Re-Centering

Same Shape Resonance

We’re in a time when, despite the resistance of mechanistic, materialistic science, new models of reality are cropping up in different fields that insist on the recognition of phenomenon that doesn’t fit the current machine model. Multiple instances of telepathy often occur between non-speaking autistic people and their mothers, the many Near Death Experiences where consciousness watches as a medical team works on the flat-lined body, the feeling of someone looking at you, or how your dog knows you’re on the way home are all phenomenon without explanation by current science. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake wrote a book about each of the last two and since his early work, I’ve been fascinated with his idea of memory not being stored in our head. The active neuronal circuit that accompanies a particular memory could also be the way the brain tunes in to a memory that exists in a larger field of mind. The circuit that tries to remember would take the same shape as the experience that encoded it so would resonate with the matching shape to tune it in, a possible explanation. Like the pulses that create frequency and amplitude in time, the ever present here contains information that resonates in shape. In her book, The Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger gives many examples of how keenly some plants are attuned to shapes of leaves. Ultimately resonating with any frequency is resonating to the same shape wave. Sheldrake suggests every species has a field of their shape that contributes to the development of new members. Fields that are encoded by shape would open lines of influence that could be affecting us more than we know. We’re already aware of how we resonate with another’s posture and know something of how they feel thanks to our mirror neurons, our body’s understanding of what it feels like in that shape. Human psychological complexity is a constellation of relationships that requires a work of art to express it through form. Art is a composition of sensations that resonates with the internal dynamic in the human structure of feeling. As philosopher Susanne Langer wrote, “Art looks like feelings feel”. How a composition of visual form is organized is a language encoded during our non-verbal infancy as we come to understand gravity and what to expect of the surroundings we navigate. This is the practical meaning of what we see. The deep structure of balance and all the metaphors extending from it reach beyond surface information to a humanness that sustains art through history. Though more sophisticated than a tuning fork or the shape of leaves, the resonance with a work of art is a connection to the human drama even at its most subtle.