Chapter 16 - Concerning Vibrations

Vibration is Life. Vibration is motion. All motion is vibration. All motion is Life. You expand your chest with an inhalation of air; you contract your muscles and exhale. This is vibration. Your heart “beats.” This, too, is vibration.

Every tiny cell in your body is “beating,” or vibrating, just as your heart and lungs do. When your chest expands you take in fresh air, which goes not only into your lungs, but into all parts of your body. The air blows like a fresh breeze around the countless millions of cells which go to make up your body. These little cells in their turn expand and take in the air. Then the cells contract and force out the air, and your lungs, too, contract, and force the air clear out of your body.

Now this air which is thus vibrated through your body serves to clean it. The decaying particles of your body cells are thrown off and carried out in the streams of air which are vibrated through your body. If it were not for this vibration of your body, which keeps the air flowing through, your body would soon become clogged with dead matter.

The nerves and arteries in your body are constantly contracting and expanding, contracting and expanding, to move along the blood, which carries food supply to the cells and bears away their sewage in just the same way that the air is carried to and from the cells.

It is by constantly vibrating -- contracting and expanding -- that your stomach and bowels digest food.

It is by vibration of the cells of tree and plant that the sap flows through and feeds the tree.

Even a stone is composed of tiny cells which breathe, just as the cells of your body, and just as your body as a whole does.

Every individual, be it cell, plant, animal or man, lives by vibrating; by expanding and contracting to take in the new and force out the old matter. Every mind, too, lives by vibrating -- by alternately expanding to receive new ideas and contracting to get rid of the old.

Then there is another sort of vibration by which one individual communicates with another. Imagine to yourself that the ether is made up of infinitely small elastic balls. If you strike any one of those tiny balls it will strike those next to it and rebound, and those hit will strike the next, and so on the blow will travel from one tiny ball to the next, clear to the edge of creation -- if you can imagine such a place. The blow you strike sets all the little elastic balls to vibrating, or moving back and forth.

Now if I stand away out in space and I feel the little elastic balls vibrate against me I know it means Something. By experience I learn what each kind of movement means. If you clap your hands together the vibrations of those tiny elastic balls strike my ear and I say, “I hear some one clapping hands.” If I face your way the vibrations strike my eyes and I say, "I see some one clapping hands." In any case your motion caused the ether to vibrate and I felt the vibrations.

If I had no ears or eyes I could not feel the vibrations, but they would be there just the same.

Every movement made sets the ether to vibrating to its particular pitch; and wherever there are eyes or ears the vibrations are recorded. When you talk it sets the ether going just the same whether there are ears to hear or not.

And when you keep perfectly quiet and think you set the ether going, too. Your brain sets vibrations going, just as your tongue does. There are people who can hear thoughts, just as you hear another's speech. In due time we shall all hear thoughts -- we are all growing mental ears.

Thoughts are higher vibrations than spoken words; and they “carry” farther. You know a deep, growly bass voice makes a great noise when you are close to it, but a shrill treble call can be heard much farther than the growly bass. The high voice makes short, sharp, far-reaching vibrations.

Now thoughts make infinitely shorter, sharper and farther-reaching vibrations than the voice can; and thought vibrations carry farther and far more quickly. And wherever there is another thinker ready to hear, the thoughts are recorded.

Many times we hear the thoughts of other people and mistake them for our own; for everybody has at least a little mental hearing.

When you speak clearly and distinctly your voice carries much farther than if you speak hurriedly and carelessly; and other people can more readily understand what you say. If you mumble your thoughts or your words the etheric vibrations carry mumbled meanings.

As people learn to think distinctly their thoughts carry farther and find more listeners.

In course of time and with due practice, we shall easily think so that people on the other side of the earth can hear us. Not only that, but we shall think so clearly and high that the inhabitants of Mars and Venus and the sun, too, shall easily hear us.

I shouldn’t wonder if what we call sun rays are really the thought vibrations of the sun’s inhabitants. What if we receive and respond to their thoughts and think them our own!