There is no doubt about it, we are stuck in a cyclical way of being that was set in motion by neoliberal game theorists. Their way of thinking that imagined a simplistic view of the world based on selfish individualism failed to imagine the consequences of such narrow bandwidth of believing. With the deliberate curtailment of joined up progressive thinking, capitalist realism entropies into the downward spiral of now. To escape the symptomatic death-grip of dysphoria and health crisis, we must imagine ourselves into different ways of being. Together we can rediscover humanity that break us free of the economic structures that hold our minds back with dogma.
In quantum physics, consciousness and matter are inseparable. How we perceive and measure the material world is in some way or another impacted upon by how we project our powers of observation. Psychiatrist and author Iain McGilchrist suggests that consciousness builds models of understanding shaped by such observation. Past experiences and prior knowledge inform expectations of current and future events, interacting with the world, changing it. Our world is socially constructed by models of understanding, created by pre-existing ways of life, passed between generations, reinforced by our attention. Such focus is rooted in prior experience, socialised into perceiving the world by the sociology of culture and dominant ideas. These ways of being are socialised into our consciousness via agencies of socialisation, family, peers, education, media, work, and religion, all play their part in shaping how we observe, interact and influence each other.
From a sociological perspective humanity is a social construct, built upon the transmission of ideas via cultures, that exist between groups of people that are rooted in time and space. From here we can proceed to develop an energetic approach towards social recovery and progressive societal transformation.
This approach will enable us to see beyond the dominant idea that we exist as unique manifestations of genetically transmuted individual. Although our atomistic selves are the lenses through which we experience our connection with reality, all our ideas are based on our absorption, synthesis or reaction to the norms, values, beliefs, and ideas that exist in time and space as the shared social construct we refer to as society, community, and human civilisation. To progress here, we must de-naturalise our experience of reality by taking the leap out of ourselves and into the emergent fractal universe of endless possibility.
Sociologist, C Wright Mills, argues that to understand society we must imagine social reality from as many diverse perspectives and angles as possible, by constructing polar types as opposites along various dimensions. Philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that philosophy and science has since the times of Plato sought to reduce things to a superficial level, where shapes are said to define reality where the basic building blocks of nature; tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, cube and dodecahedron. To further our understanding, we are compelled to withdraw from this socially constructed world as it appears and see behind it to a deeper reality. It is on these terms that we enter the fractal dimension to offer us a glimpse into our deeper selves and the unfolding nature of our reality.
The fractal dimension is at the cutting edge of contemporary science and at the heart of digital technology and a revolution on the way that we consider natural systems such as the functioning and structure of the human brain. For Durkheim sociological investigations should seek out social facts as if they were natural phenomena. Fractals are a natural phenomenon that can be seen in both nature and in the process of socialisation.
Fractals are distinct from the simple figures of Euclidean, geometry which describes the world in shapes such as triangles and the squares. Fractals are more accurate ways of describing how nature is constructed than traditional methods of science that define reality as ratios using rational numbers. Fractals can describe irregular shaped objects or phenomena such as coastlines, clouds, mountain ranges heartbeats, lung vessels, neurons the weather, the stock market.
A fractal is an object that displays self-similarity at all scales. The object need not be the same structure at all scales, but the same type of structures must appear on all scales. A piece of gravel looks like the rock it came from and the boulder the rock was once part of. The cliff that the bolder fell, which looks like the boulder, reflects a similar shape of the mountain from which all are taken as is reflected in the pattern of the mountain range. The veins on tree leaves look like the twigs that they grow on, like the branches are smaller self-similar shapes to the whole trees, root tip to tree top. The same is true in the human body where the lines on one’s hands are like the arteries that carry blood that transmit chemical energy impulses through similarly shaped fractal brain connectivity. Moving between each of these scales the towards greater degrees of magnification the shapes maintain rugged degrees of self-similarity. Fractal objects therefore are composed of structures that are nested within one another, each one a miniature, though not usually identical, version of the larger form.
The term fractal was defined by Mathematician and polymath Benoit Mandelbrot, from the Latin word fractus – fragmented, when in the late 1970s and early 1980s Mandelbrot set out to try and define the point at which material reality exists by applying his attention to the coastline paradox. This is age old mathematical problem that argues that the length of a coastline such as that of Britain varies depending on the scale in which it is measured. From a distance it can be measured in miles and kilometres using an odometer. From closer up the edge of land mass can be measured as it reaches the sea with a tape measure in metres, feet and inches around the edge of rock pools meet ocean. From even closer you Mandelbrot applied the concept of fractal dimension rationality to explain how the length of natural and biological shapes change at scale. In the fractal dimension fractal patterns change with the scale it is measured.
Mandelbrot drew upon the work of mathematician and polymath , Lewis Fry Richardson who amongst other things developed the foundational maths of contemporary weather forecasting and how such equations might prevent wars. The paradox provides empirical evidence that the measured length of any coastline increases infinitely as the measurement scale decreases towards zero. The more accurate the device used to measure , the closer you get to the true length around the edge. however, the closer measurement does not result in an increase in accuracy—the measurement only increases as it is impossible to ascertain the maximum value for the length of a coastline. In three-dimensional space, the coastline paradox can be applied to the idea of fractal surfaces where the area of natural and biological surfaces vary depending on the measurement resolution. A fractal is an object that displays self-scales. the object need not be the same structure at all scales, but the same type of structures must appear on all scales. This is the way of societal enculturation.
The fractal dimension is at the cutting edge of contemporary science and at the heart of digital technology and a revolution on the way that we consider natural systems such as the functioning and structure of the human brain. It is from within our minds we have the power to change our world for the better by planting the seed from which new patterns of life shall grow. We must see ourselves as active creators of a more humane social reality, so tell the world of your great ambition. Fractals are a natural phenomenon that can be seen in both nature and in the process of socialisation.
In divided brain theory, Iain McGilchrist, former Oxford literary scholar, our material world is socially constructed by a brain divided in two parts that are left open, to accommodate our growing awareness offered by new experiences and ideas, whilst simultaneously economising on our responses to the physical demands, challenges and threats of everyday existence. To his end it is proposed that the dominant functions of the human brain are divided into different and complimentary modes of thinking, one which is open to new stimulus, experiences and multidimensional ways of becoming, and the other that seeks to flatten down externalities into simplified models of understanding, upon which we can build simplified ways of being that might at first appear to serve us.
Divided brain theory proposes that the left-hand side of the brain is cognitively tasked with creating models of behaviours, thoughts and actions that are extracted from life events, data sets and social conditioning. This side of the brain is fundamentally different from its opposite side as it is motivated my facts and details about the world that make the world more predictable and easier to navigate than if each experience was viewed, interpreted an acted upon without prior knowledge. This bit of the brain is rooted in a more essential way to the age-old problem faced by every single one of our ancestors, that is whether to fight or flight.
The other side of the brain is more of an open book that is always scanning the horizon for new information, experiences and ways of perceived stimulus. This right hemisphere is where our emotional responses are chemically triggered, in more sophisticated and socially ways. It is from the right-hand side of our heads that we can change our point of view by looking at the bigger picture or other points of view.
Between these two complimentary parts of the whole, we are able to live in the complexity of the world. The Divided Brain theory suggests that both sides of the brain are deeply interconnected which is a key feature of our potential to learn from the past, operate efficiently without giving everyday actions much thought and yet adapt to new ideas and grow towards different modes of thought. The emotionally open and compassionate right side of the brain can open the left sides models of reality, to real life drama, human pain, happiness and anxiety.
The left hemisphere of the brain’s main purpose is to simplify the information that is presented to it by the options and information presented to it by the right-hand side of the brain. On a simplistic level, the right side of the brain is aware of a shape that looks like a tiger, which the right quickly reacts to and swiftly gets the body ready to fight or flight. Information ascertained from the everyday mundane and challenging complexities of life experiences are mediated between both the possibility of knowing, and the ultimately illusionary nature of social reality, a self-selected, culturally prejudiced, social construction. According to my understanding of this proposal of greater understanding, the left-brain constructs models of knowing based on its purpose to make concrete a world which the right-brain knows is infinite and unknowably complex.
McGilchrist suggests that the true reality of anything is unknowable if magnified. This is where the fractal dimension pushes into our consciousness the magic of the never-ending kaleidoscope of potentiality, the forever inward and outward nature of expanding multitudes of universes. Within this moment of clarity, our ideas might converge for a moment on this word, and then spiral away into a million and one different places.
This fractal dimension might be a metaphor used, to describe the left of the minds attempt to extract meaning from everything in bight sized pieces of quantitative data from the world used to build models of understanding. The more data that can be extracted and analysed rationally, the more complicated the data becomes. For the more information we are exposed to the more that our consciousness becomes aware of it ability develop deeper and more complex understanding of things, events, people, places and ideas. For example, the more you know about a person’s background and life experiences the more you feel that you know them.
Our closeness to someone increases the landscape of their identity and the flow of experiences, people and places they have been. The same is true of all forms of knowledge, the more you know about a topic the more you can expand your consciousness of the strengths and weaknesses of the different ways of understanding the nature of things, the closer you get to ultimately realising the validity of any claim to truth and knowledge is always in some way flawed. This depth of understanding can keep on expanding the more you ask why and investigate the matter of anything whose roots lye in infinitely smaller and smaller forms that spiral inwards and out into the quantum universe or their plurality, where anything could and does go.
The question is then ultimately, at what point does your left-hand side decide to give up on the inclusion of new data, at what point is a forever incomplete mental map of what you know closed off to new ideas? Does this happen when a brain is full or when a culture defines enough is enough? If the right-hand side is always open to new ideas and the inclusion of wider patterns and shapes of data, then it is intrinsically linked to the forever outward patters of newer and emergent ideas, ways of being and the branching out of new growth.
This fractal version of reality unfolds new ways of sharing ideas and ways of being rooted in the lefts ability to reconfigure new models of life if imprinted with the possibility of newly developing routines of life. The blocking of these new routes are blocked by guardians of the left brain, who use the power structures of capitalism, wealth creation, accumulation and control to reduce the possibility of allowing newer ideas to set out organised ways of manifesting new worlds rooted in the computation and synthesis of creative energy flow and the unfolding of emergent collective consciousness that could threaten the dominance of those rooted in the replication of the flattened models of two dimensional thinking, rooted in the past pages of history that transcribed the ways of being and doing as acted out by the elitist education systems founded in the empires of feudalism and acted out via the control culture of educational systems that award foundational qualifications of compulsory education to be complicit in the skills or remembering things. Deeper analysis is only permitted once you are committed to internalising to your core that you are but an instrument of external knowledge systems that exist owing to their superior evolution as rooted in capitalist realist culture.
McGilchrist argues that there is “a kind of madness associated with slavish following of procedures and rules, and with imagining that life follows a sort of mechanical logic”. This is what Fisher calls capitalist realism, where the left hemispheres dominate of our social and economic reality, marginalises and medicates against, via the mass prescription of anti-depressants, the right hemispheres openness and understanding that life is way more than a primitive fight for survival in the ideological dogma of capitalist modes of social control and wealth extraction. In this contemporary moment logic is used to win the argument and dominate the most profitable forms of socially constructed social reality, where gaps in understanding are weaponised through physical power and the assertion facts and figures to silence critics and the nuances of qualitative data.
The disproportionality of negative metrics that might highlight the structural roots of social, economic, morbitity, mortality and victimology in neoliberal capitalism are atomised as individual responses. The collective voice of disadvantaged groups that might emerge are silenced by the lack of attention that left brain logic has for the messiness of sociogical factors that might illuminate the necesserity to just give everybody a break. If the machinery of power that is build into the socially construted machinery of capitalism, from, schools right through to hierarchical work structures just listeded to different perspectives and views, we might illuminate a fuller picture of this world that includes the wide open landscapes of peoples lives and not just their narrow extractions as units of work and pawns in the power struggles of those arround and above them, seaking finacial rewards and early retirement.
In this way scientific models of understanding are shaped by a consciousness built upon extracted data taken from the observable world and synthesised to create models of reality in which we can more easily exist. This way our world is created by that which we reinforce in our pre-existing ways of life that are themselves created, shaped and reinforced by our directed attention as it creates our world perception. Of course, this stands to reason, being that it speaks to the idea that we develop a greater understanding of things the more we focus on them. This ‘choice’ of focus is rooted in our prior experiences and our enculturation, where we are socialised into perceiving our world by dominant and imposed by hierarchies of gender, class and ethnicity.
We are at our core solar powered waves of chemical energy, made manifest through vibrations on a planet suspended in infinite space, into a tangible physical three-dimensional form, which has over time since existence, shape shifted into this, our current, so called ‘wise man’, homo Sapien form. As we find ourselves breathing now, our everyday thought, dream and ambition is one way or other, the materialisation of an encultured mental, physical, literal, and metaphorical landscape, upon which we project, reflect, and reinforce our identities as they unfold, from the unconscious consequences of past victories, defeats, and mistakes.
This place is in every way conceivable, the product of socially constructed shared existences, which via our unique form, developed the ability to perceive a sense we call reality, in ways that on a good day make sense. This moment is brought to us on waves of energy from the past that are projected forward to now, literally, and metaphysically via the physically human engineered shapes of ideas and beliefs, made concrete in the material world, through the built environment of offices, homes, schools, churches, prisons, museums, military bases. Inside the built environment, these waves exist in the hierarchies of interpersonal power structures at work and in the departments of academic disciplines that audit facts and fictions to meet the demands of ideas that are already in mainstream flow.
Every idea, norm of behaviour, value and belief, in fact, the vast majority of what we imagine to be real, is an expression of a fluid collective consciousness which is channelled through the landscape of ideas that already exist. If the topography of our way of life is open to the absorption in incorporation of a wide range of thought, energy streams, springs, and tributaries can lead to new ways of being, where the river of life is briming with enjoyment, self-fulfilment, constructive and meaningful community engagement. In such an energy stream new ideas can feed off each other and create new and dynamic ways of self-expression, as is the case with cultural hybridity where ethnically diverse communities focus waves of energy from around the world into expressing how this feels here and now. This can be seen through the development of all forms of contemporary music, from rock music, to bhangra, hip hop and pop.
However, if these waves of big bang cosmic energy are trapped by power structures that limit consciousness expansion, then the waters of fluid consciousness can become trapped and filled with pent up energy that is prone to lashing out with frustration at whoever or whatever is scapegoated and blamed. Once captured by the power structures of human civilisations, the canalisation of consciousness can become stagnant, stale, and poisonous, trapped in ways of life that are sedentary and morbidly meaningless. In the eddies of consciousness created by consumer culture, our thoughts turn inwards, as we sift through the supermarket of style for objectified aspirations that are metamorphosised into consumer choices. In a world where work is increasingly becoming detached from human creativity, the energy waves from our past are channelled into off the shelf ideas and throw away patterns of consumption that do nothing to feed our growing appetite for grater meaning except fill the oceans of the world with the plastic waste that is all that is left for ever as contamination in the seas and its centrality to the life giving force which is the water cycle that make our planet inhabitable.
Story telling about our past has been retold by the powerful over ages, through fairy tales, war, and the self-aggrandising of history. Primarily written and retold by those schooled in the replication of self-iterating loops of establishment self-belief, a manifestation of control written into the code of the dominant culture, those who are afforded primary roles of authority replicate past victories of dominance as knowledge and tested for compliance via educational structures. Their ability to define the centrality of their own subcultural frequency of ideas dominates contemporary cultural reality and attempts to freeze out any challenge to its right to hold authority over what becomes manifest through the infinite possibilities of unfiltered collective consciousness.
Up until now, those with the most power and economic wealth, have been gatekeeping our future and holding back new, more socially progressive thought waves and have been fundamental in the social construction of the neo colonial, neo liberal, neo feudal present. As is clear by these words that ripple from the past, we are the living iteration of a past repeating repeatedly until we break consciousness free from this loop. The aim of everything that is written here is an attempt to unlock imaginations and shape shift human existence beyond these hierarchical loops of control culture and our complicity in the suppression of greater waves of truth that are heading towards us from our collective past.
Our bodies are built on the thought waves of our past, those that motivated our every decision subconsciously or not. From all the food we have eaten, to the exercise we have or have not done, how we behaved in our past shaped our bodies now, our muscles and fat, our health and our morbidity. Everything that we are as a society is built upon the channelling of consciousness from the landscapes of our lived experiences in the past.
The fractal dimension is our symbol of radical transformation and socially progressive growth. This inspirational iterating pattern hidden in plain sight, enables us to conceptualise ourselves as dynamic agents of electrochemical energy, spiralling patterns of radical hope across the dead-end politics of binary division. We are transformative pattern forming agencies of rapid positive change, shape shifting expectations side by side with our students, brothers, sisters, and fellow citizens, we will make social inequality a recent chapter in our history books. The fractal dimension has the power to unite objective and subjective positions, reconcile contradictions, dig a bit deeper and you will find patterns of love, or lack thereof.
Our outdated, out of touch, and out of control political system falls apart and disintegrates in the corrupting hands of big money millionaires. Recursive iterations of political dogma once expressed as empire, inwardly attack the fabric of civil society with a cancerous appetite to consume more. These destructive patterns of behaviour are a negative fractal recursion, tied up in the fabric of past times. As the gap between the rich and poor grows, the power hungry and greedy, fight to keep past narratives alive by turning us against one another down a cul-de-sac culture ghost train track of a haunted past. Half-truths, alternative facts and xenophobia ghouls fool the unsuspecting into becoming trapped by an imagined past, made hyperreal in the culture war columns of the living-dead legacy media. Social reality self-replicates in the fractal dimension, whatever thoughts are seeded, we should be mindful of this as we seize control.
This understanding of the fractal dimension will offer us a useful tool by which to diagnose what is wrong and infiltrate the system. Built upon linear patterns of control and command, the true nature of reality is cut into pieces by a control culture that divides and conquers. The true nature of all of all things is an amorphous, shape shifting form of infinite interconnected intelligence and pattern weaving scope. Alas, within this system of late capitalism, ideas and actions are extracted from reality and divided to extract wealth.
Once removed from our shared state of being this extraction is written down in two dimensional form using the vocabulary of individualised thought. Wealth and poverty, worker and boss, right and wrong hope and fear, two dimensional rationality flattens expectations, trapping us in the inertia of now, a place where two flattened boxes are ticked to measure straight line progress. This binary logic traps us from realising our true potential, as the chemical energy of an evolving mind at the centre of creation. Look up! The same shapes and processes that you see in the clouds, flow through us, emotions shape our minds, as vapour particles consolidate into rain. Condensed thoughts, inform the sweat of human actions, chemical energy seeds change through direct action.
The fractal dimension is metaphorical, literal, mathematically significant and is profoundly meditative. Although it was never intended to be be here at the start of what is a highly practical piece of direct, it finds itself here after lots of thoughtful consideration.
We must no longer be oppressed by the politics of greed, which is in the most part led by people whose childhood trauma defines who they have become, a relic from the past reiterated through a private school education. For too long replicating notions of class consciousness have stifled what is economically possible, a world of abundance lies just waiting to be unlocked. Patronised by the powerful, kept hungry like guard dogs at entrance of the country estate, the most deprived communities are starved of the ingredients for cultural transformation. Instead, tied up with the chains of poverty and fed just enough to survive on a diet of “Help for Heroes” nationalism, fellow men and women given the promise of glory, for giving up their limbs.
Once illuminated by the power of our actions to open spaces for transformation, social change happens. The fractal sociological imagination comes alive, beyond all lines of thought, when it is realised that everything stems from the interconnected streaming of self-similar thoughts. Such is this collective will to power our direct-action lives and breathes outside of the carbon dioxide laden bubbles of the everyday self-perpetuating narratives of yesterday’s news, repeated again and again.
In this reality bright new perspectives can be illustrated by the mathematics of infinity, where minds manifest social movements via the mental mapping of patterns of behaviour, seeded by ideas. Imagine how your everyday actions could be illustrated by a moving beam of light, that when darkness falls, illuminates your day-to-day life as a piece of moving art. Like a multi-coloured beam of light, all of your lifestyle choices, plot a course that if recoded over decades, would represent your life, its decisions and choices as a beautiful pattern. Some aspects of the shape would be deep filled with the rich colours of many repetitions , such as the time you spend doing the hobbies you love most. Other lines will be grey or shaded in black, the colour of the times you used to sneak outside for a cigarette out back. This pattern, in its entirity is an illustration of you and of the ways of life that we share with each other. Put together with the visual illustrations of your nearest family and friends you will see how each pattern is a replicating version of each other’s patterns. When we see ourselves as active creators, we shape the way the world grows. We become the catalyst of social transformation by shaping patterns of life around us.
Terrace McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake discuss fractals. circa 1996:
Breaking free from capitalist realism
McKenna: Why not replace the Platonic models with fractal models and then say that time itself is the morphogenetic field, that it is some kind of fractal topological manifold. The repetition or the connection to past states is really accomplished through resonance within the fractal and then we have a model for resonance because it’s familiar to us from other domains of nature….in the same way that the past occupies a relationship with the future of formative anticipation, so in a fractal do early portions of it anticipate later forms, so it is like a prediction or a self-fulfilling prediction.
A fractal predicts by virtue of its past states that define what its future states will be, exactly in the same way that I imagine the morphogenetic field that defines what future states be. The fractals that have been talked about to date have been used to describe special phenomena, coastlines, molecular arrangements, distribution of flowers in a meadow, this sort of thing.
But if instead you thought of fractals as descriptors for the temporal dimension and replaced the notion that flat or slightly curved manifold with an actual fractal surface over which events were flowing and flowing over patterns that repeated themselves at many, many levels in resonance with previous similar patterns, then we begin to have a mathematical picture of how the morpho genetic field would work and you would have found a phenomenon in nature upon which to hang it by saying that time is obviously it.
It’s just that we are so engrained with Newtonianism to accept time as an abstraction as something not have equal status with the other 3 dimensions that we have overlooked this fact, and yet obviously this is the wave that’s why you would speak of the presence of the past, what then can be, but past time in the present.”
Sheldrake: Well it is past time in the present, but he fractal way if you see why I don’t like the fractal model taken to any great extreme is because any kind of mathematical modelling, given the whole nature of mathematics as it is practised, fractal mathematics is conventional paradigm in the sense that you create and equation and you generate this form.
The equation itself is not subject to evolution, its generating the same form right into the future, in other words it would be some kind of determinism based on the kind of Platonic or Pythagorean ideal form. I don’t understand that evolution is happening like that, I don’t think its this deterministic.
McKenna: Well you are right you are right, as they are presently understood, it would generate, however complicated, ultimately a determinism. I wonder if we are just not mathematically sophisticated enough to inculcate into the fractal equations, sufficient randomness within the fractal constraints to begin to get the kind of complexity we need in the real world. That would appear what is lacking is a random factor that causes the fractal equation to skew towards production of ferns and then suddenly switch over to feathers and then to river systems and then to industrial economy into something like that.
But if it can do all of these things, but as you say in a deterministic way, but maybe we don’t know enough about them yet, and maybe there maybe higher dimensional or higher order fractals with a degree of self-determinacy or autopoiesis built into them. I think this must be so because the world we’re living in must be such a world, and that we are these fractals, we are essentially three dimensional expressions of DNA, all the DNA is the same, and yet we are all different, and yet 10 of us are like any other 10 and yet different. We as human beings have the same quality and so do our cities and our nation states and the continents we inhabit in the religious systems that we’re inside of.
So it seems to me the fractal model maybe the one which holds out the greatest hope for a formalizing of the morphogenetic field. All other fields are fractal fractals, the electromagnetic field, radio waves, all of these things are found to have this quality and in fact the development of this kind of mathematics initially was in an effort to describe the field phenomenon, and that sort of thing. So then why not this one, that vastly narrows down the mathematical domain which you have to search for a formal description of the morphogenetic field. It would also yield a perfect theory of history, because that would be part of the morphogenetic field.
Sheldrake: Well I suppose that one of the problems I have is that I’m not so fascinated by mathematics. Most mathematicians think that the maths is more real than the thing it models, that equations of the universe are more real somehow than the universe, I mean they were there before it after all, they were its source, they were both prior logically and temporarily, they are the more real thing (laughter).
This is the platonic tradition, and this is alive and well…so, all mathematics tends to have (this) quality and I would think of the fields not as something which to grasp we have to model mathematically, but as much more like living things and our models would be much more and more appropriately based on an intuitive sense, a living sense of things that we actually learn from experience as living things ourselves.
So the models would be much more communicated by seeing how they correspond to our actual subjective experiences, the kind of things that we experience, through ordinary language, through the realms of the imagination, through our understanding of memories through the mind, through the power of hopes, fears, desires, fantasies, through the experience of our consciousness as the realm of the possible.
These are much the best models, the mathematics is a tiny fraction of a formalized modelling of the possible, which is constrained by very particular rules and is entirely, so far, in the whole of the history of the subject, under the aegis of the Platonic spirit. I just think to try and pin it all to that just seems somelimitation that one doesn/t need at this stage, I mean it may be helpful it may be interesting.
McKenna: My god. I see why they are alarmed now (laughter and clapping). Yes, well I am sure you’re quite right. So what you are really calling for is the rebirth of poetry
Sheldrake: And all kinds of lived experience through which we directly relate to the world, because a science which helps us to directly experience nature and actually when we walk into the wood, understand it more deeply and more profoundly than we do now.
According to ancient Chinese culture, both order and chaos are both integral to one another and opposite to each other. This ancient culture suggests that chaos is something immense and creative. This view can be found in many other ancient cultures. Without chaos there is no order. In a world where people are not allowed to express the chaos (or creative energy) then dysfunction occurs, on any terms, functionalist/ Marxist etc.
Sociologist Ivan Illich argues that consumer goods enslave people and degrades human beings into the status of detached consumer. For Illich people need tools to work with and express their creativity should give energy to the imagination. Fractals are energetic and hypnotic. They are artistic and mathematical, ordered and random. They seem to enable me to comprehend structural, interpretive and post structural accounts both in and outside of teleology can use them to understand patterns the human experience in hyperreality and the negative externalities of this mode of control as repeating patterns.
To celebrate our collective vision we will garner support around the motif of the fractal iteration. Like the swoosh tick of Nike, three lines of Adidas, or four circles of Audi, are used to trademark brand loyalty and emotion, we will make the fractal dimension our symbol of radical transformation and socially progressive growth. This inspirational iterating pattern hidden in plain sight, enables us to conceptualise ourselves as dynami agents of electrochemical energy, spiralling patterns of radical hope across the dead-end politics of binary division. We are transformative pattern forming agencies of rapid positive change, shape shifting expectations side by side with our students, brothers, sisters, and fellow citizens, we will make social inequality a recent chapter in our history books. The fractal dimension has the power to unite objective and subjective positions, reconcile contradictions, dig a bit deeper and you will find patterns of love, or lack thereof.
Our outdated, out of touch, and out of control political system falls apart and disintegrates in the corrupting hands of big money millionaires. Recursive iterations of political dogma once expressed as empire, inwardly attack the fabric of civil society with a cancerous appetite to consume more. These destructive patterns of behaviour are a negative fractal recursions, tied up in the fabric of past times. As the gap between the rich and poor grows, the power hungry and greedy, fight to keep past narratives alive by turning us against one another down a cul-de-sac culture ghost train track of a haunted past. Half truths, alternative facts and xenophobia ghouls fool the unsuspecting into becoming trapped by an imagined past, made hyperreal in the culture war columns of the living-dead legacy media. Social reality self replicates in the fractal dimension, whatever thoughts are seeded, we should be mindful of this as we seize control.
This understanding of the fractal dimension will offer us a useful tool by which to diagnose what is wrong and infiltrate the system. Built upon linear patterns of control and command, the true nature of reality is cut into pieces by a control culture that divides and conquers. The true nature of all of all things is an amorphous, shape shifting form of infinite interconnected intelligence and pattern weaving scope. Alas, within this system of late capitalism, ideas and actions are extracted from reality and divided to extract wealth. One removed from our shared state of being this extraction is written down in two dimensional form using the vocabulary of individualised thought. Wealth and poverty, worker and boss, right and wrong hope and fear, two dimensional rationality flattens expectations, trapping us in the inertia of now, a place where two flattened boxes are ticked to measure straight line progress. This binary logic traps us from realising our true potential, as the chemical energy of an evolving mind at the centre of creation. Look up! The same shapes and processes that you see in the clouds, flow through us, emotions shape our minds, as vapour particles consolidate into rain. Condensed thoughts, inform the sweat of human actions, chemical energy seeds change through direct action.