As a programmer I often find interesting parallels between the systems that I am building and the way that some of these structures are reflected in the world around me. Today I was thinking about our society in cultural and government/structural terms and I went off on a mental tangent and started modeling aspects of these systems as if I were building an information system to facilitate them.
My mind started drifting as if I was on auto-pilot at one point and I found myself "thinking over my own thinking" as if I was meta-analyzing it. What started to come into more complete vision was the underpinnings of the human psychological attachment to familiar information systems and how bringing awareness to that in an effort to cut through it could open up doors to beautiful new ways of life.
To start to unpack this I think it helps to draw the parallel between information systems as we use them and higher-level information systems. When I say information systems as we use, a quite mundane example could be like this website that you are reading from or some other software. At the same time, the actual way that the information itself is modeled is its own higher-level information system. So, an administrative interface in a website to write an article is one level of it, but also the design itself such as the way an article relates to categories or other content. Sometimes a metaphysical look at things like this can shine a light on something in a different way we learn something new.
Now when it comes to designing systems we also have metadata. An example of metadata would be the different pieces of information we keep on an article such as its name and date it was written. In a database, there would be an `article` table and each `article` has a `name` and `date` column. The fact that an `article` has a `name` and `date` is metadata about articles. The whole topic of metadata is actually just another way we choose to define information.
So we have information systems that we build, and we have information systems which are the way we define things that therefore guide the lower-level information systems we build. We obviously have attachments to the systems we use to a certain extent but we are usually less aware of our attachment to the systems we use to define, and this can end up as a trap which perpetuates suffering out of fear of what we haven't yet confirmed as 'safe'.
Taking some common beliefs of the Christian religion and modeling them we could say that a man and a woman have a soul or we could define the relations between the angels, archangels, and God, or The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost. If we wanted to use the government as an example we could say that it consists of branches, and we could define the branches and the relation between. Or we could say that a state has a county which has municipalities. If we wanted to extrapolate it even further we could say that considering a spiritual aspect of life and a mundane, working, societal aspect of life as "two halves to a whole" is another way to organize information - and here we're really stepping into how people start to define reality.
If we start to challenge some of these information systems it could unintentionally be triggering for some people. It's just a matter of the fact that some of us have become attached to these systems so an attempt to introduce something unfamiliar may make people's reality feel threatened. However, if we can learn to observe from a place of loving detachment how we conceive the structures upon which our personal beliefs and society are built we can more easily introduce changes that bring out greater benefits for all involved.
I felt like this belonged as an article on our ministry's blog because we are passing through times of intense change. With the events of the past couple of years many people have met with hard challenges to their own belief systems whether that be related to society or an understanding spiritually of how we fit into 'the big picture.' Throughout this same time period there have been rapid introductions of new, mundane information systems into our society that people may or may not agree with. Our ministry wants to facilitate the changes that we are going through and support a community that introduces new information systems both in the matter of thought and belief as well as for our practical benefit.
As a result, it feel like this article should be wrapped by encouraging people to analyze these things and their thoughts and meditate on them. What is the meta-design of some of the things that we hold important in our lives? Relationships, spiritual beliefs, social structures - how do we define these things in our own minds? How do we define their relationships? Does the way we choose to define them make sense, and does it bring benefit to all of creation? Could we tweak it to make it better? How do our feelings on what is safe and what is not safe form our opinion of our information systems, and are these feelings rooted in a realistic manner, or are they suffering based on attachment? We hope that by meditating on some of these things we can gain a greater understanding of our own perspective and use that to benefit all communities :)