Sina’s Reviews > A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science > Status Update

We can train ourselves to view plants not as “things” but as patterns of moving energy.

The digestive system follows a whirlpool to transform food into energy and waste.

Far from insignificant, the calm eye is the spiral's center of gravity around which it all balances. Without the eye there would be no spiral expansion or dissolution, no whirling, no balance, no life.

In watching water whirl down a drain, note that the narrower and calmer the eye is, the greater the speed and turbulence around it. Notice also that unlike the center of a wheel, the spiral's eye is not fixed in one place but is dynamic and flexible.

Learn to recognize spirals in nature, in the living whirlpools we call "trees" and in house plants. Look for the "eye." Whatever its substance, the eye is always mysterious and hypnotically fascinating to watch and to contemplate as the source of the spiral.

Mathematicians call the golden spiral's eye an asymptote, a place always approached but never reached.

The Hindu religion refers to two aspects of the universe, the unmanifest and the manifest. The unmanifest is called Nirguna Brahma, "Brahma without qualities," unknowable, without characteristics, while the manifest universe is called Saguna Brahma, "Brahma with qualities," all that is know-able.

Like the deceptively calm eye within a storm or hurricane, intense action swirls all around it but the eye itself remains placid, untouched. Leaves rustle in the wind, but the trunk is rooted in the earth.

A curious fact about the golden spiral in mathematics and nature is that it has a "calm eye," a core with a character different from that of the whirlwind around it. A watery whirlpool wraps around a core of air; the leaves of a tree whirl around a woody trunk. The calm eye corresponds to the "zero" at the very beginning of the Fibonacci sequence.

The word nature comes from the Latin for “birth”. Mater, the Latin word for Mother, has given rise to the word “matter”, also related to meter (measure) and matrix. the lating word for father, pater, gave rise to patron and pattern. thus, natural forms can be seen as coming from both a mother and father, the mating of matter and pattern.