Bio
Dr. Harry Shirley was born in Essex, UK, in 1988. Trained as a chemist, he holds a PhD and has carried out research both internationally and at Oxford. After leaving academia in 2018, he moved into consultancy work. Alongside this, he has pursued a long-standing interest in Jungian metaphysics, publishing his peer-reviewed paper in 2025, The Buddhabrot and the Unus Mundus. His work explores the boundary where mathematics and depth psychology intersect.
Aims
Put simply, The Buddhabrot project explores whether a simple piece of mathematics can help explain how humans think, feel and move in the world. Instead of treating imagination and symbolism as “made up” or purely cultural, the work suggests they may grow out of the same deep patterns that shape nature itself. In plain terms, it asks whether the structures behind numbers, images, and human experience might be different expressions of the same underlying order.
More specifically, The Buddhabrot project aims to investigate whether The Mandelbrot Set reveals the deep structures through which psyche, matter, and time co-arise to form reality. By treating symbolic form as an emergent property rather than a cultural accident, the work explores the possibility that psyche, matter and time share a common ordering principle. In doing so, it seeks to give formal expression to Jung’s psychoid concept, offering a visual and conceptual bridge between mathematics, depth psychology, and the lived experience of meaning.
“Time is a number of change with respect to the before and after.” Aristotle
“Time is a moving image of eternity.” Plato
thebuddhabrot@gmail.com