An Approaching Resonant Structure

The world's equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order. Mankind's ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System -- the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 136)

I am continuing to explore this idea of spiritual causality  that is manifest as a formal causality  that imprints a final cause, or attractor, upon the material cause, or primal matter, all of which effects creation by a vibrating influence--the various efficient causes.  A couple of efficient causes I have already presented.  I discussed morphic resonance in biology to indicate a form of vibrating influence from past to present within species of being.  I used dissipative structures from chemistry to show the influence of heat exchange which is, too, waves and vibrations of molecules.  This post will examine the term resonant structure--a term from physics but also chemistry--to shed more light on the creative effects of Revelation upon creation.

Emergence can be seen as the coming of a resonant structure into the world.  A resonant structure has vibrating influence, so formal cause reveals itself by its heralding effects.  Revelation is the transcendent resonant structure, because it surrounds the whole contingent world, and the world resonates in response to it.  It is as the sun radiating its light, illuminating all it touches and setting them to vibrating at higher vibrations from absorbing its heat.  This is the herald of spring and summer. 

To have resonance there must be a structure in vibration, a field of its influence and a medium through which its effects are felt.  Imagine the earth orbiting the sun, each spinning around its own axis, each generating its surrounding electromagnetic and gravitational fields, and each pulsing its quanta of energies in harmony with all other worlds in the plenum or active medium of the cosmos.  A spiritually resonant form is an invisible template of growth. 

The concept of resonant structure and field has its examples in organic chemistry with Pauling’s notion of the chemical bond as the stabilization of a system of resonant energy.  There is always a question about why and how atoms combine together to form different compounds.  From a physics point of view, a chemical bond may be defined as an attractive force which holds together the constituent atoms in a molecule.  When two atoms tend to remain together rather than separate from each other they are said to form a chemical bond with each other.   This is similar to the idea of entanglement in physics, where two photons unite and stay entangled no matter what the distance between them may become. 

In chemistry, as in physics and biology, every structure is associated with a certain quantity and quality of energy.  Resonance structures in chemistry are alternative structures available for one single compound/molecule or ion. The resonance structure concept is that if two (or more) alternate bond structures can be written for a molecule, the actual structure of the molecule is said to be a resonance hybrid of these alternate structures.  Resonance hybrid is the combination of all the alternate structures available for a molecule—again similar to the all the possible states for a particle in physics.  One important point connected with resonance is that the resonance hybrid is a more stable structure than any of the structures contributing to it.  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because the whole is a different thing entirely from its parts, yet it is in relation with them, like the soul and the organic body.  The stability of the organism or crystal with the things around it is called relational stability.

The increased stability of a resonance hybrid over that of any individual chemical structure is mathematically accounted for in the following way.  If it is considered that a resonance hybrid has two resonating structures, I and II, each structure can be represented by mathematical wave functions which give the energies of the structures they represent. By combining the two wave functions it is found that a third wave function will also represent the system and that this function corresponds to a lower energy value, and thus higher stability.  But this lower energy value of the third wave is actually a measure of the surrounding field or medium, what we called earlier the attractive force that enables the chemical bond.  

The resonance energy of a compound is a measure of the extra stability of the conjugated system compared to the corresponding number of isolated double bonds.  Resonance energy or hybrid energy is released by new combinations of qualities.  The energy is released into the field of relations as added manifest complexity.  Resonance energy is called delocalization energy.  This correlates with the wave form of a particle in physics, the morphic resonance of the biological form, and the social and cultural form of a collective of human beings, such as an ethic people.

Resonance is both a measure of individual stability—self-resonance of a structure, called identity in a human being—and of the vibrating influence of that structure creating a field of effects within a general medium of all structures so that mutual growth can occur.  This medium, such as the Zero-Point field in physics, is a kind of extra energy or latent potential that developing organisms and even inorganic compounds like crystals can tap into, mold and express.  There are, then, resonant structures, resonant energies, and resonant processes. 

Since the Word is the cause that hath preceded the contingent world, every revelation creates an environment of new possibility—the release of energy by new combinations of qualities—within Nature and the human world.  The environment is not an empty medium, but a continuum of non-material substance that both crystallizes into things and which interacts with the events that occur within it and which it helps produce. 

Revelation, the supreme resonant structure and energy, what Baha’u’llah calls “the sovereign essence”, the formal cause, is the world’s spiritual environment.  It is the ground of all being and changing it changes everything else.  The changes provoked by the vibrating influence of the Word are all its effects and all these work by efficient causality to change the world’s equilibrium.  They work cumulatively and interactively to transform, gathering speed and power to produce a new manifest condition.

The images, principles and metaphors of Revelation form what I call spiritual templates.  These are codes of information to reconfigure the world in its image.  These are manifested as different but harmoniously connected waves of light, the intersecting waves carrying information about the processes that created them to in-form all other things. 

Revelation as formal cause recreates the whole image of creation by ‘Be and it is”.  The resonant waves of Revelation connecting spirit and matter move between different planes of being, creating coherence.  In the creation itself and in the world of human understanding, Revelation is a harmonic resonance of intellectual waves, a vibrating influence creating reverberations, retuning creation and mind in a new harmonic so that the new state of mind appears or emerges from the womb of the old form to match the new creation unfolding from the old creation.  Formal cause within the contingent world, that is the received Primal Form, is what gives initial shape and form to Revelation’s energy, but the new templates to be manifested gradually restructure creation according to new vibrations.  They act like attractors to draw the elements of creation into conformity with the new image. 

But the heralding effects, manifest as the vortex and turbulence of rapid change, of breakdown and breakthrough, of integration and disintegration, appear before the actual cause of this tumult does.  As Revelation diffuses, the retuning process increases in speed.  The vibrations of change increase and fluctuations of events become faster and more intense as the system changes due to the vast increase of energy.  These herald the approach of a new vibrating structure whose vibrating influence upsets the whole world’s equilibrium in order to manifest a new order and bringing into being a new creation.  

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle