Many principles for writing and optimizing software are also valid in the mind; here we want to look at only two of them in a very abbreviated way. If you are interested in the subject, have a look at the the article series Your Inner Computer.
We Inherited What?
Many religions state that we are "Children of God". If that is so, then what did we inherit from our divine parent? An interesting answer comes from the world of software programming: like "child procedures" that are derived from "parents", we inherited God's own properties. Which would be, for instance: compassion, love and creative power - just like we inherited brown eyes or blond hair from our physical parents.
The results of these inherited capabilities can be seen all over the world in its various cultures and their treasures of science and art. A culture which is spiritually intact (following the divine laws no matter what the name of its religion), has to make sure that the same creative freedoms that God has, and that we inherited, are also passed on to the following generations.
This automatically rules out as misleading and un-spiritual all cultural patterns that take away the individual's power of choice - because in the beginning, God had unlimited power of choice and this is our rightful inheritage as his children, so we should not deny that same inheritage to our own children, or allow that it is taken away from ourselves.
A very short conclusion would be: Cultural patterns that force individuals to do things against their will, or deny them the freedom to do as they wish, are godless, or un-spiritual (find better words if you don't like these). The two most godless or un-spiritual concepts are enforcement and denial, as they take away our God-parentage and turn us from genuine "Children of God" into powerless slaves.
Measured by this simple rule, there are not only godless cultures but also godless religions. Like any other cultural pattern, it is entirely a question of the support or non-support of individuals, whether these religions can and will continue to exist or not. No crusades, no wars, no violence at all is needed to transform our religious life once we have realized its inadequacies. It is our own support or non-support that carries them into the future.
Counting Up, Counting Down
Another, even more interesting concept in computer programming is the so-called "Component Object Model" (COM). It provides re-useable components that can be used by various applications to do routine jobs (saves a lot of work to software developers).
Every component that is in use has an internal counter which lets it know how many programs are using it. As long as only one program is holding on to a COM-Object, this piece of software must remain active and cannot be removed from the computer's memory. Only when the counter goes down to 0 (zero), can the function be unloaded. This happens exactly when the last application stops using it and reduces its internal counter by 1 (one).
Cultural patterns work in exactly the same way. No matter how massive they appear, the truth is that only the usage by so many individuals makes them massive.
The trick to keep them in place is to tell the individuals "you can't do anything against such a majority". You sure can. If each individual in this majority, by his own choice, stops using a cultural pattern like, say, treating women as inferior, the usage counter of this specific pattern goes down to 0 (zero) and it will be unloaded from this society's reservoir of active thought and behaviour patterns.
Over night, it will be "history". But there was a time for every such pattern, when they were put out of use by brave individuals who were not hypnotized by the allmighty "majority" or "mainstream" snake like poor and helpless little bunnies.
In the same way, only in the other direction, cultural patterns are brought into existence. Things like going to the fitness studio or counting calories while cooking, have not existed a few decades ago.
So, in doing new things (like using the drills on this website) we may seem to be a small minority that doesn't have a chance to make it into the mainstream. But actually, all we see is an activity pattern with a usage counter of 0 (zero) or little more, and all it takes to make it a mainstream pattern is that individuals start to use it! (Instead of waiting for somebody else to go ahead.)
This page last updated on 01.04.2007