The lessons I've learned...

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns,

so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." ~ Richard Feynman

Since I have learned how to look, I have consistently and without fail found the most mind-boggling patterns that recur in the universe. Once I learned how to look, I couldn't not see them. Just as the human brain has the biological tendency to find a face where there is none - in an electrical outlet, for instance, or a car - I feel like I am now wired to find the manifestation of these universal rules in the way that a trained "seer" cannot avoid seeing a three-dimensional shape mysteriously emerge from a purely two-dimensional Magic Eye poster. Even this phenomenon itself is not a purely anecdotal one. It is subject to the same universal rules but arises in many different forms. Escher eludes to this in "La Mezquita" (left). Look at a series of arches from one perspective, and it is a random lot of pillars and horseshoe curves...but move a few steps to the left or the right - switch your point of view - and as Douglas Hofstadter eloquently writes, "beautiful regularity emerges. You've reordered the same information by changing your way of looking at it." This phenomenon also becomes familiar to anyone who has sorted data in an Excel spreadsheet. Look at a 10,000 KB document of pure raw data, and it is nothing but a messy soup of stuff. But once you learn how to filter, order, and graph, there is again that beautiful regularity, and meaning emerges.

"Since I have learned how to look..." These seven words hold an experience that is indescribably dear to me - possibly one of the things I treasure most about being alive. Just as all learning is, the experience is an ongoing one, and I can only imagine how exponentially more meaningful those seven words will be to me, in ten, twenty, or (if I'm lucky) fifty years from now, perhaps when I am on my death bed. As with all human beings, since being born, it has taken me roughly 21 years to acquire the most basic information necessary to serve as the foundation for this kind of search for meaning. As the Empiricists will tell you, understanding does not occur in a vacuum, and I believe that the richer one's library of experiences, both academic and worldly, conceptual and concrete, the more one is able to get a glimpse of the mammoth yet delicate processes that drive the universe and everything that has ever sprang forth from it, including oneself.

In this developmental vein, there are countless learners whom I have looked to to teach me, but the two figures who have touched me the most - just masters of finding these elegant, recurring patterns - are the aforementioned academic Douglas Hofstaedter, and the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. I will not go into detail about their life work and the conclusions they have drawn, as I simply cannot do them justice at this humble point in my life, much less in this humble blog, but Hofstadter has found nature's infinitely long threads weaving through what seem to be the most disparate, unconnected topics - number theory, consciousness, Zen, modern art, genetics, artificial intelligence, and the list goes on. For Campbell, a thread of a different material ties together possibly every human culture that has ever existed, and he finds that the similarities that exist between the mythologies of the aborigines, Christians, Jains, Navajo... again - the list goes on, are too significant to chalk up to randomness. Like Hofstadter, there are fundamental patterns to the universe that Campbell spent his life understanding.

I need to pause this post at this point, because it has already developed a life of its own that will take over my day if I do not put my foot down, temporarily. If anyone is still reading up to this point, I must first thank you for staying with me for so long, and secondly ask for your extreme patience as I continue to develop my thoughts. What I have written here is a first attempt at a synthesis of my inchoate reflections over the last five years or so (since I met Chris, basically - I will let you connect the dots there). I apologize if things are muddy, and in this initial stab many ideas are probably redundant. (Also - apologies to both academics named above for such a coarse-grained representation of their genius.) But I have more to say, and as always, more to learn, so we'll see next time, how I pick up where I left off.

I'll end this post today with one last little recurring pattern for you. In the opening of this post, I quoted Hofstadter, so it is only fair to end on a thought from Campbell. In looking at the tapestry of human experience, and how to reconcile the extremes of human tragedy with the ability to laugh, here is the mythologist's take on learning how to look, and his conclusion:

"The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest - as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible."