Invisible Threads are the Strongest Ties
The title of this article, “Invisible Threads are the Strongest Ties” is a quote by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It may be one of his lesser known quotes but this quote resonates with me.
I frequently discuss how the waves in our environment and the waves produced by us, affect all our relationships and our health. If you were born with all five senses intact, you still likely rely most heavily on your visual sense to navigate and experience your world. It is well documented that people born without one or more of their senses have a heightened sensitivity in the other senses. Often people who are visually impaired have exquisite hearing or sense of smell or touch. If I were to put in front of you a piece of dark chocolate and ask you to pick out all the things you can taste, you would likely taste with your eyes closed. We subconsciously adjust our senses as required regularly throughout our day.
When I really want to hear the notes played by Coleman Hawkins on the sax, I close my eyes and focus my attention for auditory input. Sound waves of course are invisible threads that are strong ties. While we cannot see sound waves we can hear them and we can feel them. If you have ever been at a concert you may have experienced the low, bass notes from the speakers literally crashing against your body. The power of invisible sound waves should not be taken lightly. In medicine sound waves are used regularly to destroy gall stones or used to create images of a fetus on an ultrasound. Sound waves have been shown to be effective at healing bones. Ask any parent and they will tell you that they can easily recognize the cry of their own child in a sea of children. A developing fetus is completely tuned into sound vibrations and immediately recognizes the familiar sound of mom or dad when they are born.
Sound waves are far from the only invisible threads (waves) that tie us together. Our ears have developed to pick up only certain frequencies of waves and similarly, our eyes are tuned into only a small range of the frequencies of light. We tend to think that our visual experience of light as that which all animals must see but this is not the case. Bumblebees for example see ultraviolet light – not the full rainbow of colors that sighted humans detect. Snakes have the ability to see like we do but have the added ability to create an infrared image. Humans of course cannot see much of the infrared or ultraviolet range but that doesn’t mean it is not there. In fact, if we had the ability to tune our eyes to much lower frequencies (lower than infrared) we might see that the world is very different from what we believed. We might see a complex and dense web of different waves like a bouncing spider’s web all around us. If we could see this web we would notice that some object produce waves that bounce at different rates. Imagine the heat waves coming off a hot road. We might notice that some people and some objects produce waves of different frequencies than our own. We could look at our own hand and see the waves emanating from it. This is happening all the time – we just can’t see it.
Humans actually produce waves of all different frequencies. We produce ultraviolet and infrared and we also produce extremely low frequency radio waves. Most of the radio waves are produced by the heart and the brain. You know these exist because we can measure them as brain waves and the waves of our heart muscle contracting on an EKG. So if we produce all these different waves that we cannot see, how can they tie us together? We all produce waves at different rates. There is a phenomenon in physics called constructive interference which causes an increase in energy when waves of similar frequencies come together. You have certainly felt this. You have stood beside somebody and felt a connection. With training we can learn to become more sensitive to these connections. We won’t be training our eyes but rather sensing other less obvious changes in ourselves when we are around somebody who produces waves which are similar to our own.
By learning to develop our other senses such as intuition and resonance and stress response we can learn to navigate the invisible world and start to make sense of how these invisible waves affect us. When we learn to master the waves of life, we learn that, as Nietzsche said, “Invisible Threads are the Strongest Ties.”
Brett
