Everything is everything.
As above, so below.
Rome falls a hundred times while you vacuum your carpets. It’s simply your job to notice.
I’m something of a math guy. While I’d never call myself a “mathematician”, I know my way around a differential equation and am not unfamiliar with a tensor field. Unlike much of Science (an enterprise devoted to producing endless facts without producing corresponding knowledge) sometimes mathematics really does advance the capacity for human understanding. Several such advancements could be cited over the past hundred years. Chaos theory for example, or the many advancements in knot theory over the 20th century. Today I would like to examine Scripture through the lens of another of these mathematical advances. Namely, fractals.
The simplest definition of a fractal is a construct that is a) infinitely complex and b) self similar across scale. Point A is easy enough to understand I suppose, but perhaps point B needs a minute of explanation.
To be self similar across scale means that, as you zoom in (or out) and inspect a thing at various levels, it will exhibit essentially the same structure throughout. Trees are a great example. If you break off a small twig from a branch and compare it’s shape and structure to that of the tree as a whole you will find the two are remarkably similar. In other words, the smallest bit of a thing contains within it all the characteristics of its larger whole. Rivers are like that too as are neurons and blood vessels and even many things that we might consider “artificial” like economic systems and social hierarchies. If you have the eyes of a poet and ponder the question long enough, the universe itself takes on a fractal quality, and who can say how deep that quality goes? Is it coincidental that an atom looks like a solar system looks like a galaxy, or is Nature drawn repeatedly to the same forms and patterns? Are you drawn repeatedly to the same forms and patterns? Is your individual life a fractal of the whole of the cosmos, perhaps even a miniature portrait of the divine story?
It is.
That’s how you’re supposed to read the Bible.
People have spent the better part of two thousand years arguing about whether or not the Bible is meant to be read literally or allegorically. The answer is always both. You’re supposed to see the story of The Fall, or The Flood, or, for present purposes, of The Exodus, as real concrete things that happened in history. Yes. But at the same time, you must understand them as patterns of existence. Patterns which will inevitably play themselves out in your own life.
And trust me.
They will.
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