The model of the tuning bowls

  Have you already had the experience where you find someone very likeable without knowing anything about them and without even having spoken to them? As you get to know this person later you often find that you have many things in common. In particular you will normally find that he has similar objectives in his life. Or, since we often prefer to speak about experiences, you have both had similar experiences in your lives. Pure chance – or perhaps more likely not? Similar life experiences mainly point – according to everything we have previously discussed – to the fact that we are working on similar development steps. Since we do not develop by ourselves this finally however indicates similar objectives for our lives.

Our own objectives are difficult to hide since in fact we constantly «radiate» our objectives all the time. In reverse we frequently feel the objectives of other people without even knowing anything about that person and without having spoken to them.

To help to introduce the model let us consider the following example, which may be well-known from our schooldays: We take two tuning bowls which make the same sound. One is put somewhere in a corner of the room, the other is then made to sound by hitting it. Now the tuning bowl which is sounding is touched so that it cannot vibrate any more. We then find with surprise that the other tuning bowl in the corner of the room has also started to vibrate and continues to vibrate. «Somehow» the vibration of the first tuning bowl has transmitted the vibrations to the second tuning bowl without touching it. In technology we call this a resonance effect. This effect can happen if both tuning bowls have the same sound or expressed more scientifically if they have the same natural frequency. We will return to this form of the transmission of vibrations in the next chapter.

Figure 8: Tuning bowls

Previously in the model of the sphere we represented our capabilities as a sphere around our body. The larger the sphere the more developed are our respective abilities.

Now let’s also introduce a model to represent our objectives: In this model we can represent every non-compatible goal¹ which we pursue by a tuning bowl, and better still a tuning bowl which is within us. We ourselves keep these tuning bowls vibrating, in other words for every incompatible objective we radiate a sound at a certain frequency.

The loudness of this sound strongly depends amongst other things on the priorities which we have assigned to the respective objectives. The louder a tuning bowl sounds the higher is its priority.

If for example a person pursues 3 incompatible goals, we can represent this in our tuning bowl model with 3 different tuning bowls. This person simultaneously sends out 3 different sounds. The loudest sound corresponds to that goal which is presently taken as the main guideline for decisionmaking. As we have already indicated earlier the priorities in setting goals can quickly change. In our model another tuning bowl would then sound louder.

With this model we would next like to discuss the mutual influence between abilities and objectives. We can assume that in making a decision, we use that objective as a guideline which at this point in time vibrates the most intensively and thus makes the loudest sound.