Exploring the Fractal Nature of Vedanta's Sacred Texts
How Upanishads, Gita and Brahma Sutras Reveal Self-Similarity
It's a wonderful vertigo I feel every time I delve into the abyssal depths of the fundamental texts of Vedanta: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras. I don't perceive them as simple treatises, but as living organisms, infinitely complex structures that powerfully recall the idea of fractals. They are those fascinating geometric objects that exhibit self-similarity, where parts of their structure repeat recursively at different scales. They possess unlimited complexity, unfolding infinitely as details are magnified. This ceaseless depth is exactly what I find in these ancient scriptures.
In the Upanishads, I find a dialogic structure, made of questions that open up answers which, in turn, reveal new questions and levels of understanding. It's a process of constant unveiling, a ceaseless flow of insights. This progression, reflecting on itself, evokes a self-similar process. The Brahma Sutras condense this vast message into aphorisms, then taken up and expanded in the Bhagavad Gita, weaving them into a broader narrative and deeper exploration. A constant interplay between condensation and expansion is evident at the structural level, a pattern that echoes the recursive architecture of an ever-unfolding geometry.
Brimming with self-similar references
Concepts like Brahman, the impersonal Absolute, and Atman, the individual Self, mirror one another. Brahman is the undifferentiated totality, but manifests in every creature as Atman. Atman, the innermost core in every being, is identical to Brahman, the ultimate Reality. It's an infinite dance between macrocosm and microcosm, a perpetual reflection, a pattern that reproduces the Whole in the fragment, at every scale.
In the Bhagavad Gita, the relationship between the One and the many, totality and parts, is developed in a manner strongly suggesting the self-similarity of Being. Krishna identifies Himself with the essence in every creature, the light in every luminary. Divine immanence and transcendence reflect each other mutually, showing themselves everywhere while remaining beyond. Also, the three paths – action, devotion, and knowledge – are presented as distinct yet interdependent, each containing the others in nuce. They are different perspectives which, like ramifications of a recursive pattern, converge toward the same ultimate Reality, showcasing the completeness within each path.
These ideas, almost aphoristically synthesised in the Brahma Sutras, then unfold again in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. The Vedantic texts ultimately possess an architecture that unfolds continuously, incessantly taking up the same themes on different levels, from new angles, revealing ever deeper layers of meaning.
This inexhaustible nature of the texts nourishes what I call an infinite spiritual thirst, jigyasu bhava, the ardent desire for spiritual knowledge. It never exhausts itself in definitive answers, always generating new questions. The search, propelled by jigyasu bhava, is akin to exploring these self-similar patterns: each "zoom" on a detail opens up new, previously unseen scenarios.
Jigyasu bhava pushes one to contemplate the ultimate Reality from ever deeper and more elevated perspectives. It's a craving to know Brahman that never finds satiety, since the nature of Brahman is infinite. Upon believing one has understood, one immediately realises there is always much, much more to discover. It dissolves preconceptions and limited visions, just as the study of these patterns reveals new geometries, beyond Euclidean forms. This desire for truth gradually leads to transcending the sense of the limited ego, to seeing oneself in all beings and all beings in oneself, recognising the intimate correspondence where the individual essence is identical to the supreme essence of Brahman.
Ceaseless, multi-layered search
However, unlike the rational exploration of these geometric patterns, jigyasu bhava possesses a dimension of wonder, awe, and devotion. It's a thirst not only intellectual, but existential, involving the being in its entirety.
The Vedantic texts precisely nourish this ceaseless, multi-layered search. Each reading reveals new layers of meaning, generating that virtuous cycle of search and revelation which leads to the knowledge of ultimate mysteries. The Upanishads state that Brahman is 'subtler than the subtle and vaster than the vast,' indicating the infinite depth and vastness of ultimate Reality. This description of the Divine powerfully evokes the idea of an infinitely scalable entity. Jigyasu bhava is the desire to dive, fearlessly, into this ocean. The texts provide the map, but the territory always remains beyond, infinitely to be explored.
This self-revealing and recursive structure of the sacred texts generates a vertiginous effect, as meanings unfold onto each other in an infinite web. But it also produces a powerful catalysing effect: the more they are read and meditated upon, the more jigyasu bhava is ignited, pushing one to know Brahman more deeply, until final enlightenment. As mathematical patterns tend toward infinity, so this thirst for depth inspired by the texts leads toward the infinity that lies in the heart of every human being.
"Subtler than the subtle, vaster than the vast, the Atman is hidden in the heart of every creature. He who is free from desire sees the glory of the Atman through the grace of the Creator."
(Katha Upanishad 1.2.20)
These verses eloquently express how the Atman, the individual Self, is simultaneously subtle and vast. This apparent contradiction, this co-presence of extremes, unfailingly calls to mind that self-similar nature of recursive patterns, where the same structure replicates at widely varying scales. Just as in a fractal, every part contains the whole, Atman embraces infinity while being deep in the heart – a paradox that points to that divine self-reproducing geometry by which the Whole is present in every fragment.
The texts invite contemplation, with wonder, of this correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, a vision accessible to those who, free from the veils of ignorance and desire, open themselves to the grace of the Absolute, from which all emerges in sublime, albeit ineffable, geometry.
The implicit invitation of the texts, then, is to seek not an end, but an infinite expansion. The map they offer doesn't describe a distant place, but the very geography of the soul. The true vertigo is not in the unveiling of the pages, but in the discovery that this self-similar and infinite structure dwells within us, a universe compressed in the beat of a heart, waiting to be recognised. There, the search becomes Being itself.