Perspective

Quite a while back I chanced across an automated slide-show titled “Secret Worlds: The Universe Within.” The title is a little lame, but the experience is not. The merit of this project is to enlarge our perspective, an activity fit for that day of the week reserved for contemplation. There are many dimension to reality, but the physical is certainly the one our eyes can’t help but contemplate. This show illustrates in images the Hermetic “As above, so below.” I urge all who see this post to take the tour and click through to see for themselves. The link is here.

For those who didn’t scroll down to the bottom of the page, I note that credit for this innovative view of our fractal universe belongs to Michael W. Davidson and the Florida State University, the joint copyright holders.

The idea for digging up this site—it took me a while to reconstruct the processes of mind that first produced it and to find the two- or three-word strategy I used in my search then—came to me while I was clearing a vast jungle of neglected growths in our back yard. Whenever I do that, and I am in touch with nature, handling branches and weeds and the dried out detritus of the last season still clinging to the soil and forming mats through which the new emerges; and then, always, I’m reminded of the stupendous complexity of everything, living or not—and who’s to say where living yields to dead? Relentless branchings and branchings of branchings of branchings—and looking at the tips of the tiniest things, catching my breath, I realized that I’ve not even begun to see. There’s much, much more, as the ads keep telling us—and so also the world.