Modern fractal, ancient yantra

Indian yantras

Mandel fractal

Fractals occur all the time in nature..seeming to give nothingness a
pattern.

Cascade Fractal

Ancient yantras. Modern Fractals ?

Fractals move towards infinity in a way mind has
difficult conceiving: James Gleick.

Fractal geometry is beloved of art hobbyists who toy with
Sierspinkski triangle, Julia set, Koch snowflake. You will find
thousands of sites dedicated to this infinity-in-finite art.
Fractals are also being used to unknot some knotty problem of
the latest science of chaos theory. Fractals are also used to
explain stock market curves, weather patterns and all those
problems left unanswered by the stolid Euclidean geometry. But
long before all this, spiritual and scientific India had used
fractals to explain that classic vedic truth: yathe
pindande tathe Brahmanande. This translates to mean `as in the
microcosm so in the macrocosm’, again a line somehow credited to
western philosophy or science. Yantra was the original
infinite-in-the-finite art.

Even today, transcribing yantra means using heavily loaded
psychic language shrouded with tantric meanings. But even
without understanding all this, it is possible, just by gazing
at the yantras, to experience little switches getting flipped on
in your mind. The effect is tangential, inexplicable. Yantras,
like fractals, use geometric figures like circle which means
wholeness or completeness, square meaning stolidity or earth
element, triangles whose meaning varies according to whether
they are upward facing (masculine/fire element), downward facing
(female/water element) or spun together (to mean the
consummation of the male-female elements).Founder of Bihar
School of Yoga Swami Satyananda Saraswati in his book Sure Ways
of Self-Realisation observes that yantras does not function with
conscious awareness, or psychological process. It works neither
through faith, mind or belief. “It is like the
bullet fired from a rifle, whether you believe it or not, it is
going to act upon you.”

The qualities of a fractal (and yantra) are that the inner
patterns are self-similar. From nature, a fern would be the best
example. When cut, its smaller part is similar to the larger
one. It is iterative. This means the pattern repeats itself, as
in a fractal or yantra set, to infinity. But the most important
one is what gives them their name – the fractional dimension of
these parts, which means some of these patterns do not fit in
neatly with the old-fashioned geometry (Euclid’s) as we learnt
them at school. This gives them a dimension beyond the
understood ones. This, in yantra, is what helped intuition
access the difficult concepts of shoonyata (or quantum
nothingness) as maya or play of the universe. World was not what
appeared to be. What was solid was all empty. James Gleick,
best-selling author of Chaos, says `fractals flow toward
infinity in a way that the mind has trouble conceiving.’ In the
same book, he writes, when ice crystals form ` a complex shape
arises out of a featureless void’. This displays, according to
him, `the delicate balance between order and chaos.’
It just so happens that our ancients used a slightly different
language and a different symbolism, calling the order Shakti and
the chaos as Shiva. But no doubt, both are speaking the same
language about the secret of the infinite in the finite.

http://jaisivananixda.blogspot.com/index.html

www.dhyansanjivani.org

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