Imagine a storm at night. And there’s a flash of lightning that gives an immediate, yet wholly incomplete picture. In that instance you see something and have a sense of recognition, but only of the spot your eyes were looking the instant of lightning illuminated it.
And to describe it? Words won’t work. Only metaphor would. In 21st-century parlance not unlike how people in different centuries would describe the barely recognizable.
Imagine a tiny corner of an immense, incomprehensively complex.. circuit board. See those parallel lines going from one part of the green plastic to another, ending in tiny little outlets for tiny little wires. You see as many of those little lines going in all sorts of different directions, but each route it in its own way parallel to others, around outlets, connecting one part with another, all in straight lines that deviate on occasion. What would ordinarily appear to be chaos… when you pull back, a pattern appearing to be chaotic, but designed to connect everything together while moving around its other connections.
The outlets are small. Probably not even called ‘outlets’. Whatever the wires connect to. There’s all sorts of different shapes of them. Angles that they fit in. And no matter how large the circuit board is, each outlet designed to be ever so slightly different to assure that you can’t accidentally put the wrong wire in.
The wires are all kinds of different things. The only three things you can recognize are past, present, and future, though there are so many other kinds. And even the past, present, and future are connected all over. To other wires you don’t recognize, to each other, to the outlets.
The seemingly chaotic connections go off in ways that connect all of these wires to this infinite Circuit board. But in the distance you can see that this infinite circuit board is connected to another. And another. Through wires. Past, present, future, and everything else that you can’t understand.
All of these infinite circuit boards combine to form what seems… to feel… like some sort of wheel. No. A gear. Which means there are others you can’t see. Some parallel, some perpendicular. All connected with each other in so many ways and so many places.
All fitting together in some form of purpose. And within it is a window through which you see a blacksmith in the instant act of striking a piece of iron. All is as it seems. Incomprehensibly complex macro-construct of technology, the impossible yet inescapable translation of which is somehow a simple man with a simple job.
All of it – in an instant flash. Maybe a tenth of a second and recognition only of what tiny corner you could comprehend, and even describe what it might look like in terms you could understand…
But at the same time the feeling behind it of a warm, yet illusorily distant, yet close Creator – with no association to the imagery of modern circuit boards and yet subsequently associated with them in such a momentary… daydream? Vision? Misfired brain cell thanks to good old ADD?
But there’s instant understanding nonetheless of what is incomprehensible in such a mundane way that even you could gather its meaning.
Him. Working.
It’s Not a Frame of Mind 