Pattern recognition         23 April 2005

 

If you throw a pebble into a pond, ripples move out from where it sank.  The ripples are patterns.

To assume that there are patterns in a pond and not in a human life would be arrogance indeed. It is very hard to see the patterns in a life for most of them come from unconscious sources.   There are patterns in the complexity of all our lives.

The patterns within our lives reflect the structured patterns of our minds.  What is ‘outside’, that is our lives, our habits, our history, our dreams, are reflections of what is 'inside’'.   If it is important to us, it is possible to spend a lot of time seeking these patterns and we might gain more control over our lives as a result.   Often this is futile, and we swop one picture of the world for another.

We never just "see" things.  We impose a kind of order on what we see.  Even if what we see makes little sense.  (The drug or mystical experience becomes so interesting because the drug rearranges how we structure what we see).  If we can see the patterns we are involved in, we may become less attached or troubled by them.  Patterns, like the deeper feelings, have other patterns "underneath" them.

When we can see patterns at work, the deeper patterns underneath slowly (very slowly) become visible.   What is the benefit of seeing patterns?  Patterns and feelings are connected, the more so, at the ‘deeper’ levels.

You have a clear pond in front of you.  You drop a pebble at on end of the pond and quickly drop a pebble in at the other end.   At first, the ripples spread out uninterrupted.   Then the two converging sets of ripples meet, interference occurs and a new set of ripples forms.

When two patterns meet, they create a third pattern.   Cause can be seen but it is complex.   Too often we see "third pattern" and assume the second pebble caused it.   Really, it is interaction and interference that caused the third pattern.  We look for interaction but mostly we find interference.

It can be difficult to see patterns for they are multiple and interconnected  -  patterns nested within patterns.   We  'sense' them long before we can actually describe them.  It is crucial to watch the compulsion to describe, the more clearly we can see that, the more clearly our sense of patterns will develop.  The compulsion to describe, arrange and classify can be a blind alley, it’s like describing the bricks and not seeing the house. 

The notion of pattern recognition, of an ability to intuit meaning without direct calculation from data, is a very interesting one. This is probably a subconscious facility that people tap into without knowing how they do it.   Patterns seem to emerge of their own accord when we constantly look, rather than appear on demand when trying to dig them out. Whilst “digging”, we often change what we see, or we change whilst we are looking.  This means that even careful excavation  -  like an archaeologist with a tentative paintbrush  -  seems to alter or sometimes even disturb our patterns.   Nonetheless, patterns will emerge through constant looking.  Their shape and structure has much to tell us about how we are in the World but if we want to explore the mysteries, we must let the patterns “underneath” emerge too.  These patterns will almost certainly contain Edge feelings.