Insight #26: On patterns

The ultimate structure of life and it's harmony....

Author

Danny Mariotti
December 31, 2023

Welcome to Insight #26: On patterns.

Hello everyone. Today we have a juicy one, inspired by the end of the book mentioned on the last insight.

  • For today's insight I would like to begin with an extract of the book’s end. In it, the author briefly tells the story of his son's murder. After which, he writes:

I tend to become taken with philosophical questions, going over them again and again in my head… And now the question became, where did he go?

Where did Chris go? He had bought an airplane ticket that morning. He had a bank account, drawers full of clothes, and shelves full of books. He was a real, live person, occupying time and space on this planet, and now suddenly where was he gone to? Did he go up the stack at the crematorium? Was he in the little box of bones they handed back? Was he strumming a harp of gold on some overhead cloud? None of these answers made any sense…

The loops eventually stopped at the realization that the question that had to be asked was; “What is the ‘he’ that is gone”?

What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of. Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache.

The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn't find anything. That's probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some new material thing to center itself upon.

  • The above puts it quite strikingly. Patterns are extremely important, they are the basis of human existence. Everything we know is in relation to what came before, an ever growing pattern of understanding.

  • Pattern recognition is basically the primary function of the brain. Knowing which patterns are dangerous, helpful, even beautiful, is the basis of survival. And survival shapes who we are, wether we are living in a cave amongst bears or in a city apartment.

  • Harmony, then, is just the repeating of patterns that build on top of each other. In this way, things like the notes of a piano can build incredible structures of beauty, transcending way beyond their individual “value”, even when added together “in a vacuum”.

  • Of course, the piano lends itself to a clear analogy. However, this harmony and pattern exist everywhere, from the most grandiose to the most tiny and even ugly. It can be thought of as the only true structure of the universe.

  • Of course, that may be because our little heads tend to seek for them. Anything we observe is as much a reflection of what is out there, as what is inside us. To truly grasp that is to break the separation of “you” and everything you consider “other”.

Again with another massive topic. This one I am consciously leaving rather short for you to explore.

Until next time, happy holidays and may 2024 be a year where our collective quality skyrockets.