The Fallacy of the New Age Movement's 'Raise Your Vibration' Mantra
Let me start off by saying this is not an attack. The new age movement is filled with many well-intentioned people—I know many of them.
The one thing we have in common is our search for Truth—its all that matters.
But in that hunger for eternal Truth, too many are being fed empty calories—catchy mantras and slogans like “raise your vibration.”
But has anyone actually stopped and thought it out?
In reality, its an ignorant falsehood cloaked in truth…
The Falsity of Raising Your Vibration
From TikTok reels to self-help seminars and the shelves of your local bookstore—it’s sighted as the key to manifesting abundance or aligning with “higher” consciousness.
And it’s big business.
The New Age industry rakes in over $376 billion per year.
It’s clean, marketable—and it sells.
But where did this mantra come from?
That is a long story in itself, but it basically goes something like this:
This thinking springs from a still-held superstition that Heaven, and therefore God, are “up there” somewhere, and by “raising” our vibration to joyousness we get out of the “lower” vibrations associated with material existence, such as fear, greed, etc.
The New Age movement basically took Hermetic Principles, which date back to ancient Greece, Egypt and India—and most likely before that—and tried to cram it into the idea of physics.
Here are some quotes from major New Age authors:
“Listening to your ego brings your vibration down; listening to your higher self brings your vibration up.” —Caroline A. Shearer (“Spiritual Author”)
“To raise your vibration, surround yourself with beauty, love and inspiration.”
— Anthon St. Maarten (Psychic Medium and “Spiritual Author”)
“Positive emotions and thoughts vibrate at higher frequencies; negative ones vibrate at lower frequencies.” — mindsetmotive.com
Let’s deconstruct this false view for the purpose of arriving at Truth.
When talking about raising your vibration, its always referred to in one of three ways: via the body, thought or spirit.
The Spirit is vibrationless — if you would like to know why, you can read my article about that here:
So this leaves us with our physical bodies and our thoughts.
Let’s look at it from a scientific perspective and see how utterly absurd the mantra of ‘raising your vibration’ actually is.
Waves vibrate at frequencies.
A high frequency is increased activity, and a low frequency is decreased activity.
Increasing activity multiplies heat; decreasing activity multiplies cold—pretty basic.
When one exercises, for example, they are increasing their bodily activity. The more your increase your workout’s frequency—reps, sets, intensity, etc—the more heat your body will generate.
This heat increase isn’t that much of course.
When one’s body dies, the blood stops pumping, cells stop pulsating with life and the organism begins to decompose. Lack of activity multiplies cold.
If you ever have been with a loved one when they passed, you know what I am talking about.
When our body is operating in a normal rhythm, we don’t notice it—we are in harmony.
Sometimes, our vibration increases too much.
So much in fact that it makes us down right uncomfortable.
It’s called a fever…
But wait, I thought raising our vibration brought us closer to God, not Covid…?
The Truth About Vibration
Before we talk about vibration and how it relates to thought, it would be wise to tackle what vibration actually is.
Vibrations are waves.
In Nature—waves are all that exist.
“In the wave lies the secret of creation.” — Walter Russell
The entirety of the material universe is comprised of atomic and subatomic systems—and possibly smaller. These systems are constructed solely of electrical waves compacted from larger volumes into smaller volumes.
The more tightly packed these systems become, the more waves are compressed. Compressing waves increases their frequency.
As electrical waves are compacted and their frequencies increase, they take on various characteristics, one of which is increased density:
plasma (fire)
gas (air)
liquid (water)
solid (earth)
In other words, increased motion—vibrational frequency—makes objects appear more solid while lowering their vibrational frequencies makes them more tenuous.
Let’s perform a thought experiment.
A good example is the winding up strands of yarn into a ball.
The long flowing strands of loose yearn can be likened to low frequency, long vibrations. Start winding that strand up around a central point (increasing its frequency) and gradually a ball of yarn will appear.
What you have done is take long, low frequency waves from a large volume of space, and concentrated them into a smaller volume—a higher vibrational condition.
In so doing, you have created a solid body of yarn.
God constructs suns in precisely the same manner by using light waves.
The faster an object is moving (vibrating) the more solid it appears to our senses.
The above was for the purpose of understanding the following:
The quote in the beginning of the article when like this:
“Positive emotions and thoughts vibrate at higher frequencies; negative ones vibrate at lower frequencies.”
This does not hold up in reality.
Check out the graph below…
Many New Age books and sites will give you the example that happiness and joyousness are associated with Beta and Gamma states—higher frequency waves.
The truth, that they always leave out, most likely due to ignorance, is that brain scans show that fear and anger are found in Alpha, Beta and Gamma states—the region of the brain in which they manifest is different, however.
You can read the study here.
And it makes sense—jumping for joy and being ecstatic of course is a high vibrational mental state—and it’s effect can be seen in the body by increased heartbeat, alertness, bodily movement, etc.
Fear and anger—low vibrational according to the New Age Movement—in fact isn’t low at all. It involves our fight and flight mechanisms.
Whether in a fear state—running from a lion—or an anger state—in a fight—the activity (frequency) of thought and action increases.
This video by Matt Presti sums it up very well.
That said, there IS a difference between the vibrations of LOVE and FEAR.
The emotions of love and happiness operate at the same frequencies as hate and fear, however the wave frequencies of positive emotions were found to be rhythmic and harmonic whereas the wave frequencies of negative emotions are always broken up, syncopated and discordant.
That is the answer we have been seeking.
Rhythm and harmony
The state of mind which the New Age seeks isn’t found in raising one’s vibration—it’s found is being in a rhythmic harmony with both higher and lower vibrations.
In other words, the key we are searching after is BALANCE.
“The keystone of the entire structure of the spiritual and physical universe is Rhythmic Balanced Interchange between all opposites.”
For further reading check out these articles:
Michael R. Post, Creator, Beyond the Cosmic Veil
Are you familiar with the Buckminster Fuller work called Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking?
I have always considered Russell’s writing as the theoretical while Fuller’s was the nuts and bolts.
Studying both as a comprehensive look at ‘reality’ is a lifelong effort.
Yes agree - must say the Russell quote describes yin/yang