Fractal attraction

To love or not to love,

To feel or not to feel...

In my many attempts at diving into the heart of all things - any thing, really - I grew more aware of certain recurring themes that seemed to apply not just to my person, but to the world at large... sometimes it felt like staring at something close to fractals - fragmented geometric shapes that can be split into parts, each of which being a reduced-size copy of the whole over and over again as you zoom in closer and closer. Some call it 'self-similarity', but one only needs to have a look around and start zooming in on a mere leaf fallen from a tree to see it. And we, as people, seem no different from that 'norm'. Even logical thought, that very capacity to think rationally, is an echo of that notion of fractals. The more one thinks about a particular thing, the more they find they can derive not just many roots shooting up from the base, but also repetitive patterns that could simply be juxtaposed and where the only difference remains 'size'. Individual versus whole, basically - same exact patterns in essence repeating themselves in the exact same way whether one looks at the individual level or from a 'bird's eye view'.

And so here's the world. The whole of this world at its most basic. My whole person or being is but a fractal-like embodiment or manifestation of the whole universe at once - in a fractal sense. We just get distracted by the seemingly random elements of the environment, which end up shaping our 'differences'. That distraction is at the core of the reality-based illusion of difference.

What drives the human world? Repetition, it seems - through competition. Everything about living screams replication... through competition, meaning 'the best' in a very basic way rather than a sophisticated one as the human intellect would love to portray. Of course, over the centuries we managed to dress that basic notion driving our very existence into something fancier. We dressed up something basically 'ugly' to have it look more... palatable to the more sophisticated mind.

Women do it all the time. They wake up in the morning and then dart into the bathroom to apply a mask of make-up to conceal flaws. Here again comes the notion of fractals, for the only reason they conceal flaws is part of the same way the world of humans at large tries hard to sugar-coat reality all the time. Building sand castles everywhere. Over, and over, and over again. Trying so hard to conceal the true nature of Reality by applying layers upon layers of mind make-up - through the use of imagination.

Everything we can look at now is a direct result of competition - through, again, replication - of some sort. Every single second of my life is defined by a competition of some sort. Even my mere breathing is dictated by one component fighting against another to make it. We die because, ultimately, we lose out against some other component(s). Medicine is just a field that aims to fight such components harder.

Social entanglements are as much part of the competitive, replicative 'norms' as any. They repeat themselves over and over again, and though they might appear random to the undiscerning mind, the ones that get to be repeated over time are the ones that win over others in the constant competition battle. One only needs to look at how the world is built on opposites... nothing seems to exist on a stand-alone basis. If something is, then its opposite is surely there, too. Male and female, spring and winter, thin and large, black and white, hot and cold, dry and wet, etc, etc... What are opposites but the embodiment of competition at its apex? Opposites are like the perfect middle ground of the 'balance' of competition, and everything in between is forever torn in a tug of war as they all compete to make it over all others, from the tiniest atom to the biggest elements.

Nature is so 'perfect' because it makes everything rest on chains of events - on top of the replicative competition process. There is that element to be taken into account, too. The fact that from the very beginning everything that unfolded was the equivalent of a game of replicative dominoes falling one after the other according to how they were placed along the way. And I would bet my socks off that even as the last domino drops dead on the floor, it will happen to contain the fractal-like similarities of the whole universe - space/time - at once.