“The way out is IN.” –Thich Nhat Hanh
“As above, so below.”
–Sacred Geometry, Hermeticism, and various spiritual traditions
These days I am often saying to Sevde, “Choose your poison or one will be chosen for you.”
By poison, I am referring to the lessons life tries to teach us. That thing that is so hard to swallow. The wall you keep bashing your head against, wondering why it hurts.
I say that to Sevde laughingly, but in fact I mean it. I would even go so far as to say that we have already chosen our poisons, whether or not we are consciously aware of the decision.
The worst of the poisons are the painful, self-destructive behavior patterns. On the other end of the spectrum, however, we have (as the poster on the Lokmacho creampuff bakery’s wall encourages) “Find what you love and let it kill you.” Poisons of indulgence. Tastes so sweet that you walk willingly into your demise.
This is just one of the many topics I have been pondering in my exploration of the link between spirit and matter. The elegant practicality of the universe in replicating patterns across multiple platforms and metaphors.
Let me explain.
We can probably all agree that our hardest life lessons are our greatest teachers. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Did you ever stop to think about how that concept is also a physiological truth that mimics the body’s process of making muscle?
Hypertrophy.
The increase in muscle mass occurs when stressors create microtears in muscle fiber. The body’s healing response grows the muscle by sending in satellite cells to add more nuclei to the muscle cells. Note that this process only occurs in the rest period after intense stressors have torn the muscle fiber.
Similarly, the events in our lives that cause us pain (our poisons), tear the fiber of our spirit in ways that require repair. The process of repair leads to growth.
Not understanding the ultimately palliative effects of our poisons, many (most?) people attempt to escape theirs, oblivious to the knowledge that there is no escape. The way out is IN.
Like this unexpected similarity between personal evolution and muscle growth, I am finding increasingly more incidences of metaphoric patterning between spirit and matter.
It exists everywhere in myriad forms. Some less metaphysical but equally interesting… The most obvious are foods whose nutritive/healing benefits resemble the body part they support. Walnuts, which look like little brains, have a very high content of omega-3 fatty acids, which help support brain function. When sliced, the diameter of a carrot resembles an iris; the beta-carotene in carrots is known to decrease the chance of macular degeneration in the eyes. The list is long and the signposting is obvious.
Ruminating on these various mirrors, I started thinking about other, deeper patterns.
zn+1 = zn2 + c
The Mandelbrot Set. Often referred to as the “Thumbprint of God”. The concept of infinite patterning in which each output becomes the input for the next set. Its fractal quality of being similar at all scales mirrors the fundamental ordering principle found in nature.
What looks like simple math shows how simple rules can give rise to very complicated systems… Deeply extrapolated, perhaps this gives mathematical form to the plausibility of a self aware universe.
Nassim Haramein’s controversial Schwarzschild Proton theory develops it further, proffering a torus-shaped model of this information feedback loop at the atomic level in which every proton is a black hole.
The elegance of Mandelbrot and audacity of Haramein are pushing me to look deeper and with a different grasp at a Bounded Yet Infinite universe, one in which the connections and connectedness –in obvious iterations– transverse both spirit and matter.
I just have to look harder for the patterns.