The fractal cathedral embodies rhythmic laws of nature that seem older than grids. The fractal patterns of the cathederal seemcrystalline as frost, organic as thistle, free as life. And it displays soul-touching beauty whose elegance suggests mystery, whose unity offers access to transcendence. In beauty humans find an intimation of the holy, a foretaste of the blissful, an echo of higher consciousness. 2 Unity intuited by poets, artists and seers for millenia has been confirmed in recent times by tools of science on many scales and levels of existence, and I would suggest that fractals thus suggest an image, a visual framework for the potential of transcendence, the larger subsumed in wholeness, the smaller integrated in the larger.
Harmonious integration is a kind of transcendence.
Fractal geometry is a sign of creativity, because its images evoke endless generativity. Such a sign of creativity is a fitting structure for the idea behind the cathedral, a magnificence that breaks the circle of rational satisfaction completely apart. 3 Such a sign of creativity enacts an aesthetic linking vast systems and the human soul. It is an eruption of exuberance, lifting us up, impelling our vision beyond the inward workings of logic, to awe. To view images of the Mandelbrot set click here.