Projectors
Projectors were quite popular in the 1980's and 1990's as means by which to manifest tiny images on film onto a larger surface, such as a wall or canvas. The act of projecting an image from one place to another gives us a powerful metaphor for the way our own world is brought into existence. However, this became even easier to understand with the advent of websites.
Websites
In the year 2015, we might more easily appreciate the concept of the back end and front end of a software program. For example, whatever you see on this website is determined by specific settings that you (the reader) don't have access to. The back end (and there are many layers of various back ends, according to Judaism), determine how everything in this interface looks, feels, and functions. For example, according to Google, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is "a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages."
In other words, you can make a word bold by applying "bold tags" to it. The bold tag looks like this: <b>dog</b> with "b" standing for "bold." You can affect appearance and function by using a wide array of tags. The color, the font size, how much space there is between sentences - each element has a corollary that exists in the back end in one form or another. You, the user, have access to the front end, which is technical parlance is known as the Graphic User Interface, or GUI. The GUI is the place where you can click on things and type stuff - it's where you can interact with logic that is hidden from your view in the back end.
What is the spiritual significance of this technology? It teaches us the vastly important lesson that the world we live in is but an emanation of higher, more hidden worlds. The sidewalk that we stroll upon, the trees that emerge from the ground, and the sky that careens over our heads, are a sophisticated GUI. And if this sounds ever-so superbly Matrix-esque to you, you might be shocked that the Ramchal (1707-1746) describes these concepts in elucidated detail in his book Derech Hashem, the Way of God. In Chapter 1, (Feldheim's Torah Classics Library's translation) the Ramchal writes that the "existence and state of being of the physical universe thus emanate from these highest Forces and are dependent upon them. Whatever exists in the physical world is a result of something that takes place among these Forces." Excuse me for saying that the Ramchal's description of these Forces seems uncannily similar to the concept behind HTML. Brick walls, shopping malls, and Niagara falls each have their own, specific tags that give them their particular set of properties and functions. That's one sophisticated program.
To further develop this metaphor, the Ramcha"l also states that "These Forces... were arranged in various systems and placed in different domains." We know that the wide array of tags and types of HTML code are arranged in different ways to produce different results.
And we can take this metaphor to the next level. If everything that we see is determined by back end settings, then we can imagine all that exists as having some sort of tag (remember <b>dog</b> = dog). According to the Ramchal's description that "These Forces... were arranged in various systems and placed in different domains," in terms of our HTML metaphor, we can understand these "various systems" as "tags" applied to our own interface. For example, what water and trees have in common is that they are both particular substances. However, they are each substances with their own properties and functions. Hence, we could think of them each as an identical, undefined substance with a tag. The image below illustrates this point:
The effect of the water and wood "tag" is to define substance, or matter, as being either water or wood. Thus, when this tag is applied, the substance takes on the properties and functions of each particular tag. If it is water, it manifests the substance as being a transparent liquid that freezes at 32 degrees Farenheit at standard atmospheric pressure. If it is wood, it manifests the substance as being a sturdy and fibrous substance that can be set ablaze by fire.
Just as you can apply several tags to one word, such as both bold and italic tags to make it both bolded and italicized, several tags could be added to a portion of substance to define it further. For example, wood is the main substance that makes up a tree. Therefore, the tags that define a tree would look like this:
Of course, while the description in Derech Hashem is lofty and seemingly inaccessible, nothing more than the most basic aspect of bolding a word brings this concept down to earth where you can hold it and examine it with two hands. I am suggesting that our Creator has lovingly made it easier for us to understand the workings of His world by giving us a simple, even overtly mundane, conceptualization tool.
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