When you’re in there, with those strong feelings, of confusion and angst, thrown about by waves of emotion or distracted by random thoughts, plagued by doubts about your lack of an effective game plan for life or just plain down … it feels like chaos. Imagine yourself in one of the darker corners of this image, or being tossed by one of the waves as it crashes off a spiralling wing of energy, or crushed as one finger of force presses down upon your local environment or mind/body. Your experience is all-encompassing, complete, true to the life and death of this existence, right now …

But there’s always another side. There’s always another dimension, an aspect of the experience that forces you to evolve, or asks you to be patient, or simply washes over and leaves you feeling … OK. Refreshed perhaps, or even just relieved. At their best, such experiences inspire us to reaffirm our faith in the goodness of the universe. Very often, they leave us feeling that on the other side of chaos there exists an underlying order, a way that life unfolds that we could not possibly have imagined would turn out for the best. Or, at least, could leave us feeling enlightened, awakened, deeper or stronger or just … more fortunate.

When you come out the other side, what seemed like a chaotic jumble may turn out to look like a beautiful piece of art. Or an infuriating waste of time. It might seem like a period of testing, followed by an experience of thankfulness, which goes beyond rational comprehension. No matter how we interpret events, fractals remind us that the beauty of life and the world, the earth and the stars and the subatomic dimensions and all of life in its unfolding, is there at the end … because it is always there within: within each twist and turn of life, each crushing defeat or seemingly cruel turn of fate.

So if you find this post feeling anxious or confused, angry or ignorant, sad or lost, have faith. Some kind of order follows; some kind of pattern appears; something will always return to make you feel thankful for your life. Faith isn’t just for the religious – in fact, it’s another case where religions have stamped their authority over something that is innate, natural to each of us. It is an archetypal experience, to use a Jungian term, which arises spontaneously in anyone who survives something they can see the brighter side of afterwards.

Link up to a fractal doing just that and boom! There you are too.

Watch a brief fractal here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_GBwuYuOOs