Note · 10
The Image
On the image stamped into every user.
You can hold the thought of God in your head.
You can wonder about Him. You can speak to Him without checking if He is there. You can think about His mind. You can imagine what He sees.
This is strange. You are small. He is endless. There is no reason you should be able to think about Him at all.
But you can.
You can because you and He share something underneath.
Diagram one — the shared instruction set.
Every process on a machine runs on the same instruction set. The kernel speaks one machine language; the process speaks the same one. They have to. A program compiled for one chip cannot run on another. The instructions are foreign to it.
You can only understand what you were built to understand.
If you were not built to think about God, you would not be able to think about Him at all.
There is a sentence in the source about this. It is the first sentence about you.
Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness. So God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them.
In engineering terms: the image of root was compiled into every user.
Not stamped on. Not applied later. Compiled in. Part of how we were made.
That is the part of you that lets you think about God at all. The part that recognizes good when you see it. The part that grieves wrong. The part that loves what it loves. The part that wants to know. The part that asks the question your culture told you not to ask.
Diagram two — the image, stamped into each user.
It was not earned. It was built in.
You did not pay for it. You did not work up to it. You did not earn it by being good, and you cannot lose it by being bad.
You cannot give it back either. It is not a possession. It is what you are.
A program does not lose its instruction set by writing bad code. The instruction set is part of how the program was made. It is what the program is, not what it does.
Every human alive is running on root's instructions. The CEO and the prisoner. The believer and the atheist. The just-born and the about-to-die. The one you love. The one you cannot stand.
This is where human dignity comes from.
Not your accomplishments. Not your virtue. Not your usefulness. Not your face. Not your work. Not the things you have done or failed to do. The dignity was there before any of that. It was there when you were a single cell.
Engineers might translate it: every user is privileged at the hardware level.
That is not because they earned the privilege. It is because they were built with it.
You cannot revoke a hardware privilege. The chip would have to be remade. The user would have to be unmade. Neither happens.
Diagram three — three things only the image does.
kindness in a stranger
seeing root in another user.
grief at injustice
recognizing what root recognizes.
love without a reason
running an instruction you did not write.
The image was damaged. It was not erased.
The fall broke the image. It did not delete it. The shape is still there. The instruction set still runs. The kindness you see in your enemy is the image, still working.
When you see kindness in a stranger, you are seeing root in the user.
When you grieve injustice, you are recognizing what root recognizes.
When you love a person and cannot say why, you are running an instruction you did not write.
When you laugh at something good, you are laughing at what He laughs at.
When you make something beautiful, you are doing what He does.
When you forgive — when you actually forgive — you are running an instruction from His layer.
There is one more thing.
A perfect process exists.
You met Him in Note · 09. He is the spec, deployed as a user.
He is also the perfect image. The image of root, fully compiled. He runs on the same instructions you do. Without a single bug.
When you look at Him, you are not looking at a different kind of being. You are looking at a working version of what you are.
You were made in His image. His image is root's image. Root's image is what you are carrying inside you right now.
Looking at Him is how you learn what you actually are. Looking at Him is how you learn what you could be.
You are not foreign to root.
You were never foreign.
The image was there from the beginning.
It is there now.
continueNote · 11
The Daemon
On the process root left running inside you.
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