19. COMPUTERS
Computers are the latest rage. They're lots of fun and very useful. They do things for you on automatic. It lets you get a lot done.
But automaticities can be a curse as well as a blessing. First of all, you should make a point of knowing what is being done for you. And secondly, you should know how to do it yourself. This is true whether we are talking about a computer, or mental machinery, or even a crowd of servants. Don't let yourself simply be carried along as an effect of what is being done for you. Use the stuff and let it help you, but also find out about it and get over to a position of being at cause and in control.
A little time spent learning the basics about computers is well worth the effort in the current society.
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Ron did a nice series of bulletins on the subject of computers. These are a good introduction and better than many of the beginners books in the field. But here we have an interesting point. If you are new to the field and study these and use them as a point to launch off from, you will win. And if you treat these as absolute and the final word on the subject, you're setting yourself up for failure. These were written by a man who has an excellent ability to identify key factors in a subject and communicate them. But he didn't spend decades in the trenches programming and designing systems (I have). There is a lot more to know in the area.
We could draw a parallel with Scientology tech. It is good but incomplete. You will have that problem any time you try to limit a subject to one and only one individual source point. Science has ground to a halt a number of times in the past because an extremely bright figure (such as Archimedes or Aristotle or Newton) created such a vast outpouring of brilliance that people put him up on a pedestal and ceased to think for themselves.
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Computers are not self aware or creative and they are not intelligent in the fullest sense. But they can simulate these things. Any decision or postulate or way of doing something can be worked out in advance by a programmer and set up in a program.
A computer wouldn't want to take over the world. Computers don't actually want anything (even if somebody has programmed one to say that it wants something). If a computer does announce that it intends to take over the world, you should find out who programmed it to do that.
What is currently called artificial intelligence has only been successful in pattern recognition and expert systems. An expert system consists of simply programming the computer to mimic the standard actions of human experts in the area being computerized. And pattern recognition (which includes trend analysis, speech recognition, visual identification, etc.) consists of using sophisticated math and lots of computing power to find the closest matches within a known set.
One way of looking at it is to consider that the actual thought originates with the programmer and the computer is simply a way to leverage that thought into a broad and lasting effect.
Of course an exterior thetan with enough horsepower might take over a computer system. That has happened on the whole track. In that case you should be able to audit the guy (Nots etc.) and even run him back to past lives. Don't be fooled into thinking that a machine has suddenly become aware of being aware. Either a sophisticated programmer is stringing you along or you're dealing with a real thetan who goes all the way back to the beginning.
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A program is simply an ordered series of postulates made in advance to work on data that has not yet been presented. One of our best tricks is to loop these postulates around to repeat over and over, usually on a varying stream of data.
Mental machinery can be built in the same way. And if you can make a postulate stick in the real world, then you can build theta machinery which can manipulate reality. Hypothetically, the entire universe might be a sort of programmed manifestation generated by a sort of theta computer (which would really be just a series of ordered postulates).
All the various things we see in programming can be applied to theta machinery. You can loop postulates around on themselves. If you loop recursively, you get fractile patterns, and these are commonly observed in nature.
It is possible that there are system level routines in the structure of reality. I don't know if they are accessible here. I think that they were accessible in the Magic Universe. A "spell" might really be a series of thoughts (not easily hit by accident) including passwords, commands, and parameters, which would invoke a system level routine in the "machinery" which was generating reality.
People are not computers. But they set up a great deal of mental machinery that is computer like in its characteristics. And so we find that the field of computers is a very fertile area for inspiration concerning the structure of the human mind and possibly even the structure of reality itself.