John McDaveymore
05-28-1999, 08:18 PM
Thankyou Diane and Dane, both. I can see where placing a certain kind or quality of stress on the brain could "coax" it into making quantum leaps to another qualitative level of awareness. <BR>This has been described by the Russian-born Belgian Ilya Prigogine in his Nobel Prize winning work in the field of theoretical chemistry. Working more specifically in the branch of thermodynamics, Prigogine discovered that order arises not in spite of entropy, but because of it. <BR>He found that in a 'closed system', or a closed arrangement of matter, over time the entropy that's naturally generated within this system will tend to break it down, becoming increasingly disordered. Left to itself, with no energy from the outside, any system moves increasingly toward chaos. However, the cornerstone to Pregogine's position is that because of this breaking down Life allows for a new 'becoming' to take place; in a word, it's the metaphoric phoenix rising from it's own ashes. Because of the pressures placed upon life in all of its many manifestations, an evolutionary process of increasing order can begin, proceeding to ever advancing stages of growth and development. Diane's description of Jim Oliver's notes to Healing Harmonies, says "sometimes the harmonics are deliberately constrained or stretched in order to coax the mind into a different pattern", might perhaps be directly related to this same discovery, only through the more subtle art form of music rather than its more earthly brother of science. Is this not also a kind of 'meeting of minds' from two polar opposite disciplines? A unity of opposites where both Art and Science can be seen to embrace one another once again in the <BR>wonderous Act of Creation? <BR> <BR>John McDaveymore :-) <BR> <BR>P.S. Dane, please tell me...what is "ramping"?-:)