I think I’ve mentioned this before – I love The Zennist. If you have never heard of him – he is a blogger, he blogs about Buddhism and related subjects and he is awesome! Not everyone can appreciate the wisdom he shares but those who can understand are surely in love with what he writes.
Anyways, he recently explained the science of meditation – which I thought was so impossible to do but he did it! What a genius. He uses easy analogy to explain it.
Here is the link to the original post.
I explained to Karl that transverse waves were like ocean waves consisting of up and down motions, whereas longitudinal waves are more like sound waves although this is not quite accurate insofar as most illustrations of sound waves actually show transverse waves. Perhaps a better example is a huge block of steel. If you tap on it with a hammer the wave created is more like a longitudinal wave. It goes with the steel medium—not up and down like a water wave does which is occurring at right angles to the body of water (i.e., up and down).
Read the Original Post →
A New Analogy
Thought his way of explaining is wonderfully understandable but some won’t get what he is saying. For those some here is an easier version:
We live in a vibrational world. Our senses are vibrational interpreters, what you see is vibrational interpretation, what you hear is vibrational interpretation. Vibrations are like waves – most of what we see in this world are waves with nature of going up and down.
Like sea water, or water in tub – up and down. Their direction is perpendicular to that of medium (read: source). Even most of our thoughts are such.
Meditation is simply about tuning into waves that are longitudinal – that is they travel in the direction of medium. Imagine you are in water, now water is flowing in a direction, that flowing of water is seen in physics almost as waves. That flow is longitudinal – it’s about going with those waves and thinking in those waves.
I hope that helped.
Man, what an apt analogy it is. It fills the heart of meditator with joy to see that one can explain the vast world of non-physical in physical language. Brillant!
Read the Original Post →
Group Discussion
After you’ve read the original article, do come back and discuss what you can understand or if you have any questions to ask or insights to share. Don’t feel stupid if you have questions or you didn’t understand it all together – you’ve question that means you are intelligent enough to understand it.
Photo Credit:go with the flow… by muha…, on Flickr
