the prajnaparamita of the hard drive
If you are at familiar with Buddhist literature and ancient texts then you will have heard of the prajnaparamita or the Perfection of Wisdom. Have a look on wikipedia if you’re not sure. But what does it have to do with the hard drive?
As my scsi experiments continue I keep wiping my drives and writing onto them again. Recently I created a raid stripe and have been experimenting with the block sizes. There is data on the drive and then there is not and it’s there again.
A hard disk or any other digital data storage medium for that matter has to be formatted according to the device that uses it. That just means breaking up the space into little chunks and then creating a directory of what is in each little chunk. But at an even more basic level it’s all ones and zeros. A unformatted drive is all zeros, as far as I know. And then it’s formatted and a basic pattern is created. Then actual data is placed in various locations. But again at that basic level some ones appear amongst those zeros. What we see as pictures, movies, music and e-mails are just that. 11010010 or something like that. Eight bits make a byte and half a byte is a nibble.
If you remember those pin matrices that were popular in the eighties, you can think of a hard drive in the same way. It takes on various shapes but none of them are permanent or stable. And the matrix can be easily reset.
The Universe as a great big hard disk
So inside the hard drive the patterns appear and disappear according to our input. We save something such as a photo or delete something such as an e-mail. It’s not permanent. We also know that hard drives can fail as they are only guaranteed for up to 5 years. Hence the need to constantly back-up. (You are doing that aren’t you!)
Inside the case of the hard drive patterns come into being and disappear again over time. Form is only emptiness and emptiness only form. There are no videos, no photos, no music only these patterns of ones and zeros. And if you reformat the drive then it all goes back to zero. What we perceive is only a representation of text, of sound of image and moving image. And that representation is good enough for us to believe that it exists. But it exists only as a particular file format.
So if we were to supersize that hard drive and think of the universe in that way, then we come a bit closer to seeing reality. Things or phenomena come into being and disappear again. There is more in this world than we can perceive. Going back to the hard drive analogy again, it contains many hidden files and system files which the average user will never see, but they are there all the same. And in the same way all these other realms of being such as gods, ghosts and goblins will never enter the world of the average person except in mythology.
The Three Marks of Conditionality
Dukkha, Anatta, Anicca. Unsatisfactoriness, non-self and impermanence. All conditioned phenomena are subject to the three marks of conditionality. They have the appearance of being solid, permanent and satisfactory, just like files on the hard disk, but they can and will disappear at some point. Just as those photos, videos and music tracks are only illusions so are all phenomena.
As stars, a fault of vision, a lamp,
A mock show, dew drops, or a bubble,
A dream, a lightning flash, or a cloud,
So should one view what is conditioned.
Diamond Sutra