jjosuminded

I’ve been seriously working on some inner aspects that challenge the structure of my worldview quite bluntly. I have chosen this, because I found my model of reality to be quite faulty, incomplete and having very little room for scalability or adaptability.

Being a systems guy I’ve tried to make sense out of this using an analogy, which I want to share with you (or rather, a chain of analogies).

Have you ever heard of virtualization?

It’s pretty much what gave birth to the age of cloud technologies and services; the basic premise is this: you have this huge, robust server, expensive and capable of great things; and it gets assigned handling the email service for an office of no more than 50 people, with relatively low email traffic. The investment sits in the Data Center doing its email thing using maybe 30% of its CPU and at peak times 40% of its RAM; indeed they have an efficient email server but it’s a big waste for this expensive machine which also consumes a lot of energy. These numbers are made up, but I think you get the point.

So what if we wanted to add an Intranet site and a database? Two more boxes, similar situation.

This was sort of the situation until the concept of virtualization and the technology that made possible was created and commercialized. With virtualization you would introduce a layer of resource management (hypervisor) that would be able to allocate resources to several machines living inside the server. So with this, you can run the three in a single box! Email server in a Microsoft Exchange box, Intranet site in a Windows Server running Sharepoint and an Oracle database running in a Red Hat linux server. I won’t get into many details because it’s an analogy but here’s an image to illustrate this concept:

So the idea here is, you invest in a very capable machine and now you’re able to use its full potential.

An Even Better Machine

For many years I have been quite obsessed with the topic of human potential; I have my reasons for it. My own personal quest for self-actualization, for improvement, and the realization that it’s indeed attainable has been a mind-blowing discovery when it began, and today is almost a banner for which I’m inspired to fight. There’s also a negative stimuli, and it’s observing people around me whom I’ve wished could realize their immense potential but instead they trade it for nickels, for the default options the system provides.

It’s undeniable that a large part of what a human is, is a very complex carbon-based machine; the research on genetics and the ability to achieve modification at this level, the capability to be provided with an implant or a chip that responds to human intention also illustrated this concept, and now there’s Neuralink.

So what’s up with all those great machines, wasting resources in the data center of mankind?

I believe a part of it is, a machine can have incredible hardware specifications, but it’s only going to be as good as the software it’s running. And that’s kind of the whole point of the analogy.

How do we make decisions?

Typically, out of need. This is far from ideal, I believe if we made decisions out of conscious and directed will we would be left with less scenarios when we’re cornered and it’s need that compels us to act. And yet, those decisions have to respond to an underlying principle, something we consider before taking a step in a given direction. Don’t you think that underlying content or parameter is the key to what someone’s life ends up being?

Because our timeline is a collection of each individual decision or omission in our lives.

And it gets tricky here, because that which controls our actions is often hidden from our conscious mind, it’s the unconscious that contains the decision patterns we use. Some will argue, but I stand with Freud and Jung on this one, I’ve lived it.

But even trickier is the fact, that even our “in-control” engine, our conscious mind is precisely that: an engine. As such it interprets everything, from the more physical (light, color, sounds, everything sensorial) to the more abstract (emotions, gestures, situations, symbols). And the collection of these interpretations (and their hidden unconscious influences) form our perspective and it eventually begins to turn into our worldview; not let’s be careful not to underestimate the power and potential that exists in this conscious engine as it’s indeed continously feeding the hidden unconscious world and when you discover how to, you can decide to impress certain things into it, conciously. But this is a different topic I may talk about in a later article.

So wouldn’t you say that this complex set of structures of meaning contains the secret keys to understand why our life is what it is up to this day?

“Know thyself, and thou shalt know the universe and God.”

Pythagoras / Maxim inscribed at the Temple of Apollo

Templates, and Customizations

I’m learning to keep it short and sweet folks, believe I can write to much more, but then it can weaken the intention because it becomes diluted in too many words. I’ll write more on this subject (heck, maybe I’ll write a book on this one day) but for now, I’d like to entice you with some food for thought:

• What’s the software I’m running? Make a list, seriously, I’ll give you possible examples:
  • A family tradition
  • An ideology
  • A denial
  • A “survival mode”
  • A religion
  • A set of experiences
  • It could be many more, and typically it’s not just one thing
• How much of this identified software, is something I chose to install? Here’s a key thing to ponder, as much of our programming was imposed unto us from early years.
• How much of this software generates conflicts, or is constantly involved in my life’s conflicts?
• What software do I want to uninstall? Yes, you actually can!
• Which of my unrealized expectations or dreams are related with which software package? Oh, that’s a tough one, that’s a brave look in the mirror and it may change your life for good.

Folks, I believe we’re a lot more than machines, but there are those who profit in making you believe you can only work with your current set of instructions and perceptions. When an individual takes a deep look inside, begins to identify what’s limiting their potential and decides to work on it, then the real human power begins to awake.