So this may not be a topic for everyone right now; but it is a topic for everyone, at some point. This film is on youtube, and was recommended to me. Now I am recommending it to you. This, to me, was one of the videos that made a lot of seperate hobbies, pursuits, ideas, theories and interests of mine . . . align, I suppose you could say. Watch it with an open mind, is my only advice. I'd like to get some sort of discussion started around it, but I don't know where everyone is with their particular views on existence, consciousness, spiritually etc. Feel free to troll, partake, make fun, or share in what I hope will be a wonderful conversation about our place and understanding in the universe. There are several parts, I would encourage you to watch them all.
We are simply the universe experiencing itself. I always find that to be an interesting outlook on existence. Fractals are always a subject that excite me. It's interesting how often they appear in nature, and I think that there is a lot to be discovered about their use. I enjoyed that short documentary
It has 5 parts, and @SPiEkY, sure, if that tickles your fancy. PT, I think this touches more at not that fractals are found in nature, but fractals are nature. we find more and more that things are very similar, the very theory of evolution explains it as common origin. It's touching at the fact that thing's are a self repeating/self similar pattern as what is indicated in the video.
I watched almost 20 minutes and had to stop the video after it took yet another quote of some famous scientist out of context and tried to connect it to some random eastern wisdom to conclude that everything is sound/connected/repeating. With eastern spirituality being such a big plethora of ideas and practices that it's impossible to find any outlook that doesn't have a contradicting opposing view. Using the same method you can conclude that everything is pink/communism/wood. The notion of using hard SCIENCE! to try and legitimize your spiritual beliefs is absurd to me. They're 2 concepts that don't interact. Use your spiriual concepts and reasoning as your spiritual guide. Don't muddle it up with things that have nothing to do with them.
Yeah I totally got that from watching the video, but I was simply stating how I find them to be very interesting concepts. The idea of the whole "Repeating pattern" thing being reality and the universe is part of it is also a topic that fascinates me. It could be a reason we experience deja vu and other similar phenomena. Of course, there is no way to know for sure what the universe in fact is, how it started and how it ends; as mortals we can only theorize. The same goes for the purpose of life and the next step we take after death. We can never know for sure. But this general idea reminded me of this movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1191111/ . It's called Enter the Void, and it's on Netflix. It talks about the book of the dead and relates it to this idea of an everlasting fractal or pattern being part of the natural lifestyle of everything. Then it also brings to light how your experiences in life influence where you go after you die, and reincarnation. The book of the dead is a really old philosophical book, and the movie is a modern representation. It does too relate it to the use of psychedelic drugs, however that is only a small part. If not factual the conclusion that this movie tries to portray is at least satisfying. These are topics that I always like to talk about for hours
Well I think that at some point science may(or may not) be able to describe some of these more "spiritual" concepts. As PT pointed out, as mortals we can only theorize. And that is exactly the situation, we are so limited by our perception of the universe, that we are going to miss some things. However, I don't think science and spiritual concepts are so mutually exclusive. Historically religion had been the cop-out for understanding, and now that we are better at manipulating our surroundings and understanding the cause/effect relationships, we are finding things to be much more complex/mysterious than we previous thought. For instance, the discovery of the Higgs Boson still doesn't explain gravity. I don't know if it's in the first video of the series or not, but one of the videos touches on how science is getting to a point where they'll discover these things. It may have different words getting at the same notion, which tends to be the case with our limited capacity to articulate emotion, thought,experience to each other as a species. There is a great degree of human experience that isn't easily quantifiable and easy to share with one another. This does not mean that these things are not there, and part of our society. But I will attempt to share anyhow. In my personal experiences that happened years prior to viewing this series, and the views of existence I started to form, I was (and am still) dancing around things similar to this vein of thought. I had what most would consider a near death experience, or a vivid hallucination, or . . . something. . . and in it, I saw existence, and how everything was connected. I always explained it as a bed sheet, and you pinch and pull a piece of the bed sheet through a thumb/forefinger circle; then rubber band it off. What you had rubber banded off was a person, or a tree, or a rock, or a star, depending on how much of the sheet you pulled, and at what point from you which you pulled it. In this experience I essentially plunged back through that banded off part back into the whole, and felt an overwhelming one-ness, peace and all encompassing love. A beyond this world experience that made something in me click, as though I had a peace, or understanding, and a wide degree of imagry, thought, and experience that I have not managed to find words to accurately convey. I've always taken the Occam razor approach to complex situations, and due my best to stay grounded logically/scientifically, and when you have such a vivid experience, it becomes hard to ignore. So in my particular journey of experience and knowledge, I have assembled together enough pieces of information/fact/etc to draw upon the conclusion that this series is pretty close to what is going on with humanity. In far less pretty words, we are spiritual beings, having a physical experience. Worrying less about the "why" has helped alot too.
I was going to watch it but then I discovered the secret to the universe was contained in one of the punctuation marks of your post. No, I can't tell you which one. The universe doesn't work that way. You will either find it or you want. But now you know they weren't kidding when people tell you punctuation is important. Personally, I am always intrigued by the "must stop dropping so much acid" epiphanies promised by shows like this. However, I also accept that I don't have the discipline or passion to learn anything important with any sort of rigor anymore. The vibration thing was interesting since it means The Beach Boys are WAT more important than any of us appreciated. edit: I may have meant WAY more important but WAT seems to excite Dagda so much I think I may have meant WAT all along.
Gravity is one of the greatest mysteries of the scientific world, and I think that with simply the knowledge that we are able to posses we will never fully understand it. I think one theory that fits into this discussion and can reallyhelp us get a perspective on how complex the idea of gravity is is the theory M-Theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory . The idea of m-theory is derived from several other theories, but it observes the universe as existing in 11 dimensions; thre spacial dimensions each consisting of three curled up dimensions, either too small or too complex for a human to physically observe, and a planar time dimension. I'm not an expert on the subject but I do think that this theory and similar ones, like Super String theory, have an importance in discovering the origin of the universe. One interesting topic that is also relatable to this is the idea of imperfection. We look at the mathematical perfection and significance of Fractals and find it interesting that something so.... perfect can exist so availably in nature. However, everything we know and everything we have ever known, all existance that makes up what we study and who we are, is all due to imperfection. The big bang happend a few years ago, and here we are now trying to undersand it. One widely accepted theory on how we came to be after the big bang has to do with a simple imperfection. When the big bang happened, matter, space and time were all created. Along with matter was an almost equal amount of what is called "dark Matter". We have no way of explicitly observing or detecting dark matter, we just know it exists because of the effect it has on known physics. When the big bang happened, there was nearly just as much dark matter as matter. When matter meets it's counterpart in dark matter, both are destroyed and cease to exist. So, this happened a whole lot in the moments after the big bang, destroying most matter that was released. But, luckily for us, due to imperfections, there was just a tiny bit more matter than there was dark matter. So this left over matter (less than 0.000001% of what was originally there) is what was left and it makes up everything; the stars, galaxies, our planet and us. Our universe exists and is founded on the principle of imperfection. One example that Stephen Hawking made about imperfection is that if the world were perfect, he (or someone more capable) could tip over a bucket full of equally-sized marbles onto a gym floor..... if the universe were perfect these marbles would space out exaclty equally every time. But due to the infinite imperfections involved with this demonstration, this would never happen and the marbles would every time land in seemingly random positions, and each test would yield different results. This imperfection in our universe is what drives everything we know about everything, and it makes the universe that much more beautiful.
