Spanda: LeGuin, Woolf and the Wave in the Mind

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention, beneath words, there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.

– Ursula K. LeGuin ¹

For 35 years I’ve practised a form of meditation, best-known in the West as Transcendental Meditation. Popularised from the 1960s onwards by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, its best known practitioner today may be the filmmaker David Lynch, who credits this practice with inspiring his work. It originated in medieval Kashmir. For the teachers of Kashmir Shaivism, a monist tradition centred on worship of Shiva, sound or vibration (spanda) was the creative principle of the universe.

This sound has four forms. What we hear or speak as words from the lips is merely the grossest form, vaikhari. Underlying the words are the thoughts from which they emerge, which manifests in the madhyama, located in the space between heart and mouth. Still more subtle is the pashyanti, the desire underlying thoughts, centred in the heart (from which we get our word ‘passion’). Finally, the causal form of sound is centred in the belly, the paraa.

We speak a word in order to express something, a thought; a thought comes from a desire; and a desire rises out of an impersonal or collective order of reality. By analogy, physical objects arise out of thoughts in the mind of Shiva, and the thoughts from his desires, and the desires from a deeper hyper-reality that only he knows. We might compare this metaphysics to quantum physics. Particles in quantum physics are like words, crystallised out of subtler possibilities or probabilities that interact with each other before their expression, just as different thoughts and intentions play in our minds before we speak.

I’m aware of the danger inherent in a non specialist finding in quantum physics some mystical insight that they project onto it. And yet this was how many of the founders of the discipline saw it, too. Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Carl Jung to develop a psychology of physics. Pauli, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th Century, was also known among his fellow scientists for the ‘Pauli Effect’, in which lab machinery would malfunction or break in his presence.

The meditation involves repetition in the mind of a single syllable. The meditator establishes the repetition and then lets go of it, so that it repeats by itself. It may slow down or stop, and the meditator then listens, in a state of emotional acceptance of the sound. This is the pashyanti stage, and beyond that it goes into realms of extreme weirdness that I cannot describe. In the past 15 years I practice only occasionally, but the sessions get longer. The experience is so compelling that I cannot bring myself to stop before an hour, or even longer.

I think that this relationship between words, meanings, intentions and rhythms is what Ursula LeGuin was speaking of in the passage quoted above. She commented on this passage, ‘That is something that I learned from Virginia Woolf, who talks about it most wonderfully in a letter to her friend Vita. Style, she says, is rhythm—the “wave in the mind”—the wave, the rhythm is there before the words, and brings the words to fit it.’

LeGuin also speaks of writing as an embodied practice: ‘I realized that a lot of people who write about writing don’t seem to hear it, don’t listen to it, their perception is more theoretical and intellectual. But if it’s happening in your body, if you are hearing what you write, then you can listen for the right cadence, which will help the sentence run clear.’ From this perspective, we can see what separates the artist from an ordinary writer: the artist is hearing and feeling the words in the body, and indeed the rhythms that underlie word, thought, imagination and emotion. By analogy with Kashmir Shaivite metaphysics, this is why we call a true artist a creator. In the creative vibration or rhythm, “the wave in the mind”, we are flowing with the creative energy of the cosmos.

Why should this matter in the project of therapy? If matter is a crystallised form of quantum probability waves, then also bodies, with their illnesses, are crystallised forms of the quantum processes of thought, feeling and the vibrational “wave in the mind”. This may sound like a New Age concept: we create our own reality. And perhaps it is: and the only thing that may be wrong with the New Age way of seeing things is that it seeks to create a reality dictated by the thoughts of the waking mind, rather than by flowing with the fundamental underlying rhythm spoken of by Woolf and LeGuin. Perhaps in surrendering to that rhythm, rather than dictating to it, we find our way to health and harmonous being.

¹ Quoted in https://www.vqronline.org/interviews-articles/2018/03/imaginative-reality-ursula-k-le-guin