The Big Math Test

I've gotten a lot of positive reaction from people on a particular topic regarding the Healing Presence. It is that changing yourself and your relationship to others and to your circumstances is not just a selfish act of self improvement. It is, in fact, a profound change that you make in the world.
The illustration I use to explain this is fractals. I have been intrigued to discover how few people know about fractals. I guess I'm just a bigger nerd than I thought. A fractal is a pattern that follows certain rules, including:

• It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales (even when you zoom in, it has a fine level of detail).
• It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language (it has a very complex and somewhat irregular geometric shape).
• It is self-similar (it shows a similar or recursive pattern on infinitely small or large scale).

Fractals are produced by certain algorithms (a kind of mathematical set of instructions) and these algorithms can be used to predict weather, or allow a computer graphic designer to create realistic landscapes. They are found extensively throughout nature. We can recognize the frost on the windows in the winter, or the shape of sand dunes because they have a fractal nature that allows them to always have their distinctive shape while simultaneously being infinitely variable.

I like to think of the whole of human interaction as a fractal. One of the other things that defines a fractal is that when you make a change in the algorithm, or set of instructions, it must result in a change throughout the entire fractal on every scale. What this means to me is that every time we make a change for the better in ourselves, if it results in a more flowing and healthy interaction with ourselves and our circumstances, we change the larger fractal of human interaction. Making yourself better makes the world a better place.