The Law of Resonance

THE LAW OF RESONANCE

We all know from physics the concept of resonance (from the Latin resonare, to resound). A tuning fork will vibrate to a note only if the note corresponds to the frequency of the fork. If this is not the case then, as far as the tuning fork is concerned, the note is not there since the fork cannot pick it up. A radio receiver which is tuned to medium wave will, because of its resonance, pick up only medium-wave programs. It cannot receive short-wave and long-wave programs and therefore they do not belong to its “world-picture”. Similarly a human being, in order to perceive something, needs to have some corresponding vibration in himself, and his resonance makes the perception possible. Goethe expressed it this way: “If the eye were not sun-like it could never glimpse the sun; if God's own power were not present within us, how could we be stirred by the divine?”

This statement of Goethe's has already taken the law of resonance out of the purely physical plane and transferred it analogically to the sphere that interests us here. Any human being can only reach those parts of reality with which he can resonate. This applies not only to the realm of purely sensual perception, but also to the perception of reality in general. Everything that lies outside our capacity to resonate cannot be perceived by us and therefore does not exist for us. This is why each person believes that he or she knows what reality is and that no other kind of reality exists. Often when we read a book we believe we understand it fully, even though we can only assimilate from what we read that which is in resonance with our level of awareness at that time. This becomes most obvious when we read certain books after a lapse of some years. Our consciousness has become enlarged during the interval and therefore we are able to understand the book “even better”.

All these examples are to some extent familiar and understandable to everyone, and will therefore serve to illuminate the principle that we wish to apply to human fate in general. We can only make contact with those people, ideas and situations with which we feel a resonance or, as we shall call it in future, an affinity. No manifestation can come about without the corresponding affinity. If a person finds himself involved in a quarrel or brawl, this never happens by chance but always because of the person's own affinity with the events. He bears responsibility for whatever consequences he may suffer from the brawl, even if he believes himself to have been accidentally involved as a totally innocent party. Without the appropriate affinity he would never have become involved. If someone is run over in the street, it may be true that legally speaking the driver was to blame, but this does not alter the fact that the person who was run over must in some way have been ready for this event, otherwise it would not have been able to enter his field of experience.