Shifting the Cultural Frequency
Cymatics, Development, Equality & Freedom
In this post I’m going to break down the concept of cymatics as a metaphor for the frequency of culture and what shifting the culture can look like.
Cymatics as Cultural Frequency
Cymatics is the study of sound and vibration made visible, typically on the surface of a plate, diaphragm or membrane.1 Different patterns emerge in the excitatory medium depending on the geometry of the plate and the driving frequency. (Figure 1)
The beauty of these patterns is unmistakable and seems to mirror the profoundly geometric fractal patterns of psychedelic states.2 As such, it presents us not only with a useful metaphor for understanding the patterns that guide personality and behavior formation, but also the reasons that culture coalesces in the ways it does.
The way that cymatics work is that powder is placed on a plate, and as the plate vibrates at different frequencies, various patterns emerge.
The patterns become increasingly complex until suddenly, poof, an entirely new pattern emerges. The cymatic patterns here are analogous to both the individual and collective generator function that give rise to everything around us; culture, norms, degree of inequality, emotional experience, the tension between people & cultures, and depth of subjective states to name just a few. Everything that we experience in life is a manifestation of this underlying interdependently-enmeshed frequency. The only way you can intuit the frequency is through its physical manifestations, and yet it’s never encompassed in any single physical form.
The cymatic frequency of society itself is irreducible. The essence of culture is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. “The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.” as Donella Meadows puts it. 3
Donella Meadows beautifully portrays this line of thinking in her book Thinking in Systems: A Primer when she writes:
“Social systems are the external manifestations of cultural thinking patterns and of profound human needs, emotions, strengths, and weaknesses. Changing them is not as simple as saying “now all change,” or of trusting that he who knows the good shall do the good.”
Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here. … Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away. … undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it. …”
Pushing Cognitive Limits
It seems to me that if we’re ever going to find ways to transform societal patterns towards greater degrees of wholeness then it’s going to start with a profound letting go. A realization that everything is co-arising and there isn’t one cause of the various problems we’re seeing in culture today.
“Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously.” — Donella Meadows
Instead we can take the infinitely more effective both and perspective. It’s not top-down or bottom-up ,it’s both and! It’s not individual or collective, it’s both and! It’s not the oppressor or the oppressed, it’s both and! Everyone must take responsibility. No one is privileged. We’re all enmeshed in the web of cultural experience and the responsibility of anyone can have profound change.
“Drug addiction is not the failing of an individual and no one person, no matter how tough, no matter how loving, can cure a drug addict—not even the addict. It is only through understanding addiction as part of a larger set of influences and societal issues that one can begin to address it.”
“Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about systems.”
Paradigm as Cultural Transformation Leverage Point
I’m going to continue with some quotes from Donella Meadows Thinking in Systems: A Primer to paint a picture around the power of worldview and perspective change as a lever for upgrading the cymatic frequency of culture.
“Keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is “true,” that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension.”
“It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.”
“You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of not-knowing.”
“it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.”
The points here echo Nora Bateson’s explorations of uncertainty and mutual learning. Although much of Meadow’s book speaks on feedback loops and visual models of systems, she seems to come full circle and in portraying how the essence of the system is beyond rational capture. That reality is far beyond human comprehension and the way we respond to this knowing is through profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.
In exploring the cymatic frequency of culture our aim isn’t to capture the essence of culture in a rational, reductionistic paradigm but to build the protocols in which to better surrender and dance with the unknowable.
The questions I’d leave you with would be:
What paradigm are you operating under?
How might becoming conscious of this paradigm afford you a greater capacity to enact individual & cultural change?
The Necessity of Experimentation
“Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.”
“Self-organization is basically a matter of an evolutionary raw material—a highly variable stock of information from which to select possible patterns—and a means for experimentation, for selecting and testing new patterns.”
The ethos of Phoenix Culture (a DAO I’m co-creating focused on shifting the cultural frequency) is that of experimentation. The core values manifesto we’ve laid out is meant to be as antifragile as possible. We know that we have no clue what the best way to enact cultural change may be. Our goal is to instill these core insights into as many people as possible and then unleash them to co-create projects that get more and more at the root of the cymatics of culture itself.
What is evolution but an infinite trial-and-error experimentation process. With time we’re focused on upgrading culture and the way this will be accomplished is through millions of failures and reflective insights that delineate the nature of cultural paradigm shifts.