Fractals and Dill Weed

A fractal pattern is one that replicates itself at larger and smaller versions of itself. It's the same story, only bigger, or smaller, over and over again. In that way, fractals are like myths. Some myths are God-sized and angel-sized, other myths are replicated at a smaller, human level.  The Fall and Redemption of Tiger Woods is a recent, newsworthy version of a  myth at the human level. But every person replicates fractal myths in their lives; every archetypal story is a fractal. Young love, tragic breakups, Falls from grace and favor, triumph in sport and war--these are fractal myths played out in every life.

The dill weed below shows us several levels (iterations) of fractal patterns that looks like an explosion of golden fireworks. The first iteration is the mother plant and all of her branches of flowers. 

The Second iteration of the fractal is the explosion at the tip of each branch, producing a bundle of fireworks flowers

The Third iteration of the fractal is the explosion of each flower.

The Fourth iteration of the fractal is the little flower at the tip of each bundle.

The Fifth iteration of the fractal is the tiny spike coming out of each little flower. 

A possible Sixth iteration is the flattened spatula at the tip of each spike that may flower out in the explosion.

My Appearance on Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio

On Friday, June 28, I was the guest of Miguel Conner on his Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio program. Aeon Byte can be heard on all popular podcast platforms as well as on youtube. 

This was my first interview regarding my new book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated. It's good to watch it on YouTube, because we run the illustrations during the program and I explain the visual symbology.

If you have any follow-up questions regarding The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated or The Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything, please feel free to leave me a comment here.

Gnostic Gospel Illuminated and Animated

Four years ago I posted this Power Point "animation" to youtube. Hard to believe I  had made these illustrations by then and put them into this animation. It is as if someone else did all of this work for me and now it's here and ready to go. 

Now that I have written the book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, I can assure you that if you read the book, you will be able to follow the animation above. I've used the same conceptual illuminations throughout the book. The only difference is that in the book the words don't fly onto the page and there are more of them, with plenty of time to ponder their meaning.

This animation is slightly edited from the version that has been up and running since 2015. Only today I noticed one single illustration that has evolved over the past four years, and so I made the change. I won't tell you what it is, in case you would like to view the previous video and compare to this one. It will be like a "Where's Waldo?" of Gnostic visions. How's that for an esoteric challenge?

A Gnostic Perspective On Consciousness and Christianity

I just wrote and posted this as a comment on consciousness and Christianity over at the Skeptiko forum, but it seems too juicy to keep it from here. 

Is it possible for the Christian mythos to be in any way truthful and factual? Sure. But I'd say the Christian mythos that most closely resembles reality as we know it would be the Gnostic mythos, and it was weeded out of the canonical Bible and thrown away in 300 AD. I used to think the Pope and Emperor weeded it out for the good of the faithful, but now I realize they weeded it out for their own power to reign supreme. Yes, they left a lot of good in, but they weeded out the logos that makes the religion reasonable. So no wonder it looks superstitious and shallow. Thank God the Gnostic truths were buried out in the Nag Hammadi desert and resurrected intact during WW2. They have literally been protected from hundreds of years of theological misinterpretation.

I've been chewing this particular Gnosis over for about 50 years. See if this intrinsically coherent Gnostic Christian narrative is more satisfying to the Skeptik than the Orthodox view. I think it is, but it is no less Theistic, so if that's your quibble, I can't help you there. I think in order to understand Gnosis, one must start with a willing heart. If you hate God, then it is very difficult to appreciate Gnosis. Here goes:

According to the Tripartite Tractate Nag Hammadi book, we start with an underlying matrix of consciousness. (So, right off the bat, this ancient book acknowledges transcendent, undifferentiated consciousness.) This illimitable consciousness thought of a particularity, which became a fractal representation of the illimitable. This first fractal is called The Son. The Son immediately fanned out like rays from a light into an infinite number of particularities. The moment the particularities became conscious, because they, too, were fractals of the illimitable consciousness, they named themselves in order to know themselves. This naming had the effect of sorting themselves into a hierarchy of names, stations, ranks, positions, and powers. These are the Aeons, also known as the Pre-existent Church and the Elect, also called the First Order of Powers. The Aeons live in a place called the Pleroma, or the ALL, or the Fullness. Altogether, the Aeons of the Fullness represent the infinity of potentialities. They are of one accord, being simply the names of the qualities of their Father, who is called the Son of the originating One. This is the entire sum of the hidden knowledge of Gnosis that so frightened the Emperor and the Pope. We can catch glimpses of this cosmology, the Father, the Son, and the Aeons, in the canonical Bible, but not enough was left intact to make sense of it. Now we know.

The Aeons of the Fullness dream one dream that they ALL share. This is the dream of Paradise, which was the original Thought that set the whole ball rolling. The Aeons dream exactly as we dream, except they all share the same dream. This is a place we are also familiar with, we humans in our dreams. It is the foretaste of Heaven. It is the fragrance of Utopia. It is the place where we can fly. We all know it, according to the Tripartite Tractate. 

Then various things happen, an Aeon overreaches and wisdom becomes presumptuous thought. The Aeon Falls from the perfection of the Fullness. The Aeon breaks apart and little pieces of it become the seed of our material universe. The Aeons above in the Fullness dream up a Second Order of Powers that carry their Aeonic traits into this material plane. All archaea of our planet are Second Order Powers. It was decided that all of the Aeons would come to earth to clean up the mess and restore perfection to this creation that occurred because of the Fall. Every thing on earth contains innumerable Aeons instantiating consciousness into the mud. Our fables and Bible stories tell fractal stories of all lives; the same stories over and over and over again. They are real and they are metaphors. We are the children of angels; we are angels. We are all Fallen and need redemption.

The Christ Consciousness, according to the Tripartite Tractate, is the Third Order of Powers. The Christ Consciousness was designed to be the correcting algorithm for the Second Order Powers who'd been ensnared in the deception of the material delusion, also called the Imitation. Imitation of what? Imitation of the Paradise dreamed by the Aeons of the Fullness. The Christ is like a computer clean-up code that must be inserted in order to do its work of Redemption. Every soul needs to remember their eternal heritage in order to shake off this material plane and return to the Fullness. 

Here's where Jesus of Nazareth comes in--this was a human who carried the perfected Third Order Power of Christ into our material plane, and co-existed with the human genome donated from the mother. Fully God. Fully Human. First Adam perfectly incarnated. In this manner, all of the infinity of the ALL was at last incarnated, completing the cycle of coming one-by-one to our material plane. It wasn't so much Christ's sacrifice on the cross that took away the sins of the world, but his incarnation as a human and his personal Aeonic experience of separation, despair, and death. I think the emphasis is on the cross as a shape of top-to-bottom/spirit-to-mud and side-to-side/ALL inclusive.And what it means to be Redeemed by Christ as a pre-requisite to going to Heaven, well, yes, the Christ incarnated for the salvation of the ALL, and that includes us, but also the dogs and cats, and the trees and grasses. You name it. Jesus saves. Obviously the mission is larger than our belief in it or our capacity of comprehend the fullness.

You can read a much more detailed and coherent account (fully illustrated) in my own book called "The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated". It's all there.

A Simple Explanation of the Multiverse--"What is possible is actual"

My brother, Bill, and I have been kicking around the implications of an infinite set of multiple universes. The discussion began with his discomfort over the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics--that infinite multiple parallel universes branch off from every random quantum outcome of our universe. 

My reply was that it didn't bother me to think of infinite dimensions branching off of what we call reality, because the metaverse is infinite, and we rest inside of it, so there's plenty of room, so to speak. Also, since there are infinite dimensions wrapped around us, any point in our universe can map outward wherever it wants to go.

After a couple of days and a couple of phone calls, Bill called me all excited after experiencing an Insight. "Modal logic!" he declared. Then he proceeded to tell me many things about modal logic that I barely followed, because I majored in Rhetoric rather than Philosophy. (I manipulate words and diagrams as symbols, while he is comfortable manipulating logic and math symbols.) 

Once he started speaking English again, Bill said, "Modal logic talks about possibility and necessity. I realized this morning a new proposition that answers our inquiry! It's: 'What is possible is necessarily actual under an infinitely many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics!'"

We humans say it all the time: "What can be done will be done." As if it were a universal law. And of course it would be a universal law, because it's a fractal meme, isn't it? After all, if it can be said, it has been said--again a universal fractal meme.

If the universal consciousness thought up the algorithm that became our bounded universe, and that originating consciousness is infinite and illimitable, then there is a necessity for the infinities of consciousness, time, and space to be expressed in infinitely branching possibilities. 

This interpretation fits nicely with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and complements string-theory notions of Hilbert space.

Read the Simple Explanation of the Fractal, Conscious Universe here.

Simplicity is not Reductionism, repost from 2015

This article was originally posted in August of 2015, but I think maybe it was left off of the Topical Index, so you may not have read it. I've slightly updated it today by adding a couple of sentences.

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Every once in a while, someone I'm talking with reacts poorly to the very notion that complex concepts should or could be simplified--as if this Simple Explanation blog contributes to "dumbing down" science, philosophy, religion, and metaphysics. "Your theory is nothing but pure fantasy and speculation," I hear them say.

Well, I've got news for them-- All axioms are fundamentally unprovable. This is true in science, in logic, and in math. Fundamental propositions are assumed to be true. All of these axioms are in fact intuitive. So the criticism that the Simple Explanation is intuitive is a false criticism, as the same can be said of all science, logic, and math. According to U.C. Berkeley's Understanding Science website: 

"All of science is based on a few fundamental assumptions that transcend any individual experiment or study."

Understanding Science goes on to explain that, while the fundamental propositions may be assumptions, they generate testable hypotheses that can verify the assumptions. The Simple Explanation is not unscientific--it verifies its hypotheses through observation and by mining other people's research findings, amply demonstrating its theoretical robustness.

I talked this over with my brother, Bill, the philosopher, and he felt it was very important to explain the difference between "simplicity" and "reductionism." So here goes.

Simplicity is not reductionism. 

Simplicity as I use the term involves stripping away layers of linguistic and cultural particulars to reveal underlying universal patterns. According to the Simple Explanation, once memes are lifted out of their familiar linguistic and cultural expressions, their universal applicability can be readily discerned.

I have found that limiting the specificity of nouns raises the applicability of the concept. For example, I could say, "All people reach out to others to work together on projects they could not accomplish alone." But when I word it as "All units of consciousness reach out to others to work together to build the next level up," suddenly the Simple Golden Rule applies to atoms and cells as easily as it does to people.

Reductionism, on the other hand, narrows the focus of exploration by pursuing information from smaller and smaller objects, as in the way physicists look for ever smaller particles and wave forms to explain the composition of our universe. Hand in hand with this pursuit is the assumption that an object can be reduced to its tiniest components and that this will reveal its underlying nature.

I'm happy to see that according to wikipedia, Bill and I are not alone in our distrust of reductionism. Apparently reductionism doesn't go over so well with ecologists or systems theorists, because interactive systems can't be described by their smallest objects but must be described in terms of relationships and interactions. From the wiki article on reductionism: "Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems theory embrace a non-reductionist view of science, sometimes going as far as explaining phenomena at a given level of hierarchy in terms of phenomena at a higher level, in a sense, the opposite of a reductionist approach.^[24]"

So, while conventional science believes itself to be thoroughly pursuing truth through reductionism, the Simple Explanation would say it is more like they are trying to describe the haystack by counting the number of its molecules. Yes, it is a measurable result, but meaningless.

Again, from wikipedia: "Methodological reductionism is the position that the best scientific strategy is to attempt to reduce explanations to the smallest possible entities. Methodological reductionism would thus hold that the atomic explanation of a substance's boiling point is preferable to the chemical explanation, and that an explanation based on even smaller particles (quarks and leptons, perhaps) would be even better. Methodological reductionism, therefore, is the position that all scientific theories either can or should be reduced to a single super~theory through the process of theoretical reduction.

Here at the Simple Explanation, simplicity means "elegance"--the simplest theory that explains the most evidence. But unlike methodological reductionism, the Simple Explanation does not restrict truth to the tiny.The simplicity pursued by the Simple Explanation is of an entirely different kind--a true theory of everything looks for the underlying reality of our cosmos, irregardless of where it is to be found.