Centerpatterns underlay practically all of nature and life’s creations as outlined below. Also check out this cool VDO to learn more.
A Sacred Geometry
With their sleek and gently inward-flowing curves and lines, one can’t help but revel in the splendor, intrigue, poise, and beauty of nature’s center-oriented patterns. Their simple and unencumbered designs solidify their position as robust providers of form and function in a world subject to vying influences.
Centerpatterns come in practically any size, shape, texture, form, and function. Their shape underlies things the size of atoms and universes. Their parts can be as directly connected as the spokes of a wheel to its hub, or as loosely connected as nations of people about shared feelings of national pride. Their form can be as tightly bound as the crystals of a snowflake, or as loosely formed as ants circling an ant hill. Their boundaries can be as sharply defined as a property line or as loosely defined as the extended volume of air converging on your lungs.
But in all instances, they are unified by their shared overall alignment to a common cent er – they share a center-oriented shape.
It’s impossible to define a fixed set of categories encompassing all Centerpattern forms –after all, how many orientations, angles, and arrangements can “things” take around a central point? However, there are primary Centerpatterns favored throughout nature.
Centerpath’s ideas are astonishingly wide ranging showing how the seemingly diverse phenomena of matter, biology, the cosmos, our minds, society, time, rituals, and indeed our lives are all organized in the same, center-oriented pattern. Jin’s book Encyclopedia Centerpath lists out 100’s of such examples in an informative and fun encyclopedia format!
The Primary Centerpatterns
BRANCHING SYSTEMS
Notice how the bronchi in our lungs stretch out just like tree branches? We see the same structure in broccoli, rivers, roads converging at a city center, sports competition charts, and lightning to name a few others.
SPIRALS
Spirals are ubiquitous in nature – we see them in sunflowers, shells, galaxies, a ram’s horn, crashing waves, and the ear’s cochlea. The pattern of spirals also extends to emotions, rates of growth and decay, and chaotic systems.
CIRCLES AND SPHERES
Circles and spheres hold great significance in mythology and philosophy due to their flawless and perfect symmetric forms. Circles and spheres form stars, planets, dinner plates, balls, and wheels.
CONCENTRIC CIRCLES
The first Centerpattern’s we recognized as children were concentric circles spreading from rocks thrown into ponds and when counting rings of a tree’s cross-section. We can see concentric circles in the growth pattern of teeth, the slices of an onion, Mandalas, auditorium seating arrangements, and the rings of Saturn.
RADIALS
Like spokes of a bicycle wheel to their hub, radials highlight the connectivity of a creation’s parts to their center. For instance, most of the 300,000 species of plants in existence have some degree of radial configuration. Other radial designs include roulette wheels, dartboards, the flow of goods from distribution hubs, spider webs, flowers, and starfish.
SECTIONS OF A CONICAL
Ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas form precise center-oriented patterns about core foci. These conical sections link the theoretical and physical worlds with incredible mathematical precision describing planetary orbits, the shape of satellite dishes, and the path of a ball thrown overhead.
CLUSTERS
Clusters are the catchall for Centerpatterns that don’t neatly fit into other Centerpattern classifications. In essence, clusters only require the general agglomeration of parts about a common center. We see them in beautiful star clusters, in how we gather around a street performer, in swarms of insects around sources of food or light, in the population densities near city centers, and how antibodies attack invading viruses and bacteria