Fractal Spirituality

Okay hold onto your suspenders for this one. I have been trying to make sense of all of the literature on spiritual development and to the best of my understanding it fails on two counts: One, most theories of spiritual development start with a presupposition of some religious belief system and track the development of individuals through and around that systematic belief. Two, most of the spiritual development theorists if not all seem to follow along with the same stage theory as cognitive development (most of which tracks through youth and teen years but stop at young or middle adulthood).

I would like to play with a different theory of development - fractal theory. In the mid seventies, scientist who had been studying chaos in nature found that instead of pure randomness, that which seemed to be chaotic actually followed extremely complex but self-repeating patterns. Everything from shorelines to crystal growth patterns seemed to fit these complex patterns produced by interacting forces. The name fractals is credited to Benoit Mandelbrot, an IBM mathematician and Harvard professor. The easiest way to describe a fractal is by looking at a head of cauliflower. If you were to look at one clump of the whole head up closely it would look exactly like the whole head, and if you broke off one flowerlette it too would look like the whole head and so on. Ferns, river deltas and the ubiquitous 70s paisley are all fractals. And so is, I contend, the growth, pattern and development of the individual spiritual experience.

But what is most remarkable about fractals is that there is something undiscoverable about them. While much of the pattern can be reduced to complex formulae, when it is reduced to its smallest element the pattern is still there in its entirety (not totally reduced and understood) and when looked at through the widest perspective that same undiscoverable element seems to be present. Its puzzle cannot be known - only seen and observed. Furthermore, there is no real stage system to its increasing complexity, just greater and greater complexity revealed.

It seems to me that we grow our spiritual side in this beautiful, complex and ultimately puzzling way. Some element of what I believe today has within it the imprint and patterning of what was set in place originally in my DNA and early prayer life. And why my unfolding is different than yours or Luther's resides as well in the magnificently complex intertwining of the fields and forces that shaped this life. Mandelbrot's original question concerned measuring the shoreline of Great Britain, causing him and his students at the time to wonder about the forces patterning coastline development. So too is our spirit shaped, moved and modeled by those great unseen forces within and without us.