Substance: Vector or Bitmap?

A friend told me last week about a TV segment he had seen where they showed an area one meter square and then went out in powers of ten so pretty soon you were looking at the whole galaxy. Then they went in by powers of ten into a water droplet. It never got less intricate or beautiful.

This morning I was reading this passage in Proverbs, where wisdom is speaking:
“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth: While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world.”

As I read, the image from the TV program came to mind. At every level of observation and experience, the same law is present – the law that makes everything beautiful and delicate and harmonious – the same wisdom can be seen in the Creator’s hand. I thought, that makes sense, because the law of Love would always be operating in each reference point, in each center, at every here and now, no matter what the scale in time or space. With a shiver of awe, I felt the vectors of Spirit’s control, shaping me, shaping the galaxies, making all the streams of energy flow together in harmony – my life, my purpose, my limbs, the stars and planets, the surge of life.

And in the way that thoughts leap topics along the lines of thought vectors, I thought of vector objects in computer graphics. Since their shapes are established by code relating them to geometric shapes and relationships, they stay true no matter how much you zoom in on them. You can move them around and place them in relation to each other, and they don’t lose their identity. If they have a 3D component, you can change the viewing angle and see other sides.

Bitmapped images are very different. Since their code is just the color of each pixel on the screen at the time the images are created, when you zoom in on them you see jagged edges and little squares. The image only exists in the context of the pixels on the screen – you can’t move them around or see around them. If you do select an image and move it, it leaves a hole, which you then have to doctor up somehow. So I thought, we’re not bitmaps, we’re vector objects!

In other words, we’re not a collection of matter stacked together in a certain way. The pixels of our lives – our shape, our circumstances, our relationships – are not determined by the material code of location on the material plane of being. They’re not things that can get disarranged to our detriment, or things that lock us into a certain mode of being. They’re not things for us to manipulate around to improve or fix our identity. Instead, our pixels are determined by the vectors that give us our identity. These vectors allow us to move about freely, without being constrained by the circumstances around us. If one of our limbs is foreshortened due to a viewing angle, it doesn’t mean that we are deformed and will always have a shorter limb. A quick change in viewing angle will show us wholly symmetrical. This is the essence of healing: when we realize that we are vector objects – that is, spiritual, and we look to the truth of our vectors to show us our identity, we will find ourselves whole.