Reach your highest potential by becoming...

Every age has it's metaphors. In one age, human drives are hydraulic, or the world is like a mechanical clock. My metaphor here may ultimately be as incomplete, but I like, it so here goes:

A computer runs on binary code - zeroes and ones. As the musician Lori Andersen noted wryly in an intro to one of her musical performances, "Nobody wants to be a Zero and everyone wants to be Number One". If you assemble a string of zeros and ones, you can represent anything you can see or hear on a computer. The number one in binary code is 0001. The number two is 0010. The letter "A" is 01000001. These strings of 0's and 1's create everything audible and visible on your devices.

Your computer's memory is where this binary code is stored. Every computer has a limit to what it can remember, and then it runs out of storage. When a file is deleted, all those zeros and ones become free space in the computers memory again. It's like all the ingredients that went into making an apple pie dissolve back into their origins as sunlight, to be recycled into form yet again. Potential energy.

We can make great things, and over time many of those things are replaced by even more clever things. Gasoline cars are replaced by electric cars, old philosophies are replaced by ideas that include more of what we know of the workings of the brain and human motivation. Athletic records are broken by new athletes, and more accurate tools of measurement replace less accurate ones - microscopes replace the naked eye, large telescopes replace small ones.

So what is the highest potential a human can reach? It can't be a particular accomplishment, as we seem to be evolving along with the rest of the universe and change is inevitable. I submit it is the potential for change that is your highest potential. Ultimately, that means your own dissolution from concentrated form back to the formless - from the binary of skin and bone back to sunlight. But this isn't the only opportunity to realize your greatest potential.

You can experience this dissolution of form back into potential every time an idea you possess dissolves in the light of more clarity or knowledge. We are full of ideas - some of them very helpful and some of them incorrect. We can only remember so much, and we become more and more constrained by our ideas as we accumulate them. But we can if we are willing, investigate the veracity of our ideas and in so doing free up potential for better ones. By participating in this cycle, we are participating microcosmically in what the universe is doing - and that is quite an accomplishment.