I see It everywhere and recognise It behind everything. I have lost all religion while everything has become religious. It was hard to acknowledge at first, but it’s just too obvious to deny. Nature seems to repeat itself on every level, and to recognise these patterns is to have a deeper understanding of reality.
I have spent many long hours uncomfortably cramped in an aeroplane staring out at the world passing by below. It has often occurred to me that cities seem to be alive. They spring up on the surface, consuming resources in conducive places with just the right conditions, near water, and food.
ities then seem to reach out and connect with other cities to share. It reminds me of the way huge insect nests, humming with activity, will form in places with the optimum conditions. Looking down from 35,000 feet up in an aeroplane is analogous to scanning living tissue under a microscope as trucks and vehicles move through roads, streets and highways like cells carrying various agents in capillaries, veins and arteries.
For years I have been in awe of Phi, the golden ratio of 1:1.618, its expression as the fibonacci number sequence and its appearance in just about everything. Depending on what you prefer to call it, God, or nature, or this universe expresses it ubiquitously—in physics, biology, chemistry, geology and astronomy, in absolutely everything.
From the micro to the macro, it’s in the double helix spiral of the DNA molecule, in us, plants, animals, and even in the spiral of hurricanes and the form of entire galaxies.
Phi was expressed in our first structures such as Stonehenge’s concentric circles, and later was prevalent in ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Greek architecture. Was this ratio understood and expressed deliberately, or was it just that it’s proportions came naturally out of us as what seemed most aesthetically pleasing?
We have this deluded notion that we are separate from nature, but what if we are nature, and those same natural processes that are doing us? Our behaviour is a reaction to our environment, therefore we are implicitly inseparable from it. So it can be said that our environment is doing our behaviour, even when we as a species in turn modify our environment. Our thoughts are a conditioned reaction to our environment.
It’s not hard to deny that some men with flashy clothes, jewelry and cars behave a little bit like peacocks strutting around with their useless but beautiful tail plumes. Perhaps, nature employs this tactic to compensate for a dearth in another area to keep on a level playing field with the competition in this game of life. Like lizards puffing out their brightly colored necks and birds chirping away a beautiful melody, much of our behaviour is subconsciously intended to put our genes on display to attract potential mates.
However, in humans this is all expressed in a slightly more complex manner as intelligence, one of the most attractive genetic traits of all, is also out there on display. We have been designed to mutate and procreate.
The human ability to outsmart rivals with clever ingenuity and deception is nothing new, and is hardwired into our DNA. Myriads of creatures in the oceans and forests employ camouflage and clever tricks to evade predators and capture prey. In humans, our tendency to sometimes lie and deceive one another is just another expression of nature using the tactic of deception to increase its chances of survival and procreation.
If we are part of nature, then so too is our technology. Perhaps we and our technology have been evolving together in a novel symbiotic relationship. In essence, technology is a perfectly natural phenomenon.
We aren’t the first animals to “have” technology. Beavers modify their environments by building intricate dams that create ponds out of streams, birds weave complex hanging nests, and spiders make incredibly efficient and strong structures with the precisely the perfect angles in their webs. As humans, nature expresses these same tendencies in us, but in a more complex and interconnected way.
After all, where do our ideas come from? Ideas that were once sudden flashes of inspiration in the mind become the reality that we physically interact with, which then in turn influences new ideas that come out of our minds. We can go inside the ideas that were once in our minds with our architecture, cars, boats and planes, putting mind inside of mind.
What if our desire to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy is another step in nature’s process of evolution from agricultural revolution to industrial revolution and beyond; a continued maturation as a species?
Perhaps we had to go through a fossil fuel stage to then have the capabilities of leapfrogging past it.
It has been said that DNA is software that edits itself, and modifies the hardware that it runs on. What if we are about to see this most basic pattern of nature be repeated with the rise of nature’s next pet project in the very near future; artificial super intelligence that like plants, is fueled by the sun?
What if, instead of you doing it, you are being done by this thing that is doing everything?
• Find George on Twitter: @georgebovell