Tag: Fractal

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Fractal soul visions

Linear time is within a certain frame of reference staying constant.
Beyond linear time is circular time.
And beyond circular time are eternal higher dimensional realities etc.
It gets more and more abstract.

Sometimes when our visions get abstract enough we can see abstract gestalts/patterns repeating again and again like time running through a mobius strip.

For me, the common themes I wrestle with are between:
– Being and Non-being
– Becoming and Unbecoming
– Ground and Groundlessness
– Knowing and Unknowing
– Striving and Surrender
– Linear time and Non-linear time
– Attainment and Non-attainment
– Order and Chaos
– Enlightenment and Non-enlightenment
– Home and travel
– Knowledge and Innocence
– Reality and Illusion

I can explain some of these things with poetic visions.
Here are some of them below:

Vision 1:

abyssedge

I have 2 choices, stay with what I know (what is in my hand) or the other choice is to jump into an unknown abyss.
I am detached from what I have and so at times I get the courage and jump into the abyss.
Now imagine you fall and fall through the unknown but there is no ground and you land up again at a similar place where you were standing before and again there is the same choice – stick to what is in hand(known) or just into the abyss(unknown).
Again this repeats, I work on letting go of the known in hand and get the courage and jump, and this repeats again and again.
This is the play between knowing and unknowing
It is the play between ground and groundlessness

Vision 2:

dream

Imagine you are in a dream and you are trying to wake up, but every time you think you have woken up you later realize you have still been dreaming. And so you try to wake up again, and once again think you have woken up, only to realize soon after that you are still dreaming and have to work again to wake up.
This is the play between reality and illusion

Vision 3:

sandsculpture

I build myself up like a sand structure from the chaos of possibility of the sand on the ground.
I feel I have attained knowledge and being, but soon it falls back to the ground.
Then again I get inspired, and I build another structure, work on it and reach a milestone, only for it to go back to the ground again.
This is like a looping struggle to BE something and not fall back to non-being.
This can be seen as the play of order vs. chaos.
This can also be seen as the play of attainment vs. non-attainment.
It is also the play between becoming and unbecoming.

Vision 4:

Home

Imagine whenever you settled in a place, buy some things, make yourself a home there and create security for yourself, you feel its time to move. You have to move and leave everything behind, go through the grief, and do a similar settlement in your next spot, only for you to again get the impulse to move and do it again.
This is the play between home and travel.

Vision 5:

watchingmovie

Imagine you are sitting in a theater seat and watching a movie, and you go through the story with the hero suffering gains and losses. Suddenly you feel it is getting too much and you want to snap out of it and you come back to your theater seat. You realize that you were always in that seat, nothing has really changed, and the whole movie was an illusion. But then shortly after coming back to the theater seat and disillusioning yourself, you see something else interesting in the screen that once again enchants you, and you start to gain knowledge from investment. And this happens again and again.
This is the play between alternating enlightenment and non-enlightenment
This is the play between alternating knowledge and innocence.

 

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The self is endless morphing

I read this great analogy in one of the essays from Nagarjuna:

shipathorizon

“When you go to the shore and look out, you see the edge of the world, six miles out. You see a ship get too close to the edge of the world; it falls off. That’s terrible; all those people die. It happens far too often. If you go to the beach, you’ve probably seen it once or twice. You are trapped in an illusion!

So let’s say someone sticks you in the space shuttle, blasts you into orbit. You look down, you see it’s a sphere. They explain gravity. You go back to the beach. It looks just like it did before, but you no longer can see to the edge of the world. You no longer get engaged in discussions about “when you fall off the edge of the world, does it hurt immediately, or does it hurt only when you hit the bottom?” That doesn’t make any sense; you understand the illusion.

This is what the Buddha’s saying about the self. Don’t get caught in discussions about the self–does the self exist, does the self not exist. That’s like trying to decide if it hurts when you fall off the edge of the world or not. Look at the world in terms of dependently originated phenomena. That’s all that’s happening.”

This analogy was so deep, it got me thinking.
I started to see other related metaphors that demonstrate a similar point.
I’ll cover two of them below.

Mountain climbing analogy:

conquer-mountain-winter-climbing-aolne-hd-wallpaper

Suppose you decide to climb a mountain.
As you gaze at it from a distance, it stands like a large mysterious awe inspiring object in front of you.
It beckons you to explore, tread and conquer it by reaching its peak.
The peak is usually covered in snow with a foggy haze around it, which stimulates the feeling of mystery and attainment even more.
From this point of view, you resolve to reach the peak and keep walking.
Now as you walk through all the various camps, at each place you see different worlds.
Initially, there is the forest portion, then there are the grasslands, then there is the harsh hostile terrain, and then finally you hit the tall patch of snow as you race to the top.
Various realms/worlds/points of view are traversed as you move along.
Finally when you do reach the peak, doesn’t it look quite different from your conception of it which you had when you were far off on the ground?
You are seeing from a brand new point of view, but at the same time, you are still there, and this feeling of you was not different when you were on the ground, nor was it different as you passed through all the intermediate terrain.
My experience of life has been that way since my earliest memory.
At one level I am moving through stages, goals, progressing, but at another level I am still the same innocence moving from place and place.
The innocence stays untouched, but the scenery keeps morphing.

Staring at a fractal:

Mandel_zoom_08_satellite_antenna

Have you ever played a video of a fractal zoom on YouTube and just stared at it for a while?
Notice how you see a destination, and you see the fractal moving towards it, but at the same time, as the destination becomes larger and clearer, your whole view is replaced by that, and the earlier view fades.
And in this way, there is a kind of endless renewal and an endless movement at the same time.
I think this clearly illustrates the symbol ‘Ouroboros’.
It also reveals the paradox of there being ‘change’ and yet ‘no change’ at the same time.
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The ego is an endlessly spawning fractal

fractal

Even in this analysis what am I trying to do?
I am trying to overcome the ego condition I find myself in by understanding it, and can you see in this very problem statement is a fractal of – “continually trying to understand for which I need to also continually keep the problem in mind or seek/invent problems”. It is a sort of loop.
Exactly like how a fractal program runs eternally.
An ego is a closed fractal loop that operates IN TIME but is outside of time. The ego is ESSENTIALLY an ignorance.
All ignorance is outside of time, but plays out in time. (Like playing a cassette. The information in the cassette is already present beyond its linear playing out in time.)
It maintains itself fractally by reinforcing and seeking out the very problem it was created to solve.

For instance, imagine you create a game, where a character seeks and destroys all rocks. The ego is not the character as one might assume. Rather, the ego is the THE GAME itself. Which means, the character in the game will endlessly seek rocks, find rocks, destroy the rocks, but the game will also endless keeping generating/spawning new rocks so that the game keeps going.
Usually we think there is an end to all games.
But that is a limitation in our thinking. Why must there be an end? What will make the game end if you are the creator of the game itself?

This will go on FOREVER because the variable that will release this time loop of the ego is not to be found INSIDE THE GAME.
Now apply this analogy to all spiritual seeking.
NOTHING in the game contains anything that will free you from it.
Like say you are playing Mario. Is there anything in any level of Mario that will QUIT the game or change the game? Nope, the game is designed to go on and on.
Who quits the game?
Only that which is beyond the ego can release the ego.
It is fundamentally impossible for the ego to release itself by its own efforts.
It is as futile as a character in a computer 3d game, trying to quit the game from within the game.
This is an impossible riddle.
Transcendence is not in time, but rather it releases you FROM time.
Nothing temporal, or nothing in time, is the cause of your release.

Even talking to people, hearing masters etc. will not be the cause of your transcendence. I have had direct experience of this in many of my lucid dreams. I would suddenly realize I am lucid within the dream, and then spend the rest of the dream trying to convince others that they are in my lucid dream, and the others of-course would strongly disagree, and I would spend the rest of the dream trying to convince them. Then when I do wake up, it is not because of conversation with any character in the dream. I wake up when I am ready to wake up and no factor within the dream including the characters inside it are the cause of me waking up. The cause is always from the beyond, and it may so happen, that one of the characters would say something to you and that would just poof wake you up. That character only appears to be the cause, but in truth, your waking up happened from a level totally beyond the whole dream.