Natures Imagination
Traced in Geometric Patterns
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way…. and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
William Blake
Nature’s beauty alone should be ample indication of its own imaginative sensibilities: the rainbow, the crystal, the flower, and the birdsong—each express a facet of the fullness of Mother Nature’s creative potential. Imagination is to nature as life is to man. It is the seed and source of organic growth and elemental succession. It stimulates form into pattern and process into action.
Pattern is the third element in the constitution of the universe. First is energy, second is mass, and third is pattern. It is the information intrinsic to patterns that regulates the relationships and motions of the other two elements. Patterns established order, provided repeatable relationships, being either static or live, and changed only when an external influence impinged upon its rhythm.
In 1895, theosophist Annie Besant related how geometric formations on earth and in the sky were with the natural expression of the invisible qualities of spirit and life. “Underlying the physical, intelligence must be active; underlying a particle of what was once called dead matter, a metal, a crystal or a stone, there is a moving life—there is a ruling intelligence.”
Her proof was in the observable fact that “if you take a crystal, you find it grow along geometrical lines, with absolute definiteness of angles, as though a compass were used to trace it, and these lines make geometrical figures… when from the mineral you go to the vegetable where life is more active …even in its multiplicity there is order, that in the vegetable as well there is the same immutable law.
If you take the branch of a tree, you may study the way the leaves are set, and you will find every leaf in a definite place, … So that the leaves of the tree are developed on a geometrical plan.” [1]
Ancient man came to understand that imagination, paired with an empirical understanding of nature led the way to enlightened consciousness. As he watched the night sky, he noticed a hidden purpose in natures calculated movements. Over millennia—through the detailed records of his stargazing, and precise analyses of each of natures repeated patterns on earth—man was eventually allowed a glimpse of the underlying patterns of the ‘ruling intelligence’ of the universe.
Man recognized that patterns found in nature were not only beautiful and intriguing, but they served practical functions, and these patterns could be replicated for use in his own creations. When he realized the information gleaned from nature was practical and valuable, he devised a mechanism to more accurately trace and record these terrestrial patterns: Geometry.
The instruments of geometric measure are extremely simple—triangle, square, sphere—yet they endure as fundamental and compelling functions for shaping time, scale and subject matter. Reaching far beyond mathematics, the influence of geometric patterning informs all aspects of the natural world.
Geometry gives measure to abstract ideas as easily as to concrete forms. Singly, it defines the crystalline structure of a snowflake, but in its relations geometry establishes ratios such as produce musical harmony or define the orbits of planets. Yet patterns also merge, as Buckminster Fuller showed with the geodesic dome—a quasi-sphere resulting from repeating triangles. Triangulation is a fundamental pattern of structural stability, whereas the sphere is a pattern of containment.
Geometry established the basic structures of nature; rhythmical orders marked its growth and transformations. Aristotle observed “that the essences of all things rest upon numerical relations; that numbers are the principle of all that exists; and that the world subsists by the rhythmical order of its elements.”
Beauty and harmony, natures finest imaginings, were achieved through cardinal and geometrical principles, and over time man found the same principles accommodated not only his systems of accounting, but also the arts, music, politics and religion.
We might want to relearn these simple principles of nature and numbers for use in the modern world.
[1] Annie Besant
