When we relate with the identity and agency of our Particle Self as an instrument, we can tune our instrument to resonate with the vibrations in the Wave Field. Hence, we may develop a whole new relationship with the Self, free of the dualistic attachment or detachment paradigm. We may cherish our instrument like any musician does. Yet we won’t be afraid to tune, adjust or even transform the instrument in order to play the music that sings through our hearts. When our Particle Self develops fluency at vibrating with the Wave Field, we will be enjoying playing music with life energies churning and swirling around us, joining other instruments in a spontaneous flow of expression.
Rhythm is the soul of music. Our ears register vibrations passing through air as sound. Thus we can hear the rhythm of a piece of music playing on guitar or drum. What about the music played by the vibrations of life energies on the instrument of a self? How do we develop a sense of “hearing” to that music and tune with other “musicians”? Resonance Code reading essentially trains the “ear” to hear the rhythms beating through the events in our life.
First, let us calibrate our perception by looking at some of the resonance rhythms that have already been manifested and “played” at a regular beat by natural and biological processes in and around us.
We call a temporal unit of the rhythm a Resonance Cycle. A Resonance Cycle has four phases: potentiation, growth, maturation and re-sourcing. In this four phases, the Wave and Particle modes trade priorities coming into the foreground of our awareness. We will take a closer look at how this cycle may reflect to us by nature as the changes of the seasons, by our body as our breathing, by our attention as the sleep-awake cycle, and by reproductive systems as woman’s monthly cycle. Finally we will discuss how the Resonance Cycle may direct the interplay between Wave and Particle Self.
A brief reminder of what Wave and Particle represents. Wave and Particle are two inherent modes of conscious process. In Particle, we pay attention to the boundary and conditions that define an entity and give it form. In Wave, we pay attention to the substrate of inter-connected relations and the process by which the form arises out of it. They are like two lenses through which we can observe and engage with life process. The concerted interplay of both is essential for us to experience the dynamic flow of life energies in and through us. Wave Self and Particle Self refer to the two modes through which we may experience our self, with a propensity towards either the Wave or Particle mode of awareness. (For details, please refer to Wave, Particle and Resonance.)
It is important to note that although we will illustrate the examples of Resonance Cycle using concrete entities such as a flower or human body, we are not referring to Wave and Particle as intrinsic properties of these objects. We are using them to highlight how they evoke the Wave and Particle modes of our own attention.
A Marigold’s Song through the Four Seasons
In the following example, we are going to tune to the rhythm in a marigold’s annual cycle. When we pay attention to a marigold flower in the context of a garden, the flower allows us to exercise the particle-izing mode of our awareness that sees the flower as a particle-ized unit, whereas the soil, grass, sunshine and other flowers in the garden evoke the mode of our awareness that sees the garden, the Wave Field that the marigold is embedded in.
In reality, the marigold and the garden can both be viewed from either Wave or Particle lens. If I zoom my attention to the newest and tiniest leaf on the marigold, then the whole flower becomes the Wave Field, and the leaf becomes the particle-ized unit. Likewise, if I zoom my attention to the 200-acre farm that the small garden is a part of, then the garden itself becomes one particle-ized unit, and the ecosystem of the farm becomes the Wave Field.
For now, let’s come back to the marigold flower and its lovely garden. In spring time, the seed of the marigold sprouts in response to the warmth of sunshine and moisture in the rains. It draws in nutrients from the soil and gains size and mass. The flow of life energy is from the Wave, including the soil, sunshine and rain, into the Particle, the flower. This is the phase of Growth.
In late spring and all through summer, the marigold blooms. Its growth slows down. It no longer focuses on gaining size and mass. It is still drawing nutrients from the soil, absorbing sunlight and rain. Meanwhile it is also offering its fragrance, color and beauty to the garden, joining the symphony of other flowers, attracting attention of bees, butterflies and beetles, taking in the gardener’s admiration. Here the Particle and Wave reach a balance. This is the phase of Maturation.
In autumn, it starts to shed its flowers. It withers away and shrinks in size. It gradually gives away the mass it has produced back to the soil. All the glory and beauty fades into nothingness. The only things left are the tiniest little seeds, with the stories of this flower’s life reproduced as many copies of DNA coiled inside the nucleus of the seeds. These seeds need to plant themselves firmly back into the soil to prepare for the next round of life. Here the flow of energy is from Particle, the flower, to Wave, the soil. This is the phase of Re-Sourcing. For an eye fixated only on the marigold’s flower and blind to its seeds, this looks like death, ruin and loss. For a heart addicted only to the jovial summer parties, this feels like the bitter aftertaste of grief.
In winter, there is no marigold flower above the ground. The seed, the potential for the manifestation of another round of splendor, is hiding inside the dark womb of the earth, waiting, dreaming and sleeping, preparing for another spring. The earth, the Wave Field, is pregnant with the potential for next spring’s flower. This is the phase of Potentiation.
This song of the four seasons is one overarching Resonance Cycle that all living beings on Earth are attuned to. In many indigenous cultures, there are rituals and practices that follow the rhythmic beat of the seasons, celebrating the growth of spring, the bounty of summer, the harvesting, seeding and dissolution of autumn, as well as the restoring, dreaming and re-visioning of the winter. The rhythm of four seasons was at the heart of the agrarian culture of Ancient China at the time when I-Ching was written. Many of the hexagrams are associated with seasonal markers because of that.
In modern time, our man-made environment gives the surface impression that our life is largely insulated from the natural rhythm of seasons. The controlled indoor environment insulates us most of the time from the measurable climate factors such as temperature, moisture and air pressure.
But for the ancient Chinese, seasonal change is far beyond just these quantifiable parameters. Qi, the life energy that weaves through our body and mind, connects us to the rhythm of four seasons, no matter whether we are indoors or outdoors. If we train our attention to be re-attuned to the Resonance Cycle of the seasons like our agricultural ancestors, we will tap into subtle energies to leverage our creative effort. For example, we may pay extra attention to the growing and expanding aspect of our creative effort in spring, maturing and producing in summer, harvesting and reflecting in autumn, and the dreaming and visioning in winter.
Breathing
If we consider our body and the outer world as a relationship, every breath is a Resonance Cycle. In this relationship, we may consider the body as a particle-ized unit, and the air and the multitude of other life forms outside the body as the Wave, the context that contains the unit.
In this relationship, our airway is the interface through which our body and outside world exchange “information”, in the forms of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
When we breathe in, we are taking fresh air from the outside. The direction of flow is from out to in, from Wave to Particle. We rely on the oxygen contained in the air for our most basic life functions. This corresponds to the Growth phase. When we breathe out, we are giving air back to the outside. The direction of flow is from in to out, from Particle to Wave. Here the carbon dioxide, the byproduct of our metabolism, returns to the environment, where it can be sequestered by plants and other life forms, recycling through the web of life. This is the Re-Sourcing phase. Between the inbreath and outbreath, priorities between Wave and Particle alternate like a clock, all through our lives.
Besides the inbreath and outbreath, there are two pauses in between. What about these pauses in relation to the Resonance Cycle?
Let’s look at the pause right after we draw in a full breath and before the outbreath begins. Here, the intake of oxygen and the release of carbon dioxide reach an equilibrium. The net flow of the breath is neither in nor out. This is the Maturation phase.
The inbreath is an active movement. We must actively move our diaphragm down to expand our chest cavity to draw air in and hold it. We normally don’t feel the effort as it has become an automated process that our body can perform without our conscious attention. In contrast, the outbreath is a passive movement. If a person suddenly dies, the elasticity of the lungs and natural rest position of the chest will usually result in air moving out. The brief pause occurring after our outbreath and before the inbreath is the Potentiation phase.
This is a moment of micro-death, when our body surrenders its effort into a rest. When we are a fetus in the womb, there is neither inbreath nor outbreath. We are in a 9-month long potentiation state. Our body, the particle-ized manifestation, and the womb, its Wave source, are completely fused together. We are in a timeless bliss where there is no life nor death. Hence no past or future; only the eternal now. Since there is no differentiation between Wave and Particle, there is no priority either. However, the fetus and the mother, as one integrated system, are sharing energy with each other. The sudden and premature separation of the two is a high-risk event, possibly lethal to both the fetus and the mother.
Our life starts with this Potentiation and ends at this Potentiation phase. This phase marks the beginning and ending of our entire breathing history.
Under the stress of modern day life, many people develop the chronic habit of constantly holding their breath, unable to completely relax their diaphragms and breathe out in relief. It is a physical manifestation of our state of being. We are constantly striving, taking-in, locked in the Growth phase, without having the luxury to return to the source to regenerate. That is why the simple meditation exercise of putting our attention on the breathing cycle has a powerful relaxing effect.
Sleep/Awake Cycle
The Resonance Cycle plays out in the daily sleep/awake cycle too. We will divide one sleep/awake cycle into four phases. Fully awake, falling into sleep, sound asleep, and waking up.
The relationship we consider here is the Particle and Wave modes of our attention. When we are fully awake, both our Particle and Wave modes can be exercised at their fullest capacities. We can perform highly Particle-oriented tasks such as calculating mathematical problems, writing computer code, or drafting a sales report, as well as engaging in deeply Wave-oriented practices such as meditation, communing with nature, divination ritual or Fieldtuning. Our attention is at its Maturation phase.
As you may notice, the sleep/awake cycle differs from those of the marigold or the breath in that we have much more control directing our attention towards Wave or Particle modes in this Maturation phase. In our profession and life style, our waking attention can be heavily skewed towards Particle or Wave. A software engineer will most likely spend his working hours concentrating in Particle mode. But then, he may take a 10-day meditation retreat, where his attention will be immersed in Wave Field.
This is the key difference between a Resonance Cycle embodied by a natural or physiological process, versus by our human attention. Human attention has much wider freedom to stretch, expand and skew different phases of a Resonance Cycle, especially the Maturation Phase, at our will. This gives us a great deal of power to create, explore, or manipulate the environment around us.
Yet, there is a limitation to how much we can deviate from the natural rhythm of the cycle and exercise this power. We can manage not to sleep for several days, but then our body crashes. We can manage to force our waking attention into Particle mode for months, but then stress or chronic health patterns develop. Systems that are more attuned to the natural rhythm of Resonance Cycles will let us know when we cross the threshold by showing us signs of dissonance.
How do we return to resonance? Well, the symphony of resonance never stops. It is a matter of tuning our attention to listen and vibrate with it. Let us come back to listen to our daily sleep/awake cycle. As the day goes into night, we start to feel dreary. Our mind is no longer lucid; attention no longer focused. Eventually we drift into the sleep zone. This is the Re-Sourcing phase in which the Particle mode of our attention surrenders its priority to Wave. In this period when we are shifting from wake to sleep, we experience Wave sensation more predominantly. Our body becomes quieter and more expansive. Everything feels fuzzier and softer; boundary less distinct.
The process of falling asleep can last anywhere from a blink of a second to hours long. If our attention is stuck in Particle mode, unable to surrender itself into the Wave, eventually its ability to trade priority with Wave is impaired. That is why insomnia runs as a high-risk for people too immersed in a fast-paced, goal-oriented life style.
Luckily for most of us, we do fall sound asleep every night. That is when Particle and Wave are completely merged. Our experience is devoid of any conscious awareness except for dreams. Eight hours pass in the blink of an eye. This is the Potentiation phase.
Then as a new day starts, the Particle mode rises out of the womb of Wave again. We are waking up. This phase can be very short. Active dreaming happens usually in this phase. It is exactly the reverse of falling asleep. We gradually regain the concrete sensations of our body. Boundary becomes distinct again. Our mind becomes sharp. All sensory faculties back on line. This is the Growth phase.
What Beat Are We Playing?
So far, we have reviewed how these four phases set the rhythm for seasonal changes, breathing, and the sleep/awake cycle. As you can see, just like Afro-Caribbean music and American jazz have very different rhythms, these three cycles have their distinct qualities. The four phases are evenly distributed among the four seasons in many places on the Earth. (Their distributions become more extreme near the poles and less distinct near the equator.) The breathing cycle stretches out on the Growth and Re-Sourcing (inbreath and outbreath) but remains very brief in the Maturation and Potentiation (the pauses in between). The sleep/awake cycle is the opposite, very brief in Growth and Re-Sourcing (waking up and falling in sleep) and spreads out to the majority of the day in Maturation and Potentiation (waking and sleeping).
We can also see that any given moment of the day is under the influences of multiple Resonance Cycles. Like this very moment as I am writing this sentence, it is the Potentiation phase of the season (winter), Re-Sourcing phase of the breathing (I happen to be exhaling), and the Maturation phase of the sleep/awake cycle (It is 10 am in the morning – I am fully awake.) I can choose my actions or ways of being to be in alignment with the confluence of these cycles. That is in a nutshell the essence of I-Ching and Resonance Code.
The challenge is that, while it is easier to listen to the beats of these cycles where there are concrete markers such as the seasonal changes or our breath, it is much more challenging to listen to the cycles around us that are all within the sphere of human attention. Because of the erratic nature of human attention, the markers for the beats for these cycles are much harder to distinguish than checking whether the marigold blooms or not, or whether I am inhaling or exhaling. It requires concerted effort from both our Particle and Wave modes of awareness.
Re-Sourcing: Death, Rebirth, or Procreation?
For human attention conditioned by the particle-addicted, mechanistic modern culture, the Re-Sourcing phase is particularly challenging. The habitual way of using attention has a life-long history of gravitating towards particle-ized forms. In the Re-Sourcing phase, when the form dissolves, our Particle Self tends to experience great difficulty in surrendering its priority to the Wave Field. We experience being stuck in the feelings of loss, grief, or anger.
Our collective attention is fixated on a perpetual Growth phase. For example, measuring the economy by only looking at the growth index of GDP shows utter ignorance of Resonance Cycles. In a living organism, the Re-Sourcing phase is enacted as a cellular pathway called programmed cell death. When this function is impaired, cells turn cancerous. Unable to surrender to Re-Sourcing and enter the Potentiation phase, our collective attention takes on the quality of cancerous cells to the ecosystem we are embedded in.
So far, we have seen how one marigold flower dissolves into the soil. We have seen how our breath threads through the entire history of our life, and eventually stops after the last exhale. We have seen how night after night, our waking attention surrenders to the Wave, and in its final surrender, to the perpetual sleep of death. Is that all there is to the phase of Re-Sourcing?
No, Re-Sourcing is also a time for procreativity. Procreativity at the human reproductive level points to the process where the sperm fertilizes the egg and the fertilized egg develops into a new human. Yet physical sex is not the only channel through which procreative energy can be enacted. In I-Ching, the physical, emotional and spiritual union between an intimate couple is symbolic of a resonant union between Particle and Wave. In the entire I-Ching, there are three hexagrams that have to do with marital relationship, (#32 Duration, #31 Mutual Influence, and #53 Gradual Development), all of them with the Resonance Cycle set at the Re-Sourcing phase.
Can procreativity be a foundational paradigm for human collaboration, not just between a woman and a man, but between people who carry different pieces of a blueprint for a grand vision? I propose that the challenges we humans are facing today are demanding us to understand the paradigm of procreativity so that we can embody it through collaboration. I propose that the paradigm of procreativity can become a container through which we collectively facilitate the birthing of an emerging future for the planet.
Before we dive into the procreative aspect of Resonance Cycle, let us take a look at how the Cycle plays out through the physiology of a woman’s menstruation.