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: 136)

To complete the discussion of resonance, which is a central metaphor enabling the mind to grasp something of the coherence of the spiritual and material worlds, I am going to present some thoughts on the impact of Revelation, the supreme resonant structure, on the universe.

The greatest events in the history of the universe are the Revelators Themselves coming into the universe.  Revelation changes the entire creation, Baha’u’llah asserting: “The breeze of the bounty of the King of creation hath caused even the physical earth to be changed, were ye to ponder in your hearts the mysteries of divine Revelation.” (The Kitab-i-Iqan: 47)  The Revelations They bring retune creation, calling into being a new creation, establishing new harmonies between Spirit and matter that renovate the conditions of existence, creating new forms of realities that are both essential and forever and that appeared before “but not in the form thou seest today.”  The tuning of the spiritual and material worlds is also the reconfiguring of the creation, putting the spiritual and material worlds in the “exact correspondence” of the Reality to its “outer picture.”

If Revelation energizes the entire creation and is progressive, then the universe is itself an emergent reality.  Emergence can be seen as the coming of a new and greater universal resonant structure into the world (i.e. Revelation) and basically retuning the relations of things to a higher frequency, manifesting thereby greater complexity of life and forms.  A resonant structure has vibrating influence, so as formal cause it reveals itself by its heralding effects, which are known and experienced long before the actual Cause is understood. 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 all things vibrating at higher frequencies from absorbing its heat, turning radiant energy into chemical energy.  This is the herald and dynamics of growth, and in winter is the promise of spring and summer.

In all cases, to have resonance there must be a structure in vibration, a field of its influence and a medium through which its effects are felt.  The earth orbits the sun, each one spinning on its own axis, each generating surrounding electromagnetic and gravitational fields, and each pulsing its quanta of energies in harmony with all other worlds in the plenum which is the active medium of physical energy called the zero-point field, but in thought I call the cosmos of divine Thought.  A spiritually resonant form is both an invisible template of growth and the radiating power animating material forms growing in its image. 

We saw in our discussion of resonance in chemistry that 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, the social and cultural form of a collective of human beings, such as an ethnic people, and with the implications of progressive Revelation building all life into greater complexity.

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 total energy or infinite 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”, 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 and through various efficient causes to upset and then reset the world’s equilibrium.  These changes work cumulatively and interactively to transform, gathering speed and power to produce a new manifest condition.

Again, the images, principles and metaphors of Revelation, the creative Word, form what I call spiritual templates.  On the information side of them, so to speak, these are codes of information to reconfigure the world in its image.  But on the energy side these spiritual templates are not just mental structures, not passive architectural blueprints, to be imprinted by the universal Mind of the Manifestation of God upon the prima materia (one matter: love) of the universe. They are dynamic structures, archetypal resonating structures with a “vibrating influence” powerful enough to reconfigure the universe.  Now it seems to me that that vibrating influence of these structures or templates is from the infinite energies of the divine Will pulsing through them.  These are manifested as different but harmoniously connected waves of sound and 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, form issuing from form.  Formal cause within the contingent world, that is the received Primal Form, is what gives initial shape 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 a new spiritual template.  But form is not imposed full and intact, but, rather, by iterative cycles crossing and re-crossing its own movements it gradually creates a path of development, and via a series of pressures and releases form emerges within this creative movement.

The heralding effects of Revelation in creation occur in the resonant intervals of unformed prima materia.  These are first manifest as a vortex and turbulence of rapid change, of breakdown and breakthrough, of integration and disintegration.  As Revelation diffuses, the retuning/reconfiguring process increases in speed and power.  The vibrations of change increase in intensity and the fluctuations of events become faster and more powerful as the system changes due to the vast infusion of energy and buckles under a new pattern and structure arising from within.  These herald the approach of the actual Structure whose vibrating influence has upset the whole world’s equilibrium in order to manifest a new order and bring into being a new creation.