Riding Waves

An essay by Tame Bear for "TameBear Radio", Friday September 29, 2006.

This is a trascript of the podcast from "TameBear Radio" titled "Riding Waves".

They say history repeats itself, and lately I've been considering the ways that repetition in all things is a lot like ripples on water, spreading out from a center point and gradually changing, and broadening, and fading out as it goes. History repeats itself, but never in exactly the same way. Consider for instance the human genocides of the past 100 years: the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915, the Nazi holocaust of Jews in the mid 1940s, the Cambodian extermination under the Khmer Rouge in the mid-to-late 1970s, and the current wave of government-sanctioned genocide ongoing in the Darfur region of Sudan in northern Africa. Horrific atrocities, riding a repeating wave of roughly 31 years. If this wave repeats yet again, we may be led to expect some new variation on genocide beginning on or about the year 2035.

We can see any number of repeating waves in history, over any range of time we might choose. Suppose we take for instance the Louis & Clark Expedition. Completed in 1806, this was the first euroamerican trek across our continent. Say we make that an arbitrary starting point. Just about 50 years later we have the Pony Express, in 1851, when postal mail begins to make regular transits coast to coast; ten years later the first transcontinental telegraph is sent, in 1861, marking the point at which transmission wires traverse the continent. By 1871 the first transcontinental railroad service is underway on rails running from New York to San Francisco.

The 1880s saw the development and commercialization of gasoline powered automobiles; and in 1911 A.L. Westgard made the first transcontinental automobile journey in search of the early routes for coast-to-coast highways. Also in 1911, the first transcontinental air flight was accomplished by Calbraith Rogers. The first telephone signals reached coast to coast in 1914 and by the early 1920s continental telephone service, though expensive, was becoming commonplace. At about the same time "wireless telegraph" -- which soon became known as radio -- was becoming commercially viable. By the end of the 1920s Philo Farnsworth was demonstrating early black and white television; and RCA showed the first color TV system in 1930. The first Technicolor movies were shown in movie theaters in 1930, and the first vinyl long-play record was released by RCA in 1931.

These historic events trace out a wave of repeated continental crossings, marking various stages in the development of transport and communications, a cyclical wave that repeats about every 8 to 10 years, and which we can trace all the back to Louis and Clark.

Of course anyone can do this -- you just pick an arbitrary theme and selectively choose a starting point and a series of events, and you begin to see some repeating pattern that you can extrapolate out.

Here's another brief example, on the theme of gold: The California Gold Rush of 1848-49; TheYukon Gold Rush 1898-1999; the establishment of an international "gold standard" in the late 19-40s, which eventually led to monetary exchange freed from the absolute value of gold; and in 1996, about a 150 years after the California Gold Rush, we find a company named "e-gold" which launched a digital gold standard in an attempt to re-create an alternative global monetary standard. These events trace out a wave running about 50 years in frequency. The next gold-related event we'd want to look for will occur some time in the late 2040s.

Now consider how waves may stretch out as their ripples spread. On the theme of economic collapes, we have the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression of 1929; and the economic "staglfation" and malaise of the early 1980s. Here is a wave that is stretching longer as it goes -- from 36 years, to 51 years, and if we extrapolate this expanding wave out to the future then the next major economic collapse seem likely 66 years out, in the year 2046, or thereabouts.

In my own lifetime, I have seen the invention of the personal computer in the late 1970s, the invention of computer networking in the late 1980s, and the emergence of a global data communications network -- the "Internet" -- in the late 1990s. Look for a related repeating wave of this sequence in the closing years of this decade, round about 2009; what might that be?

We've seen waves predicted and maintained reliably by industry over spans of many years. Ever heard of the business cycle? Or "Moore's Law"? That's the predictable doubling of computer processor power about every 18 months.

Do you follow the stock market? Now here's a repeating wave we've been watching for many decades. Over the short term there are many ups and downs among individual stocks and the aggregate indexes over time. The more technical investors calculate the arcs and crests and troughs and measure the distances to predict the next rise and fall, and stack their buys and sells accordingly.

In science we mark moments of revolutionary revision in our understanding of the world. In politics we vasscilate between war and peacetime, war and peacetime. In economic affairs we swing wildly from boom to bust and back again. And in our own personal lives, waves of repetition are both our bane and our glory. Victims of habit, we repeat our own personal histories over and over again in varying colors and degrees of change. Mary Lamberton Becker wrote "We grow neither better nor worse as we get old; but more like ourselves." Our lives are ripples of change in the cosmos, spreading out into our local universe, affecting everything we touch and repeating our patterns of existance over and over until we expire on a far distant shore.

Repeating waves can be seen pretty much wherever we look. Take the weather for example. In some parts of the world, a long dry spell is eventually followed by monsoon, then dry, then monsoon. Here closer to home in my own part of the country, in northern Indiana, we'll get three or four days of sunny, followed by three or four days of cloudy, etc. cycle after cycle. The popular Almanacs calculate it out for years ahead, and farmers plant and harvest their crops by it.

Some of the wave-like cycles we experience are so common-place in our lives as to be almost trivial, because we can take them so for granted. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, there's an example. Work, play. Night, day. Weekday, weekend, over and over again, much the same, but with some slight variation each time around. And if the water becomes too placid, we just toss in a vacation to stir things up again.

Think of tree rings; they mark the cyclical wave of growing seasons in a regular annual pattern, with some variation each year based on temperature and amount of rainfall. This annual cycle, which we can see marked in tree rings, points to the traversal of our planet around the sun.

We typically think of the annual course of Earth as a circle, or pretty nearly a circle. But no, it is most definitely a wave! Because you see the arms of our Milky Way galaxy are spreading out over time, and all the galaxies in our local universe are moving rapidly away from each other. So if we pinpoint our Sun and our Earth in the spreading arm of the Milky Way, it traces out an undulating wave across a vast stretch of space. The annual transit of the Earth around the Sun is not a circle -- it's a wave! On this magnificent scale, all the events of global history, and our own bodies and actions in history, are ripples of spreading waves moving outwards upon the cosmos.

Ok, now would be a good point in this podcast to warn you that we are about to take a great leap into conjectural space. But before we do, let's take a brief music break. And during this short time, I'll give you something to think on. The famous Indy race car driver Mario Andretti at one time said, "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough", and so my question for you to ponder is this: Do you feel that you are in complete control of your life?

Most of us will admit that we are not entirely in control of our lives. There are many things that happen in our lives, outside forces acting on us, accidents or other unexpected events thwarting our plans, things going wrong, things not coming out the way we expected. And in spite of past experience, these sorts of things seem to happen again and again. You might say they seem to happen in waves, though never very predicably, otherwise we'd just plan around them. I'm sure that to some extent we already do, when we anticipate what might go wrong, and we make contingencies. Nevertheless, other people and circumstances insist on intervening in ways we did not anticipate, and suddenly we are no longer in control. So, as a corollary to what Mario Andretti suggests about speed, maybe we're all actually going fast enough.

My own contention is that we are in fact going absolutely as fast as is physically possible.

In previous podcasts I have talked about how we and everything around us is made of nothing more substantial than light itself, vast collectives and adhesions of photons traveling across unimaginable tracts of space-time. We can view our corporeal bodies as being built up out of these minute photonic energy packets, countless trillions of them -- photons of every possible wavelength and freqency, performing a quantum foam dance of existance as they change state -- now particle, now wave, and back again. As particles they are the most fundamental elements of our bodily existance, and as waves they are the elusive essence of our conscious awareness.

We are, at our core, the merest stuff of substance and dream.

This mere photonic veil of shimmering subatomic particles racing along through space... the quarks, neutrinos, protons and electrons that make up our atomic structure, the building blocks that form our molecules, carbon chains and rings, the amino acids and folded proteins, the nerves, sinew, bone and muscle that have cooperated in a fabulous dance of evolutionary invention to form our bodies and ignite living animal consciousness within us. Miraculously made though we are, still our lives are but the faintest ripples on the sea.

We look at each other and we see solid bodies standing here... or so it seems. What we perceive of ourselves is a fiction, appearing to be far more solid and substantial in scale than what truly exists. We, each one of us, are the merest of stuff. Our perceiving thinking minds are an effect of countless billions of energetic waves moving through space, interferring and reflecting and reacting within us. Our eyes and our brains deceive us, interpreting waves of light reflected off light and perceiving substance where precious little substance actually exists.

To the same degree that we appear to be solid embodied form, so we also are pure waves of energy emanating in sync across vast sweeps of space. And everything else we see around us, everything visible, in our local neighborhood and way beyond, clear out to the farthest galaxies we can see, is traveling right along with us, a unified wavefront of light spanning the vastness of space for as far as as the mind can possibly glimpse.

Everything we are, and everything we do, and all the ways we impact our sphere of influence and partipate in the repetitive march of history, is a matter of waves emmanating through space. The science-fiction author Greg Bear put it this way: "What is matter, after all, but a standing-wave of information in the vacuum?" And if it is true that everything is made of light, then it is quite probable that one effect of this reality is that we experience a wave-like repetition of events, in our own lives and in our corporate history. We live our lives in repeating waves of experience, never quite the same from one crest to the next, but ever-repeating permutations as the uncountable terabillions of photon corpuscules that compose our existence from one moment to the next resonate in sympathetic frequencies with all the other people and objects and things in the world around us.

Allow me to suggest that the quality of our lives is directly related to how well we ride those waves.

If you caught it earlier, I suggested that we are, at our core, the merest stuff of substance and dream. When I refer to our substance, I am talking about the physical particle nature of our makeup, what we are composed of. And when I refer to dream, or for that matter to thought, or sensory perception, all that stuff that we think of as going on in our mind, I am talking about the energetic wave nature of our makeup. We can think of ourselves as made of particles, or made of waves... but utimately we are both particles and waves at the same time. And in a very real sense, our thoughts and perceptions and dreams are one-and-the-same physical particle stuff that we are made of.

I have used this podcast to focus attention on the wave-like aspects of our existance. That is not to deny the physical, particulate nature of the world; however we tend to dwell much more on the physical material nature of things, to the neglect of other aspects that are just as real.

This brings me nearly to the end of this week's essay, but before I go I'd like to pose two more questions for you to ponder. The first is this: If we and everything we see in the unverse is light, then where in the Universe is God? And the second question is somewhat related: If our perceptions and thoughts and dreams are the very same stuff as our physical composition, how might controlling our thinking affect ourselves, our lives, and the rest of the world around us?

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If you wish to comment on this essay, you can email "tamebear@wisdomroad.com".

Last update: 2/22/08; 2:02:07 PM.