As I wrote in the first post of this series (Energy as the Structure and Fabric of the Universe), the evolution of consciousness and its journey through physicality has given us the possibility to develop and awaken different senses and schemas of perception. With these, and along with other processes and aspects of consciousness, we are able to perceive, experience, and consciously interact with different segments of what we call reality.

In subsequent posts we explored some of the ways in which our conditioning, through experience and through life in a social context, influences what and how we are able to perceive. In part, we make new perceptions match with old perceptions in terms of what we’ve learned, our expectations, and the collective experiences and expectations of our culture and those around. The Toltecs say that tending to all this, we are not really perceiving what is “out there”, instead, we are taking part in different sets of dreams – some collective, some individual; all interrelated.

In this post, we’ll take a different approach into considering other ways in which our perceptions and ideas of the “real world” may be challenged. I will be drawing on spectroscopy, electromagnetic field studies, and psychology of perception, as well as on Rosicrucian philosophy and other schools of mysticism. This post is just a very brief (and perhaps problematic) overview of some of the points I find interesting in these broad fields of inquiry. The purpose is not to exhaust all possibilities in detailed depth, but rather to point out some similarities and to set a ground work for posts to come (and for some of the places you can end up in when looking around this site). Before going there though, it’s important to reconsider one of the premises we started with: envisioning reality as the fluid manifestation of energy, in different vibrations and bands of frequencies. Most of us are able to come into contact, via our physical, inner, and higher senses, with different segments or bands of frequencies of the broad spectrum of reality/consciousness we are in. Lets look at which senses tap into what, using vibratory octaves as described by Isabelle Padovani in "El Sendero de los Angeles" and mapping these octaves to findings from other schools of thought.

Touch

According to psychophysicists, spectroscopists, other modern scientists, and yes, mystics and students of holistic sciences, our skin as a sensory organ (endowed with the sense of touch) is usually capable of feeling energy/matter vibrating within the first three octaves, at 2, 4, and 8 cycles per second. Water disintegrates in the fifteenth octave, at 42800 vibrations per second. Matter/energy beyond this octave does not regularly stimulate the skin in terms of touch and texture, yet the stimuli can take more of an auditory or olfactory nature, depending on the case. Our skin is also sensitive to temperature, and I'll touch briefly on this further down.

Audition

Our ears, endowed with the faculty to perceive sound, are usually sensitive to frequencies from the fourth to the twentieth octave, which correspond, respectively, to 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 32768, and 1048576 vibrations per second. Frequencies from the twenty-fifth to thirty-fifth octaves (or of 33554432 and 34359738368 vibrations per second) move towards the realm of ultrasound, and escape the conscious hearing capabilities of most humans. Other animal species (like cats and dogs) feel right at home listening in on some of these frequencies.

Taste and Smell

It’s interesting to note that our senses of smell and taste usually lie within the seventeenth octave, somehow nested within the spectrum of what we can hear. Straight out, this questions any conception of linearity that we might want to assume while describing reality as a spectrum of frequencies and our experiences with it. Touch and smell are sensitive to energy/matter vibrating at (or) around 131072 cycles per second – they map onto very similar sets of frequencies when studied from this point of view, and as some gourmet chefs may argue, 70% of taste is actually smell. Taste buds on our tongues can usually make general differentiations (salty, sweet, sour, bitter, etc), yet the subtle variations we perceive as taste are intermingled with smell. It’s interesting to look at how different species in our animal kingdom have developed different ways of interacting with the bands of frequencies that we distinguish as touch, smell, and taste. Crabs can actually taste by grabbing things with their claws, flies can taste with their feet, and many aquatic animals actually don’t distinguish between smell and taste as we understand them. In some cases, we can also tell if something is spicy-hot by rubbing it on our skin.

A Big Gap in our Perception Capabilities

Shortly after the twentieth octave (where most of our ears cease to perceive sound) and right before the forty-ninth octave (where most of our eyes begin to pick up reddish colors) comes a broad range of frequencies that most humans are blind and deaf to. These include different types of radio waves, VHF, UHF, and cell phone signals. It’s interesting to note that these waves are around us most of the time, and we can “tune in” to them with the use of devices capable of “perceiving” them. These devices (radios, tv’s, cell phones) can zoom in at specific parts of this spectrum with the use of dials – and we can access “stations” and “channels”, or “send and receive calls”. Our denser and more perceptible thoughts are also close to these ranges, even though many may come from subtler octaves. The Rosicrucians speak of the thirty-sixth to forty-fifth octaves as the range where many of the more usual and lower astral phenomena and projections occur. (We can perhaps discuss this in another post dealing with alchemy and materialization.)

Close along and overlapping a bit comes infrared, occupying from the fortieth to the forty-eighth octave (that is, starting at 1099511627776 and going up to 281474979710656 vibrations per second). This band of vibrations also escapes what most humans have been trained to see with their physical eyes. Yet, parts of the infrared spectrum we can feel as heat, and others we can see depending on the circumstances.

Vision and Colors

The light (and the colors) that most contemporary humans more readily see usually occupies the forty-ninth and fiftieth octaves. The forty-ninth octave starts at 562949953421312 vibrations per second, and begins with red at the bottom of the spectrum. These light waves are relatively long, slow, and the easiest to see. Then, to name a few, come orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, and, finally violet, which tops off at 1125899906842624 vibrations per second. When looking at the color spectrum, it is interesting to note that (unlike the illustration) there are no clear-cut boundaries between one color and the next.

We can find a great variety of colors by zooming in at the “mixture” in between the “primary” tones that we are more accustomed to seeing, and by looking below and beyond the color band.

It is also interesting to note that vision and the ability to perceive colors operates in sometimes starkly different ways from one animal phylum, class, and/or order to the next. Considering just humans, it's interesting to note that our visual capabilities change over time, both in terms of the evolution of our species, in terms of the evolution of single individuals, and in terms of the types of training our specific cultural medium provides for our senses. Reviewing ancient literature and the way scenery is described can perhaps hint at these changes. The Odyssey and the Iliad, for example, speak of the Mediterranean as a wine-dark sea. Perhaps it was darker and more reddish back then, or the author(s?) chose to describe it this way for metaphorical purposes (although the metaphor gets old pretty soon as it’s the only one used to describe the color of the sea, and it spans both stories!). On similar and perhaps more convincing notes, Aristotle straightforwardly states that the rainbow has only three colors: red, yellow, and green.

Light in the ranges of blue, violet and indigo has short wavelengths and moves rapidly, and for us, seeing colors in this spectrum of light may require a more focused use of attention and intention. Next time you see a rainbow, or light going through a prism, try looking at the colors that appear on the upper and lower edges. Take a little break from your routine and play with your vision. How far can you see?


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