To be, or not to be: that is the question

– William Shakespeare, Hamlet

At some point of time when Earth was still young – having just cooled off and home to raging storms and what-not – a few tiny entities unlike anything that ever existed before appeared. Organic specks in the vast inorganic sea. They were loners; they grew and died alone never having met the few others that existed alongside. Maybe even oblivious to the others’ presence. In time some of them realized they were better off pairing up with the rest and this soon made way for wild orgies. It wasn’t probably just a more fun way of living, but also meant a longer existence. As they grew and died, they picked up a few tricks of the trade along the way. Rather than perishing they soon learned to split up, giving birth to more in their form. And so they chose to give their end a meaning.

Thus they multiplied and the world grew from tiny specks to complex organic chains, to cells, specialized tissues, organs… up to an organism. These organisms, they learned to form packs (or modern day societies) much like their building blocks that evolved together to grow stronger. Nature, when you observe it, is like a fractal: an iterative pattern set within itself over and over again-indefinitely. There are elements in nature that exhibit such self-similarity – trees, ferns, neurons, snow-flakes. This way, every layer is but a speck and every speck contains within itself countless other entities.

The Mandelbrot set exhibits self-similarity. As you zoom in on the image, the same pattern reappears making it impossible to know which layer you are looking at.

Now here is a thought – If we take this fractal analogy the other way, these layers, ergo we, are but specks, destined to function in a predefined way that contributes and is contained within something greater that we can’t perceive and this infinite pattern is the grand design that extends to the whole of this universe and beyond.

It’s like studying the human society through a lens – with the deeper layers reflecting the same pattern as visible to our naked eye, all of which is a part of a bigger picture. Are we then meant to act, as a society, for a singular purpose, say, the continuation of our species? If so, then aren’t humans an anomaly, with their individual consciousness instead of a collective one? What of our personal ambitions and how do we then justify our desire to be different from the crowd?
Is there really any place in this design for Individualism?

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As I finished writing this article, I came across an excerpt from the book Beyond the Frontier of the Mind by Osho. According to him, a child is born without the knowledge of self. Surprisingly, the first thing he becomes aware of is not himself but others, as all his senses open outwards. It is his interactions with others that give rise to a consciousness – Ego.

Cognizance of others prior to oneself and the consciousness being but a reflected awareness sound to me like an interesting theory. Excuse me while I dig this further.