4. Nature's Patterns and Shapes
The essence of the Gaia principle is that all life is interconnected.
Nature is a conscious system in which all phenomena or happen-
ings affect everything in their environment — the micro-environ-
ment for a small incident, or the whole world in the case of a major
event. Life forms in Nature respond to each other by means of res-
onance; you might call it 'Gaia's glue.' When you say someone has
'good' or 'bad vibes,' you're talking the language of resonance; flow-
ers attracting insects by their colour and scent, our response to cer-
tain kinds of music, the practice of feng shui in the home; monks
chanting, bees humming.
Resonance is the language of communication and response. It is
how energetic information is transferred from one object to
another. It is also the mechanism of harmony. For example, the
organs and cells in the human body vibrate each at its specific fre-
quency, and in the healthy body they resonate in harmony like the
different instruments of an orchestra. Water, as the principal con-
stituent of and the bringer of life to all organisms, is the most pow-
erful carrier of resonance.Sound as resonance
Every musician knows that a tuning fork of the note C struck in a
concert hall will make any number of C tuning forks respond in the
same space. When you rub your finger round the rim of a wine
glass, its note will sound. If a singer finds this note, the glass will
resonate in sympathy, or even shatter if the vibration becomes too
strong.
Sound is probably the most ancient form of resonance in the
human experience. Jericho was reputedly destroyed by destructive
sound resonances. There are accounts in oral traditions of how early
societies, such as the ancient Egyptian, the Tibetan and the Inca
employed the use of sound to levitate enormous blocks of stone
used in their buildings. Music itself is more than a paradigm of
Nature's resonances. For millennia people have sung and played
music to their crops, their lovers and their children. Schauberger
- NATURE'S PATTERNS AND SHAPES