What do you think God is? I am defining it (god) as whatever impetus began the zillions of computations that make and are still making the vast universe and everything in it both material and conscious. I understand this by the illustration of The Mandelbrot Set. The Mandelbrot Set

is a geometric pattern that explains how a simple division of 1 becomes 2 and as each set of 2 is in turn divided, a number and pattern evolves into infinity. When you use any pattern besides a simple line, say an equilateral triangle, the complexity also because absolutely beautiful and looks organic – like swirls of oil on top of water, or the whorls on the bark of a tree. In a real sense, each of us are a tiny ‘division’, on/in the massive constantly moving and evolving universe. It can make you feel tiny and insignificant, but it also makes you realise that you are related to the whole, a part of the whole and absolutely necessary to the whole – a ‘gap’ where you are, would stop a whole evolution. The Mandelbrot Set is illustrated in nature … in the unmeasurable (to exact numbers) of a coastline, the meandering of rivers, the patterns of a leaf, the folds of the human brain and on and on. There is nothing on earth that does not consist of an ordered and complex internal pattern. I once saw a 3D model of our universe that highlighted ‘paths’ that connected each planet, star, sun and asteroid from the ‘big bang’ up to date. The model looked just like a brain, each pathway or several pathways meeting at a sparkling junction. It was a super highway hanging in space, making me think not only of a brain and its pathways that set down knowledge and linkages to yet more complex knowledge, but it also suggested a way that we could travel in a physical interstellar sense. Do ‘traces’ of these pathways still exist? Could we tap into them to travel from planet to planet? Importantly, it illustrated to me the interconnectedness of everything. We are not ‘alone’ on earth, we are an integral part of the giant brain that is the universe. Then I had to ask myself, whose brain is the universe? Are we a synapse in a greater brain? Are we a dream, a random thought, an operational part of the whole like a single cog?
A brain in eternal movement would have no beginning or end and would never be static enough to be defined – static would mean non-existence in this case, and clearly there is ‘existence’ so ‘stasis’ is immaterial. Would this brain have awareness of itself in the sense of its ‘whole’? Would it have a sense of each tiny atom that goes into its material stuff? Doubtless it would not, any more than we can peer into our own very finite brains and point to a single spot, recognise and define it. Then again, if we are a part of the infinite, perhaps we too are infinite? We know our bodies are not infinite but we know our matter is, so perhaps we evolve and change form but still exist? We may go back into the ‘cooking pot’ as it were, to provide further material for the eternally blooming brain that is.
We know that matter cannot be destroyed – it merely changes form. When we die our material body decomposes and the material it is made of is recycled into continuing life … our atoms become the atoms in some other ‘creation’. But what of our mind, our consciousness? Can it really be that that ethereal undefinable thing whatever it is, merely dissipates? Dissolves into thin air? Has it only been an effect of our physicality – the firing of the electrons in our brain that follow the corporeal body into other material ‘stuff’? Of what ‘stuff’ are thoughts made? Of what ‘stuff’ are dreams? If we were meant only as material stuff to make the whole brain that is exist, then why do we have consciousness? If we are a mere fly speck on the wall of the immense universe, why do we need thought? Why do we need a brain that computes, that wonders, that observes the whole and wonders ‘what is the whole’? Why am I in the whole? What is the purpose of existence in the whole? What happens when this body I am in dies and corrupts? Am I still a part of the whole? When this body dies will I finally understand the whole? Why do we desire to continue in some sense? Why do we care so much about this?