Dogen's Fractal: Knowledge as an Infinite Fractal

“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters.

After a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters.

After enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”

-Dogen

My favorite Zen quote has to do with the path one takes on the quest for knowledge. It is a blueprint for truth that beautifully describes the process of learning.

When you first learn a subject it seems simple. The deeper you dive, the more questions you develop, this internal conflict builds up until you resolve the simultaneous system of equations needed to reach that next level in the Fractal of Knowledge.

Dive further and the process repeats.

Replace Zen with yourself, your career, your dreams, or the person you love. Recognize the process of knowing is actually a fractal and embrace uncertainty as a natural part of growth.

A Framework For Extracting The Wisdom of Ancients

Ever wonder how a quote from a text from the distant past can ring as true today as it did thousands of years ago? The lived experience of a human from the past can vary greatly from the lived experience of a human today, but we more or less operate with the same hardware we had at the dawn of civilization.

The first recorded concept of "innocent until proven guilty" can be found codified within the Code of Hammurabi. As is the concept of a daily beer ration for all citizens.

These recurring patterns have been codified in human society, such that thousands of years in the future both legal precedents and beer are still very much a part of our lives today.

They improve, they change, they grow in complexity. And yet, in essence they are the same idea, merely evolved along an axis of abstract complexity that evolves over time.

Mesopotamian understanding of the law is lower on the Fractal of Knowledge, but gems like "innocent until proven guilty" and "beer rations for every citizen" continue to ring true no matter how complex our laws become.

Even if today's society has yet to reclaim the pinnacle of civilization that was a universal beer ration, universal basic income is still on the table.

To ascend and descend the Fractal of Knowledge it is important to establish new terminology:

• Levels: A relative term for distinguishing between higher and lower rungs of the Fractal of Knolwedge.
• Abstractions: The raw ideas employed within a field of knowledge or society based on it's place in time (e.g., a beer recipe from a given time).
• Stratagems: Refined abstractions that have universal application independent of time and context.

The Fractal of Knowledge is a useful tool for extracting the most useful abstractions from other minds across time and space. Refining those abstractions into stratagems that can be applied more generally to the Game of Life.

It doesn't matter if the mind in question is sane or insane, caveman or cosmopolitan, progressive or conservative, real or a work of fiction—with the Fractal of Knowledge, you can ascend, descend, or otherwise reorient yourself in order to extract their most valuable abstractions, and return to your preferred plane of existence.

Let Dogen's Fractal Be Your Guide

Swap Zen with your career, your passion, your loved ones, or yourself, and you'll find the process of learning is like an infinite fractal.

It's that second stage that is the hardest, because you must overcome the fear of uncertainty to reconcile the differences between states of knowing and unknowing.

But upon resolving this internal conflict you enter the third stage of understanding, ready to repeat the process all over again for even greater depths of knowing!

Dogen's sutra is the basic repeating pattern you need to resolve in order to ascend that fractal staircase of knowledge.