1.1. The 'Method'

I do not think any of us need to be told how extremely complex the Great Work, the plan of creation and evolution, is likely to be, but I thought that it might help to provide an analogy to show what is happening in the spiritual world to create and evolve the universe.

I will use the analogy of Spirit being like software , the big difference being that in the spiritual world, the ‘hardware’ is made of the same energy as the software.  But for our purposes we can use the same analogy to show how the Great Work would have to be planned.

The analogy

Whenever a system is developed in the computer world, the Project Managers usually use a thing called a ‘method’. 

A ‘Method’ shows the sorts or types of activities that might need to be undertaken during the development process.  This is not the plan, but it is the thing used to produce a plan.  It is like a reminder of the sorts of thing that have to be done on all projects of this type. 

The Method doesn’t show the activity sequence like a plan does , but it does show the dependencies of activities, so by knowing the dependencies we know approximately what order the tasks do need to come in.  So, for example, we know from the Method that we have to analyse the system before it is designed, we can’t construct it [program and test] before we have designed it and we can’t implement it before we have properly tested it.

Not only is this ‘Method’ used for developing a system in the first place – a new system, it is used to enhance the system afterwards.  In fact, the development is but a tiny fraction of a systems life – probably 95% of the work on a system is the evolution and enhancement of the system after it has been implemented whereas only 5% is new development.  So it is not really a development cycle, it  might be better called a systems evolution cycle.

The diagram shown below is an example cycle [freely available].  It was one I used to use.

The boxes show the types of activity that need to be done the arrows show the dependencies.  It is a sort of high level function dependency diagram.  YOU DON’T NEED TO UNDERSTAND THIS IN DETAIL.  I have provided it to show the complexity of system evolution.

But it is helpful to understand something of what the activities mean, as if we are going to continue to use the analogy, then this will help us to understand how we fit into all this – what we are here to do in this vast process.  Why we are here!