Natural Magnetic Shapes, Cymatics, Electromagnetic Mysteries, and Dark Energies

Back in 1977, a British Professor named Eric Laithwaite, using a mixture of ferrofluid and salt water in a flat dish subjected to alternating magnetic fields, produced shapes commonly found in nature, shapes reminiscent of ferns, trees branches, and sunflowers.

Interestingly, there is a plant called the “compass plant,” Silphium lacinatum, which grows out in the Great Plains. It is said to be a member of the sunflower family, and its leaves are said to grow off its stem at right angles to each other, each vertical leaf pointing toward one of the four directions. Plants growing in relation to magnetic fields has a name. It’s magnetotropism. The “compass plant” is said to be one of the best examples of this phenomenon.

Another term you’re likely unfamiliar with is cymatics. Cymatics is said to be the study of tone on shape changes in both organic and inorganic matter. The 18th century German physicist Ernest Chladni, and in much more recent years one Dr. Hans Jenny, used sand, powders, and metal filings poured on steels discs and drumheads wherein incredible geometric forms were produced from playing various notes on a violin. In addition, forms resembling organic matter like the hexagonal cells of a honeycomb and the spiral of the primitive nautilus shell were created. Dr. Jenny also used an instrument called a tonoscope that produced visual representations of sound on a video screen. Using the most common Hindu mantra “om” a perfect circle filled with concentric triangles and squares was produced on the monitor. Cymatic researchers have stated that ancient Sanskrit is a perfect language as the patterns created by certain sounds seem to resemble the corresponding Sanskrit letters that represent those same sounds. Dr. Jenny noted that many of the patterns resembled ancient mandala designs drawn by religious adepts who chant certain sounds for hours.

A Dr. Peter Guy Manners found that by subjecting a malleable plastic to five frequencies together (particularly higher frequencies) he obtained a three-dimensional structure resembling the specific enfolding of embryonic structures. Dr. Manners is credited with being the first scientist to suggest that sound vibrations cause matter to take shape. Today cymatic researchers even believe that spider webs, snow flakes, and flowers owe their structures and designs to sound vibrations in nature.

A statement credited to the famous yogic teacher Parmahansananda Yogananda was that the cosmic vibration from which all is manifested from is from the sacred sound of “om.” Interestingly, it has been noted by astronomers that sound vibration from that initial Big Bang that started it all furthermore helped to shape the vast galaxy clusters and space in between. In addition, electromagnetic fields shape and mold our daily lives. Why hasn’t there been more (much more) replication and follow-up to the pioneering work of the late Dr. Harold Saxton Burr of Yale University? Using specially adapted voltmeters, Dr. Burr was able to take “electrodynamic” life field readings in both trees and humans. He detected various cycles, periodic fluctuations, which today we’d understand in terms of the newly emerged science of biorhythms.

Dr. Leonard J. Ravitz, Jr., a former colleague of Dr. Burr’s, described in an exclusive interview with me (Alternate Perceptions, #48, Fall 1999) these remarkable studies from an insider’s perspective. He recalled how for some thirty years, Dr. Burr took continuous readings from trees he had wired up with electrodes in New Haven and Lyme, Connecticut. Numerous and incredible “electromagnetic cycles” were established, with readings that correlated with the phases of the new and full moon where “the voltages would undergo profound changes in all the trees.” Dr. Ravitz also went on to explain that there were also “seasonal changes,” as well as readings where the “tree cycles corresponded to the sunspot cycles.”

While at Yale and studying hypnosis under the renowned hypnotist Milton Erickson, Dr. Ravitz came to make another interesting discovery himself. “It seemed to me that hypnosis was far more than a psychologic event in terms of things Erickson could do with it,” Dr. Ravitz explained. “Sure enough, on April 24, 1948, we got the first electromagnetic field correlates of hypnosis. Then 1949 to ‘50, I spent the year working out these techniques on a continuous recorder in Burr’s laboratories, and when we measured friends of mine, in the undergraduate and graduate schools of Yale, low and behold, we discovered that they had virtually the same cycles as the trees! We had weekly - particularly lunar cycles, seasonal, semi-annual and annual cycles, although we couldn’t hook these people up to electrodes for thirty years to get the same things.”

Later Dr. Ravitz also measured the voltages of schizophrenic patients (45 chronic schizophrenics and 30 control) in a Veterans hospital in North Chicago, as well as those of three parakeets, and an elm tree a thousand miles east in New Haven, Conn. Dr. Ravitz noted: “All of these different forms of life showed the same or similar periodic movements, going up and down about the same time, and this was carried over a late winter period and early spring time, when the voltages begin to decrease in positivity and increase in negativity.”

“And it must be remembered too,” Dr. Ravitz added, “That in Burr and Langman’s experiments on cancer, they detected electrometric signs of cancer in the female genital, urinary tract before any clinical signs or pathologic changes were evident.”

So, after all of these highly promising laboratory studies and results conducted by highly qualified scientists, why hasn’t this work been further carried out? Why has it remained such a neglected area? On this, Dr. Ravitz likes to quote a certain Will Russell who stated: “Resistance to new ideas increases by the square of its importance.” As to a future solution, Dr. Ravitz offered up a quote from Max Planck that went: “New scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Hopefully there won’t be a great dying out of scientists anytime soon. New and exciting scientific discoveries are being made daily, and hopefully a larger percentage of scientists (certainly many have died out since Dr. Burr’s time) are increasingly becoming accustomed to making discoveries and reporting findings that contradict previously established notions. Just a few days ago, it was reported that the first scientific measurement of the speed of gravity was established for the first time (seems it propagates through space equal to the speed of light), while back in October astronomers reported how they observed a star zip around a presumed black hole that sits at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The scientists are puzzled by the black hole’s behavior, and speculate that there may be two instead of just one! Meanwhile, scientists continue to struggle with understanding their observations of what they call the effects of “dark matter” and a destructive force said to be more powerful than gravity, called “dark energy.” The latest scientific estimate is that the universe is made up of 65 percent “dark energy”, 30 percent is unseen “dark matter,” leaving a mere five (5) percent for what we define as normal matter and energy!

Are we the exception instead of the norm? Isn’t the uncertainty principle of science the most logical path for the reasonable mind to often trod upon in these confusing times of complex cosmic and microcosm-ic revelations?