It's not that difficult, although when it does get to be difficult, then I naturally default to metaphors and similes that are rooted in my physical experience.
One of these can be presented by the metaphysical model of five psychic senses. These are interpretations of psychic information that are easily translated into a physical experience, using the model of the five physical senses: vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
Speaking only physically, the accuracy of that model is outdated. The sense of temperature can be different from the sense of pressure, for example, but they both count as touch. The physical sense of proprioception might also be filed under touch, but that's not an exact fit for the category... it might be closer to the sense of chronological time, another very physical sense that doesn't fit in with any of the known five. Additionally, it's very difficult to taste something without smell. Physical senses are more complicated than the familiar five.
Still, that simplified and familiar model is what forms the basis for six clair-senses:
Clairvoyance is the ability to process metaphysical information as light.
Clairaudience is the ability to process metaphysical information as sound.
Clairalience is the ability to process metaphysical information as odor.
Clairgustance is the ability to process metaphysical information as flavor.
Clairsentience is the ability to process metaphysical information as texture or pressure, although I've also read of this term used for emotional reactions to something paranormal. I personally categorize those emotional reactions as claircognizance.
The sixth clair-sense, claircognizance, is the ability to process metaphysical information as... well, information.
I have not yet found those clair- senses terms of any practical use. I'd sooner say that "I sense a tangy sort of imbue" than, "I'm using my clairgustance" or "I am clairgustant". I think of it as a sort of in-between category, too broad to be regular vocabulary in describing a personal experience, and too experiential to refer to metaphysical "cosmology" or the way it all works in the grand scheme of things outside of personal experience.
The reason I bring it up, is to draw attention to the concept of a paradigm. While I'm going to be refer to light and sound in broader metaphysical terms, I want to keep it at the forefront that this is all only a metaphor-- just, applied to a more general, mechanical, scheme-of-things viewpoint rather than applying to the description of a personal experience.
Light
An overwhelming majority of people in this society have vision as the dominant physical sense, and vision is stimulated by light. Even if a person's vision is impaired to a small extent, through color-blindness or shortsightedness, vision can be dominant enough to override and distort other senses. The video below describes the McGurk Effect, wherein seeing somebody's mouth move in a way that it should sound like "fah" but the actual sound accompanying the image is that of a person saying "bah"... somebody with functioning sight and hearing will hear "fah" even if they know that the sound is not supposed to match the visual. The visual cue overrides the true reality in a multi-sensory illusion.
As for a physical understanding of light energy, it certainly appeals to metaphysical ideals. Light can travel in a vacuum. It is entwined with the forces of electromagnetism, the true amount of energy in matter, even acts as a sort of tempo-setter for the passage of time. Light energy is a marvel of the material world...
... and many of those who explore psi phenomena take it as a given that metaphysics is like physics. The phenomena that serve as points of focus-- telepathy, psychokinesis-- this must be because of a psychic electromagnetic force. If light can be the stuff of electricity, magnetism, matter, and time-- then so must conscious intent.
It's a beautiful metaphor, and the way it's most often used is more as a fact than a metaphor.
I think that can be a problem, essentially the same problem that I had with metaphysical energy.
Sound
The physical understanding of sound makes it a less marvelous metaphor. Sound requires a medium in which to travel. Sound is a mechanical energy as opposed to a physical energy, and it does not carry through a vacuum. The speed of sound was quite easily broken, unlike the speed of light that is a self-sustaining natural law. Sound does not fit in with the ideal metaphysical philosophy or cosmology, whereas light energy has the romance of a universally unifying force. A large part of me wants psychism to be that force, too, when I step out of the paradigm that all my metaphysical experiences are a psychological projection.
However, I personally will loan the terms used for sound and music from now on, whenever I refer to my understanding of metaphysics in a "worldview" capacity (and not only for instances of personal clairaudience.)
The materialist understanding of light energy recognizes light as a conserved quantity. Energy cannot be created or destroyed-- it can only be transferred. There is a finite amount. This particular aspect of this particular force has carried on over to the metaphysical understanding of metaphysical forces.
And I don't believe that psychism has earned that carry-over yet.
A less-often expressed aspect equally worth considering is that whatever forces-- better term might be "elements" in the classical sense even though light and sound might have not been considered elements during classical times--that construct a metaphysical experience are not about quantity, concentration, and transfer... and more about resonance, consonance, and harmony.
This suits many metaphysical experiences much better, I believe-- "darkness" and "negativity" in metaphysical terms, tend to sound far more active than they ought to be by definition within the light energy model of metaphysics. Within the sound-and-music model of metaphysics, "darkness" is "noise", and "negativity" is "dissonance". It comes off to me that noise and dissonance suit the experiential nature of miasma far, far better than its parallel to how light energy works.
They're just words, but the difference shows a shift in understanding that I believe is worth continuing to explore... even though the sound-and-music-as-metaphor will less easily allow me to forget that it's a metaphor. That might even be one of its strengths.
Cymatics, for example, is the art of giving sound a physical and visible form. This is (to my understanding) an art, however-- an imitation. It's not like light energy taking form as matter, for which it is direct and there is no imitation. I might be inspired by cymatics to think of sound as a way to shape something, or to think of the shapes of things as sounds-- but that won't be cymatics. For sound to have a direct physical effect, such as in infrasound, doesn't unify it with either the physical matter on which it is having an effect, or infra-physical psi forces.
I do admit to some bias towards music as a way to parallel my metaphysical experiences: obviously, I'm a paranormalist, and a musician in addition to that. The exploration of both interests has had great sentimental value to me. However, I hope to take nothing more than language from this psi-as-music paradigm shift.
Recommended Links
Infrasound - The Skeptic's Dictionary
Years, by Bartholomäus Traubeck From the site: "A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. (...) The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently."
No comments:
Post a Comment