Meta-state of Mind

While on Deviantart the other day, I came across a piece of fractal artwork. It had nothing significant in particular, just a piece of spiral fractal that could have been created from Apophysis. What did make me think though was its title--compassion. How random? I thought to myself, how does a fractal represent compassion in anyway? And so I stared at the ever repeating curls and in it saw our world. A place where most people are blind, where people only serve themselves. Then I looked at the fractal again. This time I saw Earth itself being selfish, and telling all of its inhabitants to be selfish. Through the magic of causality, somehow the selfish person in North America causes the person in Asia to be selfish too, and the cycle continues, until everyone in the world, until society, until Earth itself becomes selfish. What we see in our society is the state of "thought" of our world, and what makes up what we see in our society is what makes up the majority of the people. Society is the state of mind of the states of minds. Nature does not control people, neither do people control nature. Nature and people are one, we work hand in hand. Like a fractal, what we see in our world consists of smaller versions of itself that is us, people. So why is it that the artist represented compassion with a fractal? It is because the virtue of compassion transcends the self. Compassion is not just the emotional capability of empathy and sympathy towards individuals, nor is it just a part of love itself. Compassion reflects every little thing the compassionate person has experienced in his or her life that has given him or her that virtue, it reminds us what our world can be like. Compassion is also the hidden pattern within the fractal that is our world, that can be discovered if we just looked more carefully and ignored the more obvious pattern that is selfishness. All we need to do, is to look at our fractal, from a different perspective. Maybe then, we would see a completely different fractal.

-William Lee