Question6.com: The gist of our life
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The atoms of planet earth seem to move randomly between the trees, the animals, the ocean, the mountains…. This is only the appearance. They follow some general ideas. One of them is called ‘the association of opposites. The other is ‘the fractals’. There may be more.
A human life could also follow some general idea that is not obvious to us. We may find – someday – that the fractals, the association of opposites, human lives and many others can be associated together to make a ‘general fractal’ that governs the universe.
For the time being, let’s go back to the material world.
6 - Networks in the material world
Have you watched fractals before? They are beautiful. They have colors and movement. There is something fascinating about them. Sounds, colors and movement are criteria of life. Look at 'fractals' on You Tube. It is like watching television or wood burning in the fireplace.
Benoit Mandelbrot discovered the fractals using a computer to show the connection between shapes and the mathematical formula. Zn+1 = Zn2 + C. You start with one point and the formula tells you where the next point will be, and the next, and the next… That takes many operations that only a computer could make. They went even further. They made fractals in 3 dimensions and music fractals.
After this discovery we found fractals everywhere in nature. They are in cauliflowers, ferns, mountains, lighting, our circulatory system…. For more than 5000 years we were eating cauliflowers, looking at ferns, climbing mountains and afraid of lightning and nobody realized that we were surrounded by fractals. That does not make us look very bright - Does it?
The association of opposites
Let’s start with a circle and a straight line. One is limited. The other is infinite. Our DNA combines them both. That does not prove anything. It is only a clue that we can follow. Our two hands are the mirror image of one another. They are made to work together.
Our brain is associated with our nervous system. One brain inside bones with a spherical shape is associated with many nerves, outside the bones with elongated shapes.
We are surrounded by associations of opposites like we are surrounded by fractals.
We associate life with movement. The cycles of our atoms could be part of the implementation of life on earth.
- Some opposites are more difficult to see than others. For instance, there is an association of opposites between the blood circulating in your veins and the leaves of a tree. The blood in your veins is red because it has iron that attracts the magnet. Red and green are complementary colors. The leaves of the trees have chlorophyll that is green because it has magnesium that repulses the magnet. Your blood circulates. The chlorophyll does not. Blood is inside your body. Chlorophyll is outside the plants...
One association of opposites does not mean much unless you can find many more…. Let’s keep digging.
- Ovule and spermatozoa. There is only one ovule, it moves slowly, it is circular and one of the bigger cells of the body. There are millions of spermatozoa. Their shape is a straight line, and they move fast. They are very small. Ovule and spermatozoid are obviously made for each other.
- Body and soul. Our body belongs to the material world that is only 5% of reality. Our main senses (vision and hearing) are very limited. Our soul is a way to escape the limitations of the body.
The outside of the body is connected to the center of the soul. This is what makes touching important and gives you goose bumps.
- Our life is a compromise between two extremes. We cannot survive alone. To live in society, we must abandon some of our freedom. In a democracy, the individual has all the right but must delegate some of his rights to the government. Everybody must drive on the same side of the road. On the other hand, we want to preserve our freedom. We want to live the life of an individual. Nobody else can live our life for us.
-Our life is divided between time awake and time asleep. When awake we are conscious and have full memory of our life in the material world. When awake we are not conscious and have no memory of what happened.
- Our conscious mind is in the domain of experiments and science. Our unconscious mind is the domain of feelings and direct knowledge. Men have their center of gravity in the conscious mind. Women have their center of gravity in the unconscious. Sexes are an association of opposites made to work together.
-We spend most of our life being free inside limits. We created our zoos in our image.
If you are looking for associations of opposites, chances are that you will not find them. If you are open-minded without looking for them, you will see them everywhere. That means that you will find them with your intuition rather than your thinking.
...and all the rest:
After the fractals and the association of opposites and the Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio you may wonder what else exists around us, waiting to be discovered. What we can learn from fractals and opposites is that intuition is a better tool than thinking to investigate the architecture of Nature. That may not seem to be very scientific but who cares, as long as it works?