’s emotional, mental, and spiritual makeup can most definitely influence physical illness and physical healing, just as a physical illness can have strong repercussions on the higher levels. Break your leg, and it will probably have emotional and psychological effects. In systems theory this is called “upward causation”–a lower level is causing certain events in a higher level. And the reverse, “downward causation,” is when a higher level has a causal effect or influence on the lower.
The question, then, is just how much “downward causation” does the mind–do our thoughts and emotions–have on physical illness? And the answer seems to be: much more than was once thought, not nearly as much as new agers believe.
So the wisdom of downward causation comes into play during the exit of a completely reductionist rational worldview level into a higher-level integration of the mind and body. Using Spiral Dynamics terms, it’s a move from orange to green. But what usually happens when one enters this new stage is everything gets reduced again to a single perspective. It happened in The Secret and most attraction gurus tend to reduce everything to the level of mind. What The Bleep did something similar. I believe this movie could be important for someone at a purely rational level of development to widen their perspective but someone of an even higher more integrated level would see this as gross reductionism.
States
For me, this is where it gets fun. Who doesn’t love an altered state? Lucid dreaming, visualization, and subtle body exercises like Qigong, help us to expand and focus our energy. Every attraction guru will tell you to visualize your goals regularly and I believe it’s damn good advice.
It seems to me that the nondual state is where the two truths doctrine shows up, recognizing my relative and absolute self. A common attraction technique is to become grateful for what you have while at the same time striving to improve your life. This attraction hack is said to help you achieve your dreams faster. A deeper interpretation is to recognize your ever-present self that cannot be found because it was never lost while simultaneously improving your relative self.
Types
Types are a useful tool when it comes to the principle of attraction. They can help us take different perspectives. We can use the Enneagram to predict the issues that may come up in our personalities and then design outcomes in accordance to our Enneagram type. Masculine/feminine and yin/yang typology can help to balance our relationship to attraction. I give and receive. I let go while acting.
In conclusion, while most of the AQAL model can be used to enrich our understanding of attraction, there are really only a couple of major changes that must occur. First, include all quadrants. No more gross reduction to the individual interior. Second, transcend and include all levels. No more gross reduction to the level of mind.
There. My critical voice has done its job. I can believe in attraction again. Did I miss anything?
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