While I was reading a few things around chaos theory, I came across few interesting things which I would like to share with you. There are many aspects that this theory points to, like unpredictability, butterfly effect, etc. I was particularly fascinated by one crucial and universal aspect that it points to, and that is fractal. Fractal is a pattern that has no end. And interestingly enough, it repeats itself to exhibit self similarity. Benoit Mandelbrot, while explaining the theory, says:
Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, repeated without end.
Benoit Mandelbrot
This reveals the true nature of Reality. In a sense, Infinitely complex things have inherent simplicity. Our logic says generally to break a big problem into sub pieces and make it simpler to solve. Breaking into pieces, perhaps doesn’t reduce the complexity of the problem. It just gives us a mental peace and a confidence that tells us that we would be more comfortable solving a small problem! That’s it!
In another video, Ben Weis, a mathematician, talks in details about the fractals. He refers to a stanza:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in a Palm of your Hand,
And Eternity in an Hour!
William Blakes
This prompted me to read about holograms as I thought they also exhibit the self similarity property. Holograms are photographic recordings of a light field. One essential characteristic of a hologram is if you break that into pieces, every piece still manages to retain the information about the original image to a great extent. With a very small loss of information, you are able to recover the entire image! Every piece contains the entire image!
This phenomenon seems to be universal! In case of biological cell division too, the cell DNA get duplicated. We call this DNA replication. However, in this case too, the duplicated DNA is segregated into two cells each retaining the exact genetic information as that of a parent cell DNA. Wonderful, isn’t it?
There’s a Sanskrit verse which connotes the similar universal phenomenon. Just it is written some few thousand years ago! It goes like:
ॐपूर्णमदःपूर्णमिदंपूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते ।
पूर्णस्यपूर्णमादायपूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥
Om, That (Outer World) is Purna (Full with Divine Consciousness); This (Inner World) is also Purna (Full with Divine Consciousness); From Purna is manifested Purna (From the Fullness of Divine Consciousness the World is manifested)! Taking Purna from Purna, Purna indeed remains (Because Divine Consciousness is Non-Dual and Infinite)!
Finally I would like to end this by quoting my one of the most favourite poet philosophers Rumi:
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.
Rumi
Reinvent The Self! 