Letter 1.4 - Fractals
Dear Benoit,
What do you think of these letters on the internet? It is something half-way between the traditional paper-letter and a film. In a letter your ideas are placed in a cage. Here you can leave the cage open. Click on any underlined word and you can escape and never come back.
I propose that the idea of 'letters to grandson' becomes a tradition in the family. You cannot write letters to your own children. They are too busy living their own life. They also think that they know you and have nothing else to learn from you. Let's call this bundle of letters LTG 2021 (Letters To Grandson of the year 2021). By the time you write your 'Letters to grandson', the internet may be replaced with something better. You may be able to get the gist of your life into some sweat and let it evaporate. The wind will take it around the world.
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Fractals:
They first fractals appeared in 1979 and that was only a beginning. They made us discover nature’s architecture.
There are a few things in life that cannot be put in writing. Fortunately, we have the internet. I could not tell you about fractals without a computer.
Have you watched fractals before? They are beautiful. They have colors and movement. There is something fascinating about them. Sounds, colors and movement are criteria of life. It is like watching wood burning in the fireplace or watching television. Search for 'fractals' on You Tube and you can spend many hours watching them and never finish this letter. They made some fractals in 3 dimensions. They even made music fractals.
Benoit Mandelbroit discovered the fractals using a computer to show the connection between shapes and mathematical formula. After this discovery we found fractals everywhere in nature. They are in cauliflowers, ferns, mountains, lighting, our circulatory system…. For more than 5000 years we were eating cauliflowers, looking at ferns, climbing mountains and afraid of lightning and nobody realized that we were surrounded by fractals.
That does not make us look very bright - Does it?
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Association of opposites:
The world around you is full of marvels for you to discover. The scientists will tell you about their achievements. This is only a beginning. Nature has placed many more secrets right under your nose. Look for instance at the association of opposites.
Here are some examples of association of opposites:
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- Our hands are the mirror image of each other. They are two opposites made to work together.
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- Everybody knows the opposition between light and darkness. You need light to see the darkness and you need darkness to see the light. We experience them as night and day.
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- A simple example of opposites is the association of a circle and a straight line. Combined together they make a spiral which is the shape of our DNA.
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- Some opposites are more difficult to see. For instance, there is an association of opposites between the blood circulating in your veins and the leaves of a tree. The blood in your veins is red because it contains iron that attracts the magnet. Red and green are complementary colors. The leaves of the trees contain chlorophyll that is green because it contains magnesium that repulses the magnet Your blood circulates. The chlorophyll does not. Blood is inside your body, Chlorophyll is outside the plants...
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One association of opposites does not mean much unless you can find many more…. like you can find many fractals. Let’s keep digging.
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​- Ovule and spermatozoa. There is only one ovule, it moves slowly, it is circular and one of the bigger cells of the body. There are many spermatozoa, they shape is a straight line and they move fast. They are very small. Both are obviously made for each other.
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- Body and soul. The outside of the body is connected to the center of the soul. This is what makes touching important. The body is in the material world. The soul in the immaterial...
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- Brain and nerves. There is one brain inside bones with a round shape ( The skull). There are millions of nerves, outside the bones, elongated. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body...
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- Scientists say that you don’t change the result of an experiment when you reverse time, space and electrical charges.
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- Here are some more examples: Attraction and Repulsion of magnets - Past and Future - Thinking and intuition - Matter and radiation....
If you are looking for associations of opposites, chances are that you will not find them. If you are open minded without looking for them you will find them everywhere. That means that you will find them with your intuition rather than your thinking.
...and all the rest:
After the fractals and the association of opposites you may wonder what else exists around us, waiting to be discovered. That should keep you busy for awhile. What I learned from fractals and opposites is that intuition is a better tool than thinking to investigate the architecture of Nature. That may not seem to be very scientific but who cares, as long as it works?
We already know that we have a body and a soul. Don't stop there. Keep investigating.
- We live simultaneously in two different domains. There is the material domain surrounding us with everything that we can see, touch, hear, smell... It is the scientific world where you can use ideas and make experiments and measurements.
- We also live in the immaterial domain. It is a world of feelings and direct knowledge. No need for experiments and measurements. You just KNOW when someone loves you or somebody is lying.
Our conscious mind is in the domain of ideas and experiments and science. Our unconscious mind is the domain of feelings and direct knowledge. Men have their center of gravity in the conscious mind. Women have their center of gravity in the unconscious. Sexes represent and association of opposites made to work together.
This is an over-simplification - of course. You may not approve.
It would be pretentious to decide that we are the only creature in the universe having a body and a soul. Do you think that your dog has a soul? It may be more simplistic than yours but there must be something. Do you think that the microbes in your body have a shadow of a soul? Do you think that planet earth could have a master soul? All those souls must be related to each other. The body of the microbe is inside your body and your body is part of the earth. The souls could be united like fractals inside each other.
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Let's dream:
You start with the soul of a galaxy. As you get deeper you see the soul of a solar system, followed by the soul of a planet, the souls of individuals, the souls of microbes..... like you go from the trunk of a tree to its branches and all the way down to the little veins of its leaves.
There is a marvelous world around us that we are only beginning to discover. Don't let the adults get in your way with their logic.
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Big hug
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Pepe