Just Blocked: Allowing the Fractal
God as a Fractal
Mind the Gap
Field Study
Fractal Flow Learning
Life Path Curriculum
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God as a Fractal
What is "God?"
God is a Fractal.
By that I mean that God has many faces and names.
Ticht Nhat Hahn wrote a book titled Call Me By My True Names.
When I was 5 I thought God was the rare patterns on the leaves and branches in rural Napa. I used to go out on scavenger hunts to fiind those leaves and branches that peaked my curiosity and took my breath away.
When I was 10 I thought God was "great" since a Jewish friend of my mom's used to sit my sister and I sometimes and read parts of the Torah, insisting at times that "God is Great." I remember repeating that over and over with my sister, and the pure repetition felt kind of pleasant, safe and grounding. We enjoyed attending Hanukkah with that family for several years. It was a bonus that the Dradels with chocolate coins inside spun in very interesting patterns.
When I was 22 and in college, I studied, amongst many other topics, History of Religion. One of my graduate student teachers put a metal chair on the table on the first day of class and asked us "what is the religion in this chair?" I noticed at that point that the seat part was made of a very generic, green plastic and wondered if, like the worm on the leaf, that could be part of God, too.
When I was 23 I read St. Augustine's Confessions over the holiday break, fell in love with that God, and cried. I bought a few bibles for people for Christmas that year.
When I was 24 Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers brought my Christian affair to an end with the PBS series about the power of myth. Campbell clearly and lucidly explained how all the different spiritual traditions were analagous to the different sides of a pyramid which all converged on one point, the life force or intelligence or essence of the life. It took me awhile to forgive Campbell for logically explaining away my brief Augustinian romance.
When I was 25 I took the Landmark Forum and a Laurel Sheif called God "a word with three letters"...in fact "Dog" backwards. Some linguist pointed out that if you just add one "o" to God, you get "Good" and that was probably why the two words were associated with each other. Oh, and add a "D" to "evil" and you get "Devil." Just semantics over history. They said that it was a semantic interpretation and that we should be careful about thinking, in general, that the "word is the thing." Someone said that God was that space of "empty and meaningless." "Hmm," I thought, "fair enough...those leaves and branches were sort of empty and meaningless."
When I was 26 and did the Vipassana 10-day meditation and lived at Green Gulch Zan Farm in 1992. After some of the meditations I felt like I melted into the floor and everyone else in pure bliss. God seemed to be around the Vipassana Center and Zen Center a lot. Those same leaves are on those properties, too, but at Vipassana you aren't supposed to get too distracted by leaves, branches, people, or the thoughts that think you.
When I was 36 and did Arete in 2002, one of the course leaders made a connection that mirrored something for me and I felt God's love for everyone in the room and felt terribly sad that we would all one day die and not exist any more in this form. I felt the tragic beauty that this earth is like a slowly sinking Titanic. Start the violins and cello.
Maybe we will become leaves or branches in our next life so that someone else might develop a curiosity about God.
Over the years I've developed an overarching, all-encompassing, visual metaphor for God--a "Fractal." Fractals are difficult to describe, just as God is difficult to describe. Fractals are beautiful patterns of order that appear from some perspectives to be chaotic. They dance between chaos and order. They have many different looks, many different names, just like God.
If you meditate on a fractal you might feel the process of Arete, you might remember the experience of Vipassana, you might see the heart of Jesus, you might feel the empty and meaningless along with the full and meaningful.
And if you look closely and between the lines and swirls of a Fractal, you will eventually see a plain green plastic chair, or the leaves and branches of nature.
God/Fractal--has many names, many descriptions, and, thankfully, appears in a variety of places and contexts.
Scott Hannon, Fractal Bridge Institute
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