Vibrations and Æther

The world we see is a world of vibration and in a sea of potential.

Welcome back, dear reader, I hope the last week has found you well. In our discussion of the mechanism of action in alchemical astrology we began to cover the vibrations emitted from the sun and from the planets, mainly earth. As we have slowly waded into this concept, we have come face to face with an idea that seems to bridge ancient hermetic philosophy and modern quantum theory, the fact that everything in the universe is made up of a series of vibrations or waves. While this is a very difficult reality to wrap our brains around I hope that I can explain it in a way that will help it make sense to as many of you as possible, and if there are any areas that you would like to discuss more we can always use the chat or comments to dive a little deeper.

Let us begin with the basics, what is a wave? A wave is a “propagating disturbance in one or more quantities” or it is a motion made by a source that spreads out through a substance. Think about one of the most common images of waves, ripples on water, the ripples begin from a central source when something impacts the water and they spread out across the whole body until the end is reached or the energy is dissipated, making the medium of the water move up and down. Another common wave is that of sound, which is a ripple made in the air from the source, the person or thing making the sound. Both of these kinds of waves have to have a medium to move through; the ripples in the water must have the water in order to create a ripple, otherwise we would be seeing constant ripples in the air around us with each movement, in the case of sound waves there must be air for them to propagate (spread out) because we know from physics experiments that sound waves cannot exist in or move through a vacuum.

Now that the extreme basics of waves have been covered as the disturbance that spreads out through one or more mediums, what is causing the waves? Simply put, vibrations cause waves and waves are evidence that vibrations exist, in the same way that ripples on water are proof that the water was disturbed. A vibration is the “oscillatory motion around an equilibrium point” or the slight movement around a central point. It doesn’t have to be repeated or at a specific interval to be a vibration, those traits would further describe what type of vibration that it is. If I slap my desk right now I would be producing a set of vibrations; one set of vibrations is slow and travels through the wood of my desk, causing the things sitting on it to bounce and shake, another set of vibrations is much faster and leaves my hand, travels through the air and makes my ear drum shake so I can hear the thump and the rattle from all of the objects that moved. My hand caused part of the desk to move around an equilibrium point, or vibrate, and that vibration caused waves that propagated, or traveled, through the desk and air, one or more mediums and affected all of the things along their path of propagation.

When we look at modern science and the study of quantum physics, we can see that the scientific view of the world has been changing to reflect these concepts. We used to believe that the universe was made up of tiny particles, sometimes explained as tiny balls of elements or atoms that are bonded together to create the form that we see. Current models show that these particles don’t really exist, they are just showing themselves in one of their possible states, kind of like a Schrödinger’s particle and that the things we see are made up of the interaction of the vibrations in many different fields. These fields are like oceans of potential energy made up of many different substances like, the proton field, electron field, the Higgs field, and so on. As each of these different oceans of energy interact with each other, the waves crashing into one another create the world we interact with. Many of us have seen the example of how gravity is supposed to work, they will stretch a cloth out and place a large ball in the middle to show how the mass of the ball changes the gravitational forces around it, this is similar to how these waves work. If we were able to dent the cloth with our finger and then flick it forward across the plane, we could show that what is moving is the wave, your finger worked as the vibration creating the dent, then the wave moved out forward. And if we were to send 2 dents toward each other, when they interacted, we would be able to observe several different reactions; they could bounce off one another, cancel each other out and disappear, or even become a deeper dent. These different reactions between the waves is what causes the different materials we interact with on a daily basis.

This may sound very familiar to anyone who has studied hermetic philosophy because the two schools of thought are nearly the same. Hermetics do not refer to the different quantum fields when they describe the medium in which these vibrations take place, they use the term æther. Æther or aether is the hermetic ocean of potentiality that everything happens in, and while they do traditionally only use a single field as a universal medium, some modern Hermetics are willing to accept that there may be several overlapping fields involved. It has even been hinted at in ancient writings when the alchemists describe how the intersections of universal laws, the alchemist, and him observing the vibration causes things to condense out of the sea of potential that is always there. Once these interactions happen, what we call material reality precipitates out of the potential energy of the aether, meaning that everything we see, interact with, and are, is simply the sum of the waves of many different vibrations.

As we come to how material reality falls out of the aether like salt in a solution, I want to pause for the time being. These concepts are very intricate, and I have tried to distill them down to their most simple form, if you are interested in diving deeper into this topic I encourage you to, but do so with discernment because it is a difficult topic and easy to be lead down the wrong path on. I also want to take a moment to apologize for the delay in posts recently as I did not intend for there to be as long of a break as there has been. That being said, the posting schedule for An Emerald Tablet is likely to change soon as the actual physical alchemical work going on is requiring more time than before. Right now, I have no idea of what that new schedule is going to look like, but I will be sure to pass out that information as soon as I can. I thank you so much for your time today as well as your patience and I hope the next week finds you well.