This is fun and worth a listen:
At times it feels almost like an exercise in Tapping to release beliefs. But, I also just enjoyed his take on dog energy and cats and hate.
Thursday, May 09, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
The "Sacrifice" of Oneness
 |
| Landsong fire circle, Krishan Bralley |
The world you see is
based on "sacrifice" of oneness. It is a picture of complete disunity
and total lack of joining. Around each entity is built a wall so seeming solid
that it looks as if what is inside can never reach without, and what is out can
never reach and join with what is locked away within the wall. Each part must
sacrifice the other part, to keep itself complete. For if they joined each one
would lose its own identity, and by their separation are their selves maintained.
ACIM, Chapter 26So here were more words that went straight into my heart. Sometimes it is good for your heart to break. Only then do I become open and defenseless and ready to receive the influx of love I’ve been resisting. For a moment, these words made it imperative for me to see the world in a new way, to see the Oneness. Perhaps they’ll resonate with you too.
A Course in Miracles states as its goal, in many ways, a shift in perception, a different way of seeing. The Course calls this different perception by various names -- the eyes of Christ, spiritual vision, salvation, Atonement, true perception, and forgiveness. The entire goal of A Course in Miracles is but this. For example, the introduction to the Workbook of the Course states unequivocally, "The purpose of the workbook is to train your mind in a systematic way to a different perception of everyone and everything in the world."…
All of our experience is tied to our perception and perception is not a fact but an interpretation.
Daan Dehn, commentary on ACIM
Perception is not a fact, but an interpretation!
That is not simply ACIM or non-dual philosophy but also physiology and hard science.
And where does all this take me?
I scan the ACIM texts and from time to time come across a phrase that churns me, evokes some deep response that I cannot really understand and turn away from in discomfort.
I find many of them have to do with healing and highlight my resistance to something obviously of beneficial.
Is
Healing Certain?
Healing
is always certain. It is impossible to let illusions be brought to truth and
keep the illusions. Truth demonstrates illusions have no value…Yet what if the patient uses sickness as a way of life, believing healing is the way to death? When this is so, a sudden healing might precipitate intense depression, and a sense of loss so deep that the patient might even try to destroy himself…
Healing will always stand aside when it would be seen as threat. The instant it is welcome it is there.
Manual for Teachers, Section 6
I recall a comment on BATGAP that anyone who meditates diligently for years and has not awakened is harboring some uninvestigated ambivalence – in short, they don’t want to wake up.
I think of Adyashanti explaining how many people awake and go through a loss of all will power.
And I think of Evie and others working their hearts out to heal their cancers.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
A Required Course
For some time now, I have been uninterested in posting anything here. Something seems to have broken inside, which I actually take as a good sign. However, I find I really want to share these words:
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.
This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
ACIM
My nephew, when he was little, one day suddenly realized, “Life’s a lot of work! Why do people do it?” To this day, his words are something of a family joke.
But, isn’t this what A Course in Miracles is saying? It is required.
Your only choice is if you want to accept the challenge now or later.
When will I remove the blocks to love’s presence?
And how - How to let love in?
I find I can only aim at discovering what deeply moves me. And then, resist nothing.
Today, it was these words.
“Read ‘em and weep” … because then, I open up to Love.
Love will immediately enter into any mind that truly wants it.
Truly? Why not go with that?
You are free to believe what you choose, and what you do attests to what you believe.
A Course in Miracles
And less you think this is simply airy-fairy and not for the practical, gritty challenges of life, let me introduce you to two remarkable women:
Helena – who should by now be dead from rectal cancer.
And
Corinna Borden– who has refractory Hodgkins lymphoma.
 |
| Jump, by P Bralley |
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.
This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
ACIM
My nephew, when he was little, one day suddenly realized, “Life’s a lot of work! Why do people do it?” To this day, his words are something of a family joke.
But, isn’t this what A Course in Miracles is saying? It is required.
Your only choice is if you want to accept the challenge now or later.
When will I remove the blocks to love’s presence?
And how - How to let love in?
I find I can only aim at discovering what deeply moves me. And then, resist nothing.
Today, it was these words.
“Read ‘em and weep” … because then, I open up to Love.
Love will immediately enter into any mind that truly wants it.
Truly? Why not go with that?
You are free to believe what you choose, and what you do attests to what you believe.
A Course in Miracles
And less you think this is simply airy-fairy and not for the practical, gritty challenges of life, let me introduce you to two remarkable women:
Helena – who should by now be dead from rectal cancer.
And
Corinna Borden– who has refractory Hodgkins lymphoma.
Thursday, February 07, 2013
A Krishnamurti Millisecond
I’ve mentioned that I have migraines. Curiously, over the past few years they’ve changed. They have gone from seemingly an obvious physiological pathology that sometimes gave rise to a spiritual experience to the exact opposite: a spiritual experience that makes the body sag as it tries to biologically support “the vision.” And sometimes, there is just this weird in-between state. My vision gets altered and I feel a little headachy and definitely nauseated. Not at all your classic migraine, but for lack of a better term, I just call it a migraine.
My doctor always asks how they are going (not that his by-the-book-medicine understands a thing about the spiritual) but, to give him something of a reply, I explained to him that something happens to my vision: I lose the ability to process vision in the normal manner. I don’t get the flashes of light or bizarre distortions that are ripe within the migraine literature. Rather, my vision becomes “disconnected” from the normal higher processing center.
It has become very obvious to me that vision is a process composed of a hierarchy of processes or functions. Most basically, the retina picks up light and the signals are processed in to a flowing image. We “see” the world around us and then at another level this image gets processed further. Another level of brain activity gives rise to meaning, interpretation, linguistic labels, and ultimately the logical interaction of “me” with the world I see.
The migraine disconnects this level of interpretation and labeling. When it happens at work, I call it quits and just go home. Last Saturday, it happened while I was driving up to the mountains for a family weekend. My reaction was, “No, no, no – not now!” I rubbed my eyes and rubbed my neck and tried to “reconnect.”
It’s with this background of “spiritual migraines” that I came upon this Blog entry by Nicole Taras, a psychic by profession, and was fascinated by the new angle Nicole provides my understanding. Her disconnect involves the sense of hearing and she calls it a Krishnamurti Millisecond:
It happened while I was watching a video talk by Krishnamurti.
Krishnamurti is fun to listen to for me because he always, only, talks about “reality” on the very deepest level which cannot be talked about or understood intellectually so he is constantly frustrated by students trying to understand what he is saying intellectually…
In any case, during part of his lecture, Krishnamurti became very frustrated about this and said sternly, “Just listen. Don’t try to listen. Don’t try to understand. Just simply listen to what I am saying...” (that may not be a direct quote but that’s how I remember it)
He went on talking and I decided to listen without focusing on the concepts or trying to gain any sort of knowledge, or get anywhere further on my spiritual path by having listened.
For probably less than a second, I just listened. It felt as if some sort of filtering or resistance system that I live in constantly had turned off and for that millisecond life was allowed to just be without me slowing it down or counting it out in terms of a process of time before acknowledging it, organizing, categorizing, making concepts, understandings, perceptions, judgments — I saw that my normal processes of perceiving myself and the world around me acts as a filtering system which slows life down and breaks it into categories or measurements of time that I can then count and comprehend...
The best way I can describe what listening was like is that it seemed like a flood of openness...but even a flood is too small...it was just being open and with no idea in the world of a closed comparison…
the question I am stuck with is – how would it even be possible to actually go about living in this state of mind (if that’s what you’d call it)? In hindsight, I’m left with the concept of just how vulnerable it is to not have the filters on.
Krishnamurti says that once you have seen things as they really are there is no going back to the old way of being — I definitely am not there yet — he does not believe in a gradual awakening because that implies time and a goal, somewhere to get to — but my path appears to be gradual.
Yes. My path seems very gradual.
I poked around Nicole’s website and the more I read the more relaxed I became. There’s a sweetness that resonated with me. And before I knew it, my vision was disconnected once again. I wouldn’t call this a migraine. I’d call it witnessing, but then I might not even call it that. Witnessing presents a “radical duality” that by definition establishes a here and there. I'm noticing that disconnection with my vision is a dropping off of differentiation, labeling, dividing. There's a soupiness or ocean that disorients my normal vision. (Perhaps the habit of vision/nervous system is to WANT to label and dissect.) And, of course, I can see all the cups and pencils and notebooks same as anyone. But, as the vision changes and the relaxation arises, mostly I am aware something dropping away leaving behind a Wholeness - or at least a chunky soup as we all swim about within the same warm pot of ...what? Wow! What?
Or, as Nicole summarized:
This moment, along with other milliseconds of sudden conscious shifting in my life helps me see (little by little) my mind with more perspective and with a deeper trust in my Oneness with God.
Well, I hope that makes sense to somebody!
I think it does, at least to me! Thank you, Nicole.
 |
| Asemic Circles, by P. Bralley |
My doctor always asks how they are going (not that his by-the-book-medicine understands a thing about the spiritual) but, to give him something of a reply, I explained to him that something happens to my vision: I lose the ability to process vision in the normal manner. I don’t get the flashes of light or bizarre distortions that are ripe within the migraine literature. Rather, my vision becomes “disconnected” from the normal higher processing center.
It has become very obvious to me that vision is a process composed of a hierarchy of processes or functions. Most basically, the retina picks up light and the signals are processed in to a flowing image. We “see” the world around us and then at another level this image gets processed further. Another level of brain activity gives rise to meaning, interpretation, linguistic labels, and ultimately the logical interaction of “me” with the world I see.
The migraine disconnects this level of interpretation and labeling. When it happens at work, I call it quits and just go home. Last Saturday, it happened while I was driving up to the mountains for a family weekend. My reaction was, “No, no, no – not now!” I rubbed my eyes and rubbed my neck and tried to “reconnect.”
It’s with this background of “spiritual migraines” that I came upon this Blog entry by Nicole Taras, a psychic by profession, and was fascinated by the new angle Nicole provides my understanding. Her disconnect involves the sense of hearing and she calls it a Krishnamurti Millisecond:
It happened while I was watching a video talk by Krishnamurti.
Krishnamurti is fun to listen to for me because he always, only, talks about “reality” on the very deepest level which cannot be talked about or understood intellectually so he is constantly frustrated by students trying to understand what he is saying intellectually…
In any case, during part of his lecture, Krishnamurti became very frustrated about this and said sternly, “Just listen. Don’t try to listen. Don’t try to understand. Just simply listen to what I am saying...” (that may not be a direct quote but that’s how I remember it)
He went on talking and I decided to listen without focusing on the concepts or trying to gain any sort of knowledge, or get anywhere further on my spiritual path by having listened.
For probably less than a second, I just listened. It felt as if some sort of filtering or resistance system that I live in constantly had turned off and for that millisecond life was allowed to just be without me slowing it down or counting it out in terms of a process of time before acknowledging it, organizing, categorizing, making concepts, understandings, perceptions, judgments — I saw that my normal processes of perceiving myself and the world around me acts as a filtering system which slows life down and breaks it into categories or measurements of time that I can then count and comprehend...
The best way I can describe what listening was like is that it seemed like a flood of openness...but even a flood is too small...it was just being open and with no idea in the world of a closed comparison…
the question I am stuck with is – how would it even be possible to actually go about living in this state of mind (if that’s what you’d call it)? In hindsight, I’m left with the concept of just how vulnerable it is to not have the filters on.
Krishnamurti says that once you have seen things as they really are there is no going back to the old way of being — I definitely am not there yet — he does not believe in a gradual awakening because that implies time and a goal, somewhere to get to — but my path appears to be gradual.
Yes. My path seems very gradual.
I poked around Nicole’s website and the more I read the more relaxed I became. There’s a sweetness that resonated with me. And before I knew it, my vision was disconnected once again. I wouldn’t call this a migraine. I’d call it witnessing, but then I might not even call it that. Witnessing presents a “radical duality” that by definition establishes a here and there. I'm noticing that disconnection with my vision is a dropping off of differentiation, labeling, dividing. There's a soupiness or ocean that disorients my normal vision. (Perhaps the habit of vision/nervous system is to WANT to label and dissect.) And, of course, I can see all the cups and pencils and notebooks same as anyone. But, as the vision changes and the relaxation arises, mostly I am aware something dropping away leaving behind a Wholeness - or at least a chunky soup as we all swim about within the same warm pot of ...what? Wow! What?
Or, as Nicole summarized:
This moment, along with other milliseconds of sudden conscious shifting in my life helps me see (little by little) my mind with more perspective and with a deeper trust in my Oneness with God.
Well, I hope that makes sense to somebody!
I think it does, at least to me! Thank you, Nicole.
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Intentions
You can have a group of people hang out with the same teacher, or perform the same mediation practice, and their outcomes will be determined by their individual intentions for participating in the common practice.
I haven’t found a more influential factor of a practice’s outcome than one’s intention for performing that practice.
Peter’s comment at BATGAP
Peter’s comment, which I love, brings to mind a story of a local meditation teacher who one day, aggravated with her students told them, “You do just enough to feel better.” Meaning, they wanted to simply do the bare minimum and escape into the feel good airy-fairy.
Why do you bother with your spiritual practice? What is it that you really want?
Community? Stress relief? Self improvement?
Has it become mere habit?
Or, has it slipped beyond any personal choice, to become a force beyond yourself?
I find it rather presumptuous to assume that I know why anyone meditates. And I find it useful to periodically look into my own motivations, because, as Peter points out, intentions have a direct effect upon outcomes.
When I was with Adyashanti this summer I noticed that he spoke of three practices: Meditation, Inquiry, and Contemplation. I liked seeing this as it seemed to bring some new balance, order, and perspective to terms that float around inside my head.
Now, he is giving away a booklet entitled “The Way of Liberation” which you can download for free for a while. It’s a really simple, straightforward explanation of these three practices. I love the sparseness of the language, like his Summary of the Teaching:
Be still.
Question every thought.
Contemplate the source of Reality.
There it is: meditation, inquiry, contemplation.
If your intention is liberation, it’s good to know the bases.
In The Way of Liberation, Adya begins by suggesting you address your aspirations (intention by any other name…) and he states it almost as a warning:
To clarify your aspiration means knowing exactly what it is that your spiritual life aspires to, not as a future goal but in each mo¬ment. In other words, what do you value most in your life—not in the sense of moral values, but in the sense of what is most im¬portant to you. Contemplate this question.
Do not assume that you know what your highest aspiration is, or even what is most important to you.
Dig deep within, contemplate, and meditate on what the spiritual quest is about for you; don’t let anyone else define your aspiration for you…
Very few people have Truth or Reality as deep values.
They may think that they value Truth, but their actions do not bear this out.
Generally, most people have competing and conflicting values, which manifest as both internal and external conflict.
Where am I going with all this? I am not sure.
But, more and more I understand how important it is to truly value what is true.
What is it that you REALLY want?
I was reading The Seven Story Mountain recently. In this autobiography, Thomas Merton said something that simply stunned me as if I’d never before heard truly heard such a teaching. He said:
If what most people take for granted were really true – if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it… I would never have entered a Trappist monastery
Question every thought. Question all assumptions and the rules that get drummed into you.
I don’t want to miss out on Life and yet, I do not even know what there is to miss and how best to use my time.
A friend and I compare notes.
I worry that I will waste my life by not being engaged enough with others.
I fear I am too content to sit upon my back porch and watch the sky.
And then my friend worries that she will waste her life by always being addictively too busy.
There is no such thing as a path to enlightenment… What you can do is to remove any and all illusions, especially the ones you value most…
Adya, The Way of Liberation
I read these words this morning at the breakfast table and made these notes upon the page margin:
How do I recognize illusion?
When I feel resistance to what is… when I feel separation…
What illusions do I most value?
I am in control… I exist as an individual, born and will die…
Are not illusions my most persistent thoughts?
I could do better… I’m not loved… I am a silly mess… I have failed… If I were enlightened all my problems would be solved…
I hope you will ask yourself a similar inquiry. I found it somewhat surprising and it began an opening of perspective until I heard a voice from the radio behind me shouting:
Are you crying?
Are you crying?
There’s no crying!
There’s no crying in baseball!
Tom Hanks, A League of Their Own
The Library of Congress is inducting this film and these words into the National Film Registry for its contribution to American culture. Somehow, that seemed just perfect, just perfect and the end of any commentary I might offer.
Meditate, Inquire, Contemplate. My intention is upon discoverying what’s true, despite all appearances.
I haven’t found a more influential factor of a practice’s outcome than one’s intention for performing that practice.
Peter’s comment at BATGAP
Peter’s comment, which I love, brings to mind a story of a local meditation teacher who one day, aggravated with her students told them, “You do just enough to feel better.” Meaning, they wanted to simply do the bare minimum and escape into the feel good airy-fairy.
Why do you bother with your spiritual practice? What is it that you really want?
Community? Stress relief? Self improvement?
Has it become mere habit?
Or, has it slipped beyond any personal choice, to become a force beyond yourself?
I find it rather presumptuous to assume that I know why anyone meditates. And I find it useful to periodically look into my own motivations, because, as Peter points out, intentions have a direct effect upon outcomes.
When I was with Adyashanti this summer I noticed that he spoke of three practices: Meditation, Inquiry, and Contemplation. I liked seeing this as it seemed to bring some new balance, order, and perspective to terms that float around inside my head.
Now, he is giving away a booklet entitled “The Way of Liberation” which you can download for free for a while. It’s a really simple, straightforward explanation of these three practices. I love the sparseness of the language, like his Summary of the Teaching:
Be still.
Question every thought.
Contemplate the source of Reality.
There it is: meditation, inquiry, contemplation.
If your intention is liberation, it’s good to know the bases.
In The Way of Liberation, Adya begins by suggesting you address your aspirations (intention by any other name…) and he states it almost as a warning:
To clarify your aspiration means knowing exactly what it is that your spiritual life aspires to, not as a future goal but in each mo¬ment. In other words, what do you value most in your life—not in the sense of moral values, but in the sense of what is most im¬portant to you. Contemplate this question.
Do not assume that you know what your highest aspiration is, or even what is most important to you.
Dig deep within, contemplate, and meditate on what the spiritual quest is about for you; don’t let anyone else define your aspiration for you…
Very few people have Truth or Reality as deep values.
They may think that they value Truth, but their actions do not bear this out.
Generally, most people have competing and conflicting values, which manifest as both internal and external conflict.
Where am I going with all this? I am not sure.
But, more and more I understand how important it is to truly value what is true.
What is it that you REALLY want?
I was reading The Seven Story Mountain recently. In this autobiography, Thomas Merton said something that simply stunned me as if I’d never before heard truly heard such a teaching. He said:
If what most people take for granted were really true – if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it… I would never have entered a Trappist monastery
Question every thought. Question all assumptions and the rules that get drummed into you.
I don’t want to miss out on Life and yet, I do not even know what there is to miss and how best to use my time.
A friend and I compare notes.
I worry that I will waste my life by not being engaged enough with others.
I fear I am too content to sit upon my back porch and watch the sky.
And then my friend worries that she will waste her life by always being addictively too busy.
There is no such thing as a path to enlightenment… What you can do is to remove any and all illusions, especially the ones you value most…
Adya, The Way of Liberation
I read these words this morning at the breakfast table and made these notes upon the page margin:
How do I recognize illusion?
When I feel resistance to what is… when I feel separation…
What illusions do I most value?
I am in control… I exist as an individual, born and will die…
Are not illusions my most persistent thoughts?
I could do better… I’m not loved… I am a silly mess… I have failed… If I were enlightened all my problems would be solved…
I hope you will ask yourself a similar inquiry. I found it somewhat surprising and it began an opening of perspective until I heard a voice from the radio behind me shouting:
Are you crying?
Are you crying?
There’s no crying!
There’s no crying in baseball!
Tom Hanks, A League of Their Own
The Library of Congress is inducting this film and these words into the National Film Registry for its contribution to American culture. Somehow, that seemed just perfect, just perfect and the end of any commentary I might offer.
Meditate, Inquire, Contemplate. My intention is upon discoverying what’s true, despite all appearances.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
A Lover's Tale
One day, one of God’s
lovers goes to the home of his shaikh.
The shaikh begins to speak to him about love. Little by little, as the shaikh speaks, the
lover begins to melt, becoming more and more subtle until he just flows like a
trickling stream. His whole physical
being dissolved in front of the shaikh, until there was nothing but some water
on the floor.
Just then a friend of the shaikh enters the room and asks, “Where is that fellow who just arrived?” The shaikh points to the water on the floor and says, “That man is that water.”
This kind of melting is as astonishing transformation of state. The man lost his density in such a way that he became what he originally was: a drop of liquid. Originally he had arrived at human form from water, for as God has said: “We created all of life from water.”
This lover merely returned to his original essence, the water that is the source of life. And so we may draw the following conclusion: A lover is that being by whom everything is brought to life.
A story attributed to Shaikh Ibn al-Arabi, as told by Kabir Helminski in The Knowing Heart.
I read this story and broke down in tears and as I mopped my face dry a whole new appreciation for what tears represent came to mind. They reflect our opening to our true essence, our Beingness, our Love.
And immediately a song arose from somewhere deep in memory, just this fragment, out of context and yet so fitting:
We lay down and wept
And wept for thee Zion
We remember, thee remember
Thee remember, thee Zion
There was grieving heartbreak and yet there seemed to be some hope within the song, which to my surprise was sourced not in psalm but rather science fiction and American Pie.
And after humming for some time another classic came to mind
regarding love and water, evil and melting:
I’m melting! I’m melting!
... Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful
wickedness!
Just then a friend of the shaikh enters the room and asks, “Where is that fellow who just arrived?” The shaikh points to the water on the floor and says, “That man is that water.”
This kind of melting is as astonishing transformation of state. The man lost his density in such a way that he became what he originally was: a drop of liquid. Originally he had arrived at human form from water, for as God has said: “We created all of life from water.”
This lover merely returned to his original essence, the water that is the source of life. And so we may draw the following conclusion: A lover is that being by whom everything is brought to life.
A story attributed to Shaikh Ibn al-Arabi, as told by Kabir Helminski in The Knowing Heart.
I read this story and broke down in tears and as I mopped my face dry a whole new appreciation for what tears represent came to mind. They reflect our opening to our true essence, our Beingness, our Love.
And immediately a song arose from somewhere deep in memory, just this fragment, out of context and yet so fitting:
We lay down and wept
And wept for thee Zion
We remember, thee remember
Thee remember, thee Zion
There was grieving heartbreak and yet there seemed to be some hope within the song, which to my surprise was sourced not in psalm but rather science fiction and American Pie.
Yes, who would have thought?
Enjoy your tears and melting heart... 'cause we are each our own wicked witch and we do not die so much as melt back into our original essence.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
What’s the Point?
I never know what’s
going to happen next. I have to roll the
dice.
A mathematician, explaining the Chaos Game
Fractals… They’re all
over in biology. They’re one solution
that natural selection has come up with over and over again.
NOVA, Fractals the Hidden Dimension
A good friend has spent the past few weeks on jury duty – a death penalty, double murder trial. It’s been a hard, very emotional period for her. But, she’s approached it as happening for some reason and so she tends to look upon the trial as an opportunity for growth. Her husband, on the other hand, feels things simply happen. The trial is an odious even she has been pulled into and there is no reason for the disasters that befall us. Our task is simply to survive the pain and move on down the road. His philosophy has uncovered my friend’s own doubts regarding her spiritual beliefs.
His doubts also reflect statements I sometimes hear from nondualists: There is no reason or ultimate cause. Things simply happen.
You can watch this process for the pattern called a Sierpinski Triangle here.
2. Chaotic systems are very sensitive to the initial conditions making them very unpredictable. A very slight change in the starting point can lead to enormously different outcomes. The famous Butterfly Effect and the difficulty in predicting weather are examples.
3. Chaotic systems appear to be disorderly, but they are not. Beneath the seemingly random behavior are a sense of order and beautiful patterns. The orderly systems predicted by classical physics are actually the narrow situation.
And thus, in the Chaos Game we find that the picture that is generated through this random process is not random at all. And I think this is exactly how are lives are. We may not see the reason for the situation that we're in. But, that does not mean there is no intelligence or reason underlying the surface appearance of events.
Chaos and order are deeply, deeply linked. In fact, I view them as different sides of the same coin.
You can call this phenomenon an expression of the Laws of Nature or the intelligence of God. I think it just depends upon whether you are coming from your head or heart, and your ability to look deeply inside yourself, deeply inside the universe.
A mathematician, explaining the Chaos Game
NOVA, Fractals the Hidden Dimension
A good friend has spent the past few weeks on jury duty – a death penalty, double murder trial. It’s been a hard, very emotional period for her. But, she’s approached it as happening for some reason and so she tends to look upon the trial as an opportunity for growth. Her husband, on the other hand, feels things simply happen. The trial is an odious even she has been pulled into and there is no reason for the disasters that befall us. Our task is simply to survive the pain and move on down the road. His philosophy has uncovered my friend’s own doubts regarding her spiritual beliefs.
His doubts also reflect statements I sometimes hear from nondualists: There is no reason or ultimate cause. Things simply happen.
I think we all wrestle with this question. Sometimes we simply voice it as, “Why me?”
I find one answer to this question through the
science of Chaos Theory and Fractals. It’s
simple and very graphic. Fractals are
beautiful complex patterns. Each pattern
is defined by an equation. The equations
are meant to be solved repeatedly with each iteration generating a point. When these points are plotted graphically,
their location pops up randomly. It is
from this random deposition of points upon a piece of paper that the beautiful fractal
pattern eventually emerges.
You can watch this process for the pattern called a Sierpinski Triangle here.
You can view an emergence of this pattern in 21 seconds here.
[The game is following these rules: Number the vertices of an equilateral
triangle 1, 2 and 3. Start with a random initial point in the plane and plot
this point. Randomly pick a number: 1, 2
or 3. From the initial point, move half the distance towards that numbered
vertex. This point is plotted and becomes our new initial point. Repeat this
process thousands of times.]
Fractal geometry is
the geometry which describes the chaotic systems we find in Nature. Scientifically speaking, Life and the
Universe itself are complex systems. Such
systems are Chaotic in behavior and Chaos Theory presents these simple,
defining features of every chaotic system:
1. Chaotic systems may appear to be random but they are not.
They are deterministic with equations ruling their behavior. 2. Chaotic systems are very sensitive to the initial conditions making them very unpredictable. A very slight change in the starting point can lead to enormously different outcomes. The famous Butterfly Effect and the difficulty in predicting weather are examples.
3. Chaotic systems appear to be disorderly, but they are not. Beneath the seemingly random behavior are a sense of order and beautiful patterns. The orderly systems predicted by classical physics are actually the narrow situation.
And thus, in the Chaos Game we find that the picture that is generated through this random process is not random at all. And I think this is exactly how are lives are. We may not see the reason for the situation that we're in. But, that does not mean there is no intelligence or reason underlying the surface appearance of events.
Chaos and order are deeply, deeply linked. In fact, I view them as different sides of the same coin.
You can call this phenomenon an expression of the Laws of Nature or the intelligence of God. I think it just depends upon whether you are coming from your head or heart, and your ability to look deeply inside yourself, deeply inside the universe.
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