Dynamic structures of spirituality
The structural model of spirituality exemplified by the word search, described in the previous post Structures of spirituality – I – Word search, can be deepened and expanded.
Let’s imagine that the letters inside it are not still, but moving: they mix and remix continuously.
This will make possible to detect different words that will form randomly at different times. In certain cases, for the reasons that I will discuss below, we could find not only words, but phrases, or even whole speeches. The criterion with which to see words that are formed by the letters is not necessarily just what we’ve seen so far: we could find a word that is formed by taking letters in an alternating way, or by selecting some of them by proceeding in a zig-zag, or mixing either ordered and random geometric patterns; the result is that everyone can find anything among the letters, because everyone can invent on the spot the criteria used to select them. Now let’s imagine that the word search is our brain, where our spirituality structures are: the letters are the neurons, the words that we can find are the ideas. In the same way in which we can discuss whether the words are really in the word search, or it is just our imagination seeing them in it, so it is questionable whether our ideas are truly present in our brain, or if they are only neurons, connected more or less randomly, in such a way as to encourage in us the identification of structures that we call ideas.
Not only our structures of spirituality, but also all the world, the entire universe can be considered a word search; the alphabet letters are the atoms and everyone sees what he wants to see, depending on how he prefers to organize his own mind, his own thoughts.
As well as the letters of the alphabet are all different, the atoms as well are different from each other; some are attracted to each other, others repel each other, some group and form objects, structures.
Let’s also note that any object can be able to have behaviors similar to those of a living being, although not being any of them. Viruses are such an example. If we think about computer viruses, it is easy to notice that in some ways they are able to behave like living beings: they can attack, defend, multiply, adopt strategies. In fact even viruses causing disease in our body are considered scientifically halfway between simple chemical compounds and real living beings. It is difficult to consider them as real living beings, because they lack cellular organization and complex internal functions, as bacteria have.
Even an idea that lies within our brain (that is, a structure of connected neurons) can behave like a living being or like a virus: it can try to take possession of our brain (an example would be a song melody, that sometimes we cannot push away from our mind), spread to other minds, multiply, differentiate, defend, attack. At this point we understand that in a strictly theoretical perspective there is no difference between living and non-living beings: a living being is nothing more than a set of atoms arranged in a structure that has a degree of complexity. The DNA is nothing more than a set of molecules arranged in a structure.