Radiation & Vibration

Philosophy, for one who understands,
points out, and not just in one place,' he said,
"how nature follows—as she takes her course—
the Divine Intellect and Divine Art;
and If you read your Physics carefully,
not many pages from the start, you'll see
that when it can, your art would follow nature,
just as a pupil imitates his master;
so that your art is almost God's grandchild.
From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,
if you recall how Genesis begins,
for men to make their way to gain their living;

— Dante, Inferno, Canto XI

Does the blood of a hero reach much closer to God than the knowledge of the wise man and the prayers of the saint?

The gods, who know they cannot die, admire and perhaps envy the sublime courage of the heroes who do not know they cannot die, and, nevertheless, enter voluntarily their only life for an ideal, for a dream. Does there exist anything more beautiful? The sacrifice most appreciated by the highest divinity is the heroic death of the warrior, the one which seeds the world, as a final act of providence. For that reason, he is immortalized at the pinnacle of a cosmological order that transcends death.

Affirmation of this world and of man constitutes Homeric religion. There was no categorical ethical or metaphysical distinction between gods and men, both were susceptible to the Moirai. And it was this primordial acceptance of fate which gives Homeric religiosity its defining character of realism and tragic pessimism. The gods were immanent; they were idealizations of man... more beautiful, more vital.

Orphism inaugurated a spiritual revolution in the Greek world by inverting this traditional Homeric valuation of embodied life in which psyche is understood as a simulacrum of the mortal body.

In Orphic thought, the body is understood instead as an illusory image or a tomb (sōma sēma, a phrase inherited by the Gnostics and which influenced the Stoics and early Christians) of the immortal soul, whose purification is achieved through separation from the body. This process occurs primarily through ritual purification and asceticism, the latter understood in a metaphysical sense as a “turning away” from the flux of becoming, structurally analogous to nonvolition in Schopenhauer’s terms.

Here, the soul or divine spark is understood as being imprisoned within the body either as a form of punishment or as the consequence of a primordial “forgetting” comparable to Māyā in Hindu thought. The ultimate aim of the soul, then, is liberation from the cycle of terrestrial punishment and reincarnation, what the Hindus call saṃsāra.

While the conceptual connection between Orphism and Hinduism is unmistakable (indeed, some have speculated that the historical Orpheus was himself a Hindu sage), we cannot say with certainty that the latter directly influenced the former.

Orpheus was said to be of Thracian origin, the son of the eldest of the Muses, Calliope, and of the Thracian king Oeagrus. Iamblichus tells us that it was from Calliope that Orpheus received his wisdom. From Herodotus, who described Thrace as the “greatest nation on earth after the Indians,” we learn that a Thracian tribe known as the Thrausians regarded life as suffering and death as eudaimonia. Herodotus reports that it was their conspicuous custom to mourn the newborn and to bury the deceased amid joy and merry-making.

On this basis scholars have understood Orphism as un-Homeric if not, as in the case of Burckhardt, un-Hellenic conceptions.

According to the Neoplatonists, their theology was first promulgated by Orpheus, albeit symbolically and mystically; it was then transmitted esoterically by Pythagoras, who was said to have been initiated into the Orphic rites by Aglaophemus in the Thracian Libethra, and finally articulated “scientifically” by Plato: the so-called golden chain of Neoplatonism.

Orpheus would later be assimilated into the figure of Christ.

To me, carrying conversations sometimes feels like trying to capture as much of a landscape as you can from a fast-moving train. You can, at best, give yourself the approximate immersion and understanding of the part you're looking at, all while knowing you have so little time to move on to the next. I am in no way trying to trivialize the skillfulness of a great speaker — one of which would assimilate themselves to that of a painter having to create from memory, and produce an illustration that would capture the essence of what was seen (or rather experienced). I think speaking, in the same way, is a severe test of how proficient one is at putting their experiences into words. Yet, I believe that discourse can often be a neglected hypostasis when having to become a master of what you're interested in. The lens of debate often detracts from intellectual progress because of emotion, ego, timing, pressure, or presence.

The ability to reflect.

If my thought can't survive outside the moment in which it was spoken, does it even belong to me? No, rather, it belongs to the situation that produced it. The conditions in which an idea can flourish are supported by structure rather than persuasion. When we write we can trace back its provenance. When we write about something, even something we know well, it more often than not shows us that we didn't know it as well as we thought. This is, in essence, our true test. I don't want to be afraid of how fast this train is moving and risk not capturing the beauty of the landscape before me. I would, rather, get off the train and walk on foot.

https://paulgraham.com/words.html

Some time ago I was reading an author who talked about how science accepts vibrations as continuous. We create vibrations everywhere — from the strings of a guitar getting plucked down to the very air molecules that move when we hear something. But they actually move in pulses, with moments that speed up and slow down. He went on to explain how these pauses are like "intervals" in an octave, and they explain why nothing in life ever really moves in a straight line.

He drew diagrams of rising vibrations of 1,000 to 2,000 per second intervals and pointed out two spots — not at the start or end, but somewhere in the middle, where growth slows down. Many ancient scholars marked these exact points to form a seven-step scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do. The "intervals" fall between mi–fa and si–do. It was first applied to music, but it's a microcosmic view that holds for any type of vibration, be it light, heat, chemicals, and even our social rhythms. Those pauses are why we start out doing one thing and end up doing something else entirely. They're why our efforts so often fall short or take turns we never expected.

I feel somewhat overwhelmed at the rate information gets shared and received nowadays. I thought this would be a fitting name for a public diary of some sort — because for the most part, a diary is a response to vibration, it is radiation. It's the act of transmitting back our understanding of what we experience and interpret without many expectations.

I hope that through keeping this archive, it can be both a way for me to look back at what information space I was directing my attention to at some point in time, but to also act as a reference point to any reader who desires clarity on some of life's topics that are difficult to articulate clearly.

Radiation / Vibration