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.

Keeping in right relation to Truth

There is a message in the Bible that God (and those who speak for him) keep trying to tell the people. God tells it to Moses, who tells it to the children of Israel. Most of the prophets also are found trying to make the people understand. Jesus tried through stories, his healing works and his explanations of them, to make the people understand. Most of the time they didn’t.

The message has to do with the relation of the power of God with the goings on of the world. God is found giving the message of being the great I AM – in other words, Life, The Event Going On, That Which Is Interesting, That Which Sustains – that upon which our attention is designed to be focused. The misinterpretation of the message is that God is the thing that sometimes has the power to make the things in our life go in a favorable way. In other words, instead of God being the event, the circumstances of the world – issues such as food, shelter, wealth and social position – are seen as the event. Then God is seen as a force that can manipulate those things.

In the Bible, whenever people get the message right – when they see God as The Event – then things also go right for them in terms of their circumstances. They get their needs met – for survival, security, and prosperity. But whenever they get it wrong – when they think their security and prosperity are based on their food, shelter, army strength, etc, then they lose those things. So God, and the prophets, keep telling them: it’s not the things. It’s God.

It’s still a hard message for us to get. I think this is because we struggle to grasp what God actually is. The Bible language makes it easy enough to visualize God as an authoritarian, jealous figure, who doesn’t want us to pay attention to anything but him, although there may be other interesting things that would vie for our attention. When I read it that way, especially if I imagine God to be represented by the voice of some church institutions, I naturally bridle at the implied lack of freedom and the possible boredom such obedience would require.

On the other hand, if I can make my thought of God big enough, the command to attend to God is transformed. If I grasp that God is Life, I hear Life saying: Life is The Event – pay attention to it, learn all about it, be true to it. Live with all the vibrancy that Life offers. Don’t be stopped by the limitations of what you thought before were essential material conditions for your existence. Trust Life to guide you beyond what you thought was possible.

Like the Children of Israel, I have had definitive experiences of the presence and power of God. In those moments, I feel Spirit as tangible substance, as aliveness, as regenerative power. I think, of course this is what we’re about. We’re about joy itself, not about the material conditions sold as prerequisites to joy. Then, like the Children of Israel, I let my focus shift. I think, for example, that the e-mail in which I received the message of joy is the source of joy, and start checking my e-mail obsessively, and feeling let down when another message hasn’t arrived. Then I have to try to get back in right relation to Truth.

And so it goes. The challenge is simple, but all-encompassing. The lesson is there to be studied, but it is the practice that brings the mastery.

A few angel thoughts for creativity

Who you are is vast, even infinite -

And wonderful beyond imagining.

God gives you what you need by giving you what you are.

It's not that you have one thing you need to give the world, if only you can find out what it is. It is that your being is a constant gift, and it's right for you to bring forth goodness continually.

All things that are alive are life-supporting, not only for their own species but for all life forms to come. You can tell that you are of Life because of your desire to bless.

"Be still, and know that I am God." - Psalms 46.

"To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings." -Mary Baker Eddy

The infinite is right here at all times. There is infinity between the span of your fingers.

Mind is Love. If you love something, you notice everything about it. It holds infinity - you feel you will never lose interest in it. This is why you do the best at the things you love.

Whether you choose to do what you love, or choose to love what you do, you do well.

It's not that it always comes easily, but when you work and work and work you discover that in the work is the joy -

And with the completion, a radiant rush of lightness.

The Ecosystem of Life and Love

From time to time I’ve come across writings of scientists who study life, where they’ve expressed their continuing awe about what they’re studying. It seems, the more they study, the greater the awe: how does life manage to do it? How does it form? How is it that the deeper we probe, the greater the intricacy? The explanations that gave rise to Social Darwinism, touting a fierce and predatory competition for resources, give way to more nuanced views in which cooperation and a delicate balance of interdependence govern every aspect of life. As we’re ready to see it, we get to behold exquisite interlacings between and among species, amazing adaptations that require intimate relations with every other member.

I marvel at what a leap of trust is entailed in single celled organisms choosing to come together to be a more complex organism. Or for a fungus and a root to form a relationship that benefits them both. (I know some would dismiss the above as hopeless anthropomorphism; in my defense let me say I’m using the word “choose” in the sense that every action is a choice, whether it’s “conscious” or not, and that every action that depends on another entails trust, whether it’s reasoned or not.)

I remember in high school biology learning what were considered the properties that would make something qualify as life. They included growth, reproduction, metabolism, and adaptation. As a student of Whole Systems Design at Antioch University, I learned a few more: life is negentropic, cybernetic, autopoetic. I love these words. I sort of smugly love that I always have to define them to people:

Negentropic: working contrary to entropy. It is a law of thermodynamics that things always wear down – that they move from a greater level of complexity to a lesser one, that energy always moves to a less usable state. But life is negentropic – it always moves to a greater level of complexity, where more energy can be used. It creates conditions that make for more life, and not only within species. Trees make it possible for many more things to live – providing atmosphere, shelter, nutrition. I’ve read that in the early stages of evolution, the micro-organisms gave off gases that created an atmosphere wherein life forms such as ourselves could develop.

Cybernetic: equipped with a system for taking in information and, based on it, adapting behavior to optimize itself. In other words, it has a goal, a means of setting a course towards it, and a way of measuring its progress and using that information to steer its continued course towards that goal. Whether the mechanism for the system be a chemical one or a reasoned one, each living thing has this series of feedback loops which allow it to enhance and extend its life. Biologist Humberto Maturana made an eloquent case for intelligence to be redefined as present where goal seeking behavior is present.

Autopoetic: formed for its own purposes with a code contained within itself. Trees do not exist to be timber or even to be animal homes. They exist because of an imperative within themselves, and their being is for their own sake. This, of course, is also true for people, though we do seem to forget.

All of these properties have interesting implications for the understanding of life. Negentropy makes a compelling case for the existence of God, like this:

Clearly, life is a lot of work. Life is something that makes a lot of effort; in fact, you could say it defines effort. So the obvious question is, why does life bother? And the answer is, because it wants to. I am fond of quoting the biology teacher of one of my students, who said, “Even bacteria desire to live.” All the explanations for life’s continuance – the struggle for survival, the amazing efforts to procreate, the stunning adaptation – require as their engine life’s desire to be. Without that, there is no explanation for negentropy.

Well, desire is a property of love. The zest for life that gets us up in the morning is a kind of love. So is the absorbing interest that keeps us working hard at gaining a new skill even when the progress is slow. Though there is a predatory sense of the concept of desire, and though desire often filters into the dominant paradigm as something that keeps us from being present to the joy of the moment, in the simple sense of the desire of life to be, it doesn’t need to carry those connotations. Mary Baker Eddy says desire is prayer. This relates to the Biblical concept of being drawn by lovingkindness – being pulled forward by the power of a love that may feel to us to be our own.

The other thing I think is important is that desire can’t be expressed in material terms. Matter, by definition, can’t desire, as matter is defined as the inert building blocks from which things are made. Therefore desire is a spiritual property. What seems to me the obvious conclusion is that Spirit is a necessary component in the description of life.

And now I’ll stop pretending to be an authority on all this stuff. I’ll admit that I took a leap when I capitalized Spirit. I’ll admit that it could be another leap to say Spirit is God. And when I bring my faith into it and say God is Love, so Spirit is Love, and Love is the engine of Life, I have to abandon the voice of proof-through-argument. But these are things I hold to be true, and I find the contemplation of them deeply enlightening.

The cybernetic property of life gives evidence that Mind is Love, like this: Intelligence is defined by the presence and complexity of goal seeking behavior. The goal seeking behavior of life is always to make the best choice for itself. So intelligence is making the best choice. The act of always seeking the greatest good is a property of love, so Mind is Love. OK, that’s in shorthand, a little bit, but I find it interesting to think about it.

Autopoeisis is important to understand for the purpose of respect and the honoring of every living thing. Each thing has its own center. The center is the place of stillness around which things circulate. A tiny movement from the center can engender a great movement at the periphery. It takes much more effort to move something from the periphery, and there also is far less of a reference point for accuracy. It’s not surprising that each living thing would be designed to steer itself, from its center. Our society tends to operate on the assumption that it’s beneficial to have someone other than the individual determine what it will do. But the ecosystem of Life illustrates for us a better plan.

I think that whenever we study life with honesty and openness, we find great awe and inspiration. Similarly, when we explore our faith with honesty and openness, we approach truth. I find I do best in my inquiries when I’m not so much seeking to disprove other theories as to learn everything I can about the ecosystem of Life and Love. It seems to me that any explanation in words can only be a shadow – minus at least one dimension of the actual truth.

Banana Nature – an allegory

I came up with this analogy a few years back, and since then it has grown into a story that I find useful. I've told it to people but not written it - so I hope this account is able to convey the light-hearted nature in which it's intended:

Imagine that a large group of people were hypnotized into believing that they were bananas. As a result of this, they would spend much of their time sitting in groups of reclining chairs (their bowls) arranged so their heads were near each other, reaching their hands over their heads and clasping them together with each other. They would mostly occupy themselves by talking about the condition of their skin – their coloring, how their brown spots were coming along – and their insides – how soft they were, how much they were bruised.

Imagine then that after a while, a few of them started speculating that there must be more to them than this, their banana nature. Someone might suggest that, after all, if they were really bananas, they wouldn’t be able to talk. But most of them would not want to talk about that. They would say that talking was one of those things that couldn't be explained, and that its existence could be questionable – it could also be attributed to a chemical phenomenon in the skin. And the conversation would quickly go back to such things as the effects of bowl location on health, and the effect of bunch size and position on personality.

But there would be some of them who would keep thinking there had to be more to life, and maybe one or two of them would get up and walk around. They would say, see – bananas can’t do that, and we can. Some might reply, that’s not healthy – it’s bad for bananas to be alone. You need to stay with the group or you’ll get terribly bruised. Others might say, wow, that’s something to aspire to. And they might try getting up. But they might say, I try to escape it, but I just can’t get around my banana nature. It keeps pulling me back with the deep need I have to sit in the bunch and be connected at the top.

Eventually, some of them might wake all the way up, and it would be clear to them that they had never been bananas at all. Some of them might just walk away from the whole group and go have adventures and live normal lives. Others might come back and try to wake up the rest of the group. They might say: look, you’re not a banana. You’ve never been a banana. It doesn’t matter if you think you were badly bruised during transit or that you’ve gone too brown and soft and need to be thrown away. This truth about you, that you’re not a banana, can free you from all those difficulties. You can get up!

If it’s anything like current life in our society, there would be some in the group who would be angry at that assertion. They would say, how can you say it doesn’t matter whether I was bruised? How can you assert that the inevitable process of becoming brown and mushy doesn’t govern us all?

Meanwhile, there might be some kind of a religion formed around this new teaching – it would be a gathering of the bananas who believed there was more to aspire to, and that it was reachable. There would be some among these who would sit in their place asserting the words, but not actually getting up. They might talk about how they were trying to have faith but they hadn’t gotten a clear sign yet. They might get in contests with each other about which of them was a deeper believer – which was best able to recite the words and carry on convincingly about how their nature was more than bananas.

The more these believing bananas would sit there and talk about it without doing anything, the less credence the words would have among the whole group. But occasionally, there would be a banana who would take the words to heart and actually get up and walk around. That banana would try to tell the others: you don’t have to be a banana – you can get up.

And in fact, any of the group who did choose to entertain the possibility that this was true, that they weren’t bananas, could get up and slowly prove it for themselves. Maybe at first they’d be drawn back to their banana natures, but after a while their actual selfhood would become clearer to them. They would find a huge world to live and move in, far beyond what they could have imagined. They would be free.

To be tiringly obvious in driving this point home: I believe that the gap between the hypnotized “bananas” and their true selfhood is not larger than the gap between what our societal norms tell us we are and our actual being. I believe we each not only have the power, but are already being much more than our societal constructs give us credit for. After all, we do have love as our engine. We do take soaring leaps of compassion and understanding. We have beautiful dreams. I believe that a close look at what we already are can help us see that we deserve to aspire to much more than we do.

Angels

How can angels be everywhere, or at least in the precise place where you need them, every time you look up?

Is it in the way the moon stays with you as you travel down a long dark road?

Is it the way your heart stays with you throughout the day and night, so you always have access to all that is within it?

Perhaps both - they are bigger than the path we think we travel on, and they are a part of our very being.

May you feel the presence of angels, comforting and inspiring you.
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Angels come:

Angels came to Sodom.
It was a terrible place - a place where people had given up
on any sense of individual dignity, for themselves or others,
a place where people preyed on each other.

Lot wasn't an especially virtuous man. He was upright, but he wasn't very strong. He wasn't a great servant of God like Abraham. But he was OK. The angels came. They came into that sordid place and lifted him out.

Angels don't just come to the pious. They don't just come into well-lit livingrooms and studios with oriental rugs on the floor. They don't just come when we've been cleaning house for them, mentally.

They also come when we are slimed, filthy, defeated, when we feel like no one would want to be seen with us. They come when we're feeling ragged, or ridiculous, out of place or out of sorts. They slip quietly in, in the places between our rantings, and at the point when we've run out of tears. They push in at the little flaws in our illusions, exposing the truth that has waited all along, just under the surface, to bless us.

Sometimes they do it by making us laugh at ourselves. Always they make us know that we are beloved -
In spite of ourselves,
Because of ourselves.

Angels come. They lift us out.

Praying for people, and being prayed for

I once had a young Muslim woman for a student in English as a second language. When I asked her about what she liked to do in her free time, she said, “I love to pray!” She said it with a sincerity that moved me, and I didn’t doubt that what she said was true.

I love to pray. Though I have at times felt like prayer was a duty or a burden, those times were when I wasn’t really succeeding at praying. It was more a thing with myself, a declaration of things I had been told that, if I knew were true, would heal me. But I didn’t know they were true, so my declaration didn’t have any effect.

Mary Baker Eddy says that the key to healing people is love. That is a thing I struggled for years to comprehend, mostly because I didn’t know how to make myself love more than I was already loving. Now I sometimes get it – it works when I don’t leave God out of prayer. I let myself feel loved by the divine presence of Love, and let that Love spill out in my love of others. So when I pray, I get to be lifted up in Love. I get to soar with it, and be in love, and have my thought lifted in love towards whoever I’m praying for.

What is amazing to me when I pray for someone is the love that endures afterwards. It is a spirit-bond, a sense of deep joy at the contemplation of the existence of the person. It is a gift to me – I get to keep it. And it feels just like love, the kind everyone wonders if they will ever find. And the more of that love I have, the more accessible the healing prayer.

Now here’s the really cool thing: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of you.” When people share the Christ presence, it generates for all of them more of that pure love that heals. And they get to keep it, and use it. I am part of an ecumenical spiritual formation group, and over a period of several months, we have prayed together, for each other, many times. At this point, I don’t even need to gather with them to reap the fruit of the Christ presence. I just invoke them in my thought, and there is the love. I can use it to get to the heart of prayer, where healing takes place.

Here is a description of my process of praying for someone. First, I “go into the closet.” In anticipation of the joy and peace that will arise, I retire from all of the trains of thought which say they need to be resolved first. Next, I let God “deliver me into the large place” – the place in consciousness in which I begin to grasp an inkling of the scope of the Infinite. Then I carry my thought of the person into the light of Truth and Love, and bear witness to what God reveals to me about that person. I get to experience the depth of God’s love for that person and the specific provisions of Love to meet the current need. I get to see God’s face in God’s image and likeness.

Also, when people have prayed for me, I have felt the same deliverance of love – They have gone into the closet and been delivered into the large place, and then the influx of love that they bring back floods to me, bringing something I couldn’t have generated by myself.

I think this is a taste of the Holy Ghost which the apostles gave to people when they traveled to see them. There’s a part in Acts where it tells about some of the faithful who have heard of the Holy Ghost but don’t know for sure if it exists. Then the Apostles come and give it to them, and then they have it. Prayer, Christ, faith – these things can be total enigmas to those who haven’t experienced them. But once we have, it is our duty and joy to share them as we can.