Fractal God Part 2 - An Emergent Spirituality for our Collective Evolution
If you Never fit In to the world around you, or you always knew there was something more, read on. This one's for you...
How to Belong
Brene Brown has said that in order to belong, you have to be yourself in a way that's accepted. If you're being yourself and getting rejected, that's not where you belong. If you fit in by hiding your true colors, that's not where you belong. Spending a lot of time feeling that you don't belong can make it seem like there's just something wrong with you. Why? Because we're built to belong. It's part of our survival and how we thrive.
We live in a consumeristic society that tries to convince us thousands of times each day that something's wrong with us, and we can fix it or mask it in order to belong, in order to feel loved... if we buy what they're selling. But if you're tired of living in that world, done believing that shit, and wanting an new vision for how the universe truly is, I offer you this one to try on. Read the whole way through for a new spiritual perspective plus a sense of purpose, and see if you belong here.
Starting with the Basics
Our entire universe is made up of fractals. Fractals are the mathematical shapes that create trees, rivers, mountain scapes, galaxies, and even us. (read Fractal God part 1.) It is the geometry we didn't learn about in school. Everything in nature that seems chaotic - leaves blowing every which way, waves washing in and out of shore - actually has a measurable, mathematical equation, aka pattern, to it.
Each fractal equation recreates its own pattern and shape - getting smaller and smaller, and also getting larger and larger, looking similar at each "zoom". In other words, fractals are self-similar and iterating on infinite scales through time and space.
Think about a tree. If you start at the trunk you see the tree's main shape. Zoom into a limb and pretty soon it appears as though you're looking at a mini trunk, with the same basic tree pattern. Zoom in farther to one of the branches, and you repeat the process again - more mini trees. Zoom out far enough and a forest canopy has the same patterns as leaf clusters from a single tree. (Same goes for rivers running into streams into tributaries, and you might even notice the shape the entire system takes looks suspiciously tree-like too.)
You are a Fractal
Your human life is self-similar and iterating on infinite scales through time and space also. In space, our bodies typically have a main trunk with 5 limbs (arms, legs, and head). Each limb has 5 branches (fingers and toes).
Remember, self-SIMILAR isn't self-exact, there's always room for variation and exception in the fractal world. Iterating through time, trees plant seeds and grow new similar-but-not-exact versions of themselves to live on into the next generation. Humans mix DNA with partners and raise children, similar yet new versions of themselves carried forward in time. The cycle of reproduction is itself the living essence of mathematical self-similar iteration. It gives the term "family tree" new meaning.
It's not enough to just call each tree or each river or each human its own fractal though, because fractals are growing infinitely larger too. That means we are simultaneously a "trunk" - the basis of a fractal pattern, which has smaller limbs emerging from it - and a "branch" - growing out of a larger pattern that we are just one part of. Everything we see in ourselves is repeating somehow in smaller and larger ways around us. Everything we call metaphor is actually the universal fractal of our awareness repeating itself in new ways.
The Fractal Evolution of Growth
One fractal pattern we see in nature (the universe) is matter and information organizing itself into revolving and relating clusters. Atoms join to make molecules, molecules join to make cells, cells join to make organs and organisms. organisms join to make tribes and packs. Each of these clusters is a different sized scale of the same principle of grouping or cooperation. Each new level-up of grouping creates higher functioning and consciousness because it's more complex. If we continue this grouping trend up one more level, then just like we are both a "trunk" with smaller branches and a "branch" of a larger tree, each human is like a cell within the larger body of humanity. Collectively we human "cells" make up the next level of functioning and consciousness - a superorganism of humanity.
Darwin's Law: Competition or Cooperation?
Psychologically, our brains are wired to create an individualistic self-understanding. We know and take care of the cluster of cells we call our own body and fight off similar groups that want the same resources (competition). Without that awareness this cell group wouldn't function properly and it would die. It's awareness of the human-self-scale that keeps us alive.
And our brains are ALSO wired to exist in a state of altruistic hive consciousness. A self-understanding that is connected to and one with all things (cooperation at its fullest). Anyone who has altered their predominant brain functioning through meditation, substances, selfless actions, stroke, religious experience, being in a unified crowd, fasting, music, or other flow states can attest that this state is not only possible but blissful, even spiritual. Time spent in connective states to something larger than ourselves - whether it be a cause we care about, a group of like-minded people, or nature - has been shown to reduce stress, and increase happiness, purpose, and belonging. Because as fractal creatures it is literally built into our nature to belong, like a branch, to find the trunk we call home.
In Darwin's the Evolution of Man, he actually mentions cooperation 10x more frequently than competition as a driving force in all evolution. Both are needed at different moments, and we have become who we are because of the dancing paradox.
Cells Have Intuition Too
Cells exchange information and nutrients 4 billion times per second in a functioning body. 4 billion times per second, micro-fractal pieces of you figure out exactly where to go, where to stay, what to give, what to receive, and what enemy cells to fight off to keep you healthy, all somehow "without consciousness", at least not that scientists firmly understand and believe.
So how DO our cells know where to go? They receive signals from the brain, from other cells, and from within their own DNA to direct them. In a word, they have impulses: from above, below, and within. It is simultaneously these physical exchanges in the body/brain that create our human consciousness, and that human consciousness that directs the physical exchanges. Neither would survive without the other and yet both emerge from each other.
If we are indeed selves AND cells, then we are simultaneously co-creating and being directed by some larger superorganism that we live within. Some people call it the System, the Field, or Collective Consciousness, some people call this larger thing by a religious name, others call it Nature. I call it all of the above, but most of all, I call it Fractal God.
We are the Neurons in the Brain of God
If Fractal God is the super organism that we live within (or perhaps this organism it itself currently emerging), then we are living inside a new body we never saw before. We are literally the cells that make up the consciousness of the level-up of organizational grouping. Imagine, do the cells within your own body have awareness of YOU? In what way? They certainly hear from your requests and intentions through electrical signals, and receive nutrients and experiences from you that shape their movements.
Could our own intuitive impulses and truest desires be like the Fractal God's nervous system sending requests and information to us from its decentralized consciousness? What if we really are the physical neurons of the brain of God, or the actual "body of Christ"? What if hearing from the Great Spirit is so much more alive and interconnected than we ever imagined?
Finding Your Purpose
For our Fractal God body to be at its healthiest, each cell inside it - each of us humans - must be allowed to do their part for the collective whole. Each human is born with their purpose already encoded into DNA, made real by responses to environmental stimuli, co-signaling where in the "body" they belong at any given time. If we want to find our place in the world, we must trust that who we actually are is already the "cell" we're meant to be, and then follow those intuitive impulses toward our destiny - toward where Fractal God needs us and where we enjoy being most.
We spend so much time comparing ourselves to other cells. Imagine a heart cell, whose main strength and joy in life is to pump - contract and release - tries to belong in the arm instead. All the little arm cells around her keep yelling "Stop that! You're spasming again! There's something wrong with you!" Little heart cell feels terrible about herself, why can't she just fit in? Because she is not meant to be an arm. She is meant to beat to the rhythm inside her - it is actually vital for the whole system to stay alive.
In Fractal God, everyone has a place and nothing is wrong, so we get to look at the system and find out where we belong, to do the job we were born to do. And once we land in the right place, everything that was "causing problems" suddenly becomes our greatest gift to the world.
Our Evolutionary Path: An Experiment
A scientist once took individual bacteria cells and placed them into petri dishes to observe how they would grow. As the cells multiplied, each bacterium behaved individualistically, searching for food and competing with others. The fittest bacteria survived and reproduced like the good fractals they were. Until one day when the petri dish hit carrying capacity and the food was all gone.
Each petri dish responded in one of two main ways. Either the bacteria remained competitive and individualistic, fighting and killing others to be on top, or they evolved and began working together in new cooperative ways, sharing and creating resources for their symbiotic groups. The cells who competed depleted their resources destroyed themselves, while the cells who cooperated survived and created better functioning systems for a sustainable and cooperative new system.
Humans are like cells and Earth is our petri dish. Over the course of our history we have survived by forming more and more complex groups and destroying outsiders. From hunter-gatherer tribes to villages to states and countries, we have at every stage felt the fractal grouping mechanism of cooperation AND the fractal fitness mechanism of competition, just like our own cells. They are both hardwired into our brains because they've both helped us survive in the past.
But we are in a situation we've never been in before. Our petri dish is full. The earth is at max population and we are running through resources faster than they can replenish.
We have reached our human experiment's tipping point, and we have two options, just like the bacteria in petri dishes: Evolve again to cooperate and share resources sustainably and globally, or die fighting.
How to Join the Movement
Everything wants to heal itself, whether it's a cell, a body, or a community. Our Fractal God organism is going through a massive healing and evolving on every scale at once right now. We humans are literally being born with the DNA and impulses to move toward global cooperation and sustainability because that is what the Organism needs for its own survival.
If you know you're a part of this evolution, all you need to do is listen to the impulses - your intuition. A combination of DNA, responses to your environment, and signals from the Collective - are leading you to the right places, at the right times, for the right events to unfold. Imagine that gut decision you made or serendipitous moment you experienced, because you listened once. Now imagine if you lived your whole life that way, and so did everyone else. Imagine if we healed ourselves and Fractal God by trusting our own 4 billion intuitive exchanges again.
Tipping point moments have always emerged in evolutionary/fractal growth - this one is special for us because we can be self-aware as it's happening and choose to co-create it.
Fractal God - the idea of belonging to and within an emergent (iterative), interconnected, self-similar, organismic intelligence - means simply that we are nature and divine. This idea has implications in every area of life, from our personal growth to our relationships, from our economics to our infrastructure, and from our purpose to our cultural mythos.
Not only does living and working from this paradigm help us evolve and survive our petri dish / Spaceship Earth tipping point, it creates the opportunity for more vibrant lives we didn't know were possible.
When we move from the tipping point to the connected culture, the chance to enjoy life, heal our bodies, love our relationships, help our communities from a place of joy, and truly know that we belong - is all present. The next blogs will be all about how Fractal God and Connection Culture apply these topics and more.