A Glitch in the Universe

Have you ever run a computer program and noticed a glitch? Where the program was supposed to do one thing and ended up doing another? Maybe you tried to save a file and your computer crashed. Maybe the website you tried to open didn’t seem to format correctly.

When your computer fails to work how you think it should, programmers usually call this a bug, error or glitch. Although they can be a nuisance, the program really isn’t doing anything wrong. It is behaving exactly the way it was programmed to act. Whatever code the designer wrote down before sending you the software is working exactly how it was written.

Life is like a computer program. All the events in your life happen because of the systems of nature function that way. From a limited point of view parts of life can seem unfair, confusing or capricious. But like a program, the events in life may appear to have glitches but they are simply functioning exactly how they were created.

As a fairly technically savvy person, I always find it interesting to see someone struggling with a basic computer problem. Often they will get angry at the machine for not doing what it is supposed to do. They mutter that it is the computers fault for not working, that it should do what they want it to.

Of course, the computer doesn’t care that you don’t understand it. The program is a series of complicated systems designed to respond to certain inputs. From the program’s perspective, it is doing exactly what it has been designed to do, you are the one who isn’t using it correctly.

Like the computer program, life doesn’t care that you don’t understand how it works. It doesn’t respond to your yelling, whining or gloom about it. The universe functions exactly how its systems dictate, without compassion or spite.

Life is a program where you don’t have the source code. You can’t make modifications to the systems of life. All you can do is observe what is happening and try to understand.

I feel that each of us has our own idealistic view of how we think the world should work, and we have our personal experiences of how the world actually does work. Personal development can only come from letting go to that naivety and instead trying to observe how things actually work.

Your mind and the minds of every other person are also complicated systems within the universe. When you fail to act as you want to, or other people don’t respond the way you think you should you have two options. Get upset or seek to understand.

When you seek to understand, you gain power. Computer hackers don’t have magical abilities, they just understand how the systems inside a computer work. Be a life hacker. Be someone who strives to understand how life actually works. From that understanding you can develop your own personal power and see past the glitches in the universe.