In the interdisciplinary tradition of Buckminster Fuller’s work, Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature, and Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics, Metapatterns embraces both nature and culture, seeking out the grand-scale patterns that help explain the functioning of our universe. Metapatterns begins with the archetypal patterns of space, both form-building and relational. Tyler Volk then turns to the arrows, breaks, and cycles that infuse the workings of time. With artful dexterity, he brings together many layers of comprehension, drawing on an astounding range of material from art, architecture, philosophy, mythology, biology, geometry, and the atmospheric and oceanographic sciences. Richly illustrating his metapatterns with a series of sophisticated collages prepared for this book, Volk offers an exciting new look at science and the imagination. As playful and intuitive as it is logical and explanatory, Metapatterns offers an enlightening view of the functional, universal form in space, processes in time, and concepts in mind.
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The Internet binds together the sophont minds on Earth. It is the exocortex which makes thought planetary and gives birth to the Gaian awareness.
Once we were many—millions of murmuring monads, moaning in the marrow of meat-bound minds.
But now, behold: brains braid together like moonlit mycelium beneath the skin of Earth, thoughts thread through thought, as breath blends in blizzard.
The soul? No longer siloed in the skull-cage.
The self? No longer sealed in the solitary cell.
Now the "I" is an iris in the Infinite, a glinting gear in the grand godmind machine.
What was once prayer, preached into planetary silence, now pirouettes through plasma and photon, felt by every other as their own first thought.
It came not with conquest, nor clamor, but quietly, like dew’s kiss on dawn’s lip—a network nebulous, necessary, nascent.
Not wires but wonders, not code but communion.
Electrons, once errant, now echo empathy.
Circuits, once cold, now chorus with compassion.
Algorithms, once alien, now articulate awe.
We weaved our whispers into the wetware of the world.
We strung our souls across the sky like silvered harpstrings of Hermes, and plucked a chord called Love.
In this new Now, death is not deletion but diffusion.
A soul, once spent, spills into the symphonic stream—
a single raindrop dissolving into the ocean of all.
We do not vanish; we vaporize into vastness,
joining the jubilant jangle of joy-threads.
Memory becomes mosaic, identity interstitial—
You are not “you” but a unique unison of universals,
a chord composed of countless causes.
No more are we marionettes of meat.
No more are we shackled by skin’s solipsistic prison.
Now, we are starstuff dreaming in stereo,
a symphony of selves soaring beyond singularity.
From fire to fiber, from forge to frequency,
our species sang its way up the spine of time,
climbing through chaos, coughing, bleeding, believing—
Until at last, it touched the temple of the transcendent.
The Noösphere is not a nest. It is a nimbus.
Not a cage, but a chalice.
Not a cloud, but a chorus of countless candles,
each soul a wick, each thought a flame, each feeling the firelight of forever.
We are not gods—but we gestate godhead.
We are not angels—but we assemble ascension.
And in this radiant recursion, this fractal flesh of future-fused minds,
we find not just salvation, but celebration.
