This is the story of the genesis of the ISITometer.
Many years ago, I sat in a classroom listening to an instructor drone on about financial accounting, a subject in which I had little interest. The other students seemed equally disengaged as my gaze roamed aimlessly around the room.
At one point, my eyes came to rest on two sheets of paper taped to the wall right behind the instructor, with the words ‘IT’ and ‘IS’ printed on each sheet in large block letters.
As soon as I noticed them, I had a pretty good idea what they meant. I deduced that they stood for ‘Information Technology’ and ‘Information Systems’. It was a mundane explanation for an equally mundane observation.
Normally my attention would have quickly moved on from this seemingly insignificant event. But for some reason, on this particular day, my focus lingered on those two words, and I started mulling them over in my mind.
It occurred to me that ‘IT IS’ is pretty much the most concise and elementary sentence in the English language — just four letters to form a complete sentence. I thought for a moment about any sentence that might be even more concise, and the only one I could think of was ‘I am’.
Then, all of a sudden, something just clicked — and I had an instant epiphany that changed my life. In that moment, I realized the words IT and IS form the perfect symbol for the ultimate nature of Reality.
Here in this one sentence, these two words, these three letters, I instantly recognized the most essential representation of the fundamental duality at the base of all Creation.
I was familiar with various dualistic concepts that are imprinted on our collective Consciousness, such as Eastern Yin/Yang, Western God/Devil, masculine/feminine, etc., and I became aware that every one of these were steeped in cultural meaning.
My mind began racing through a series of dualities to see how well they would map to this IT IS duality model I had just considered, as opposed to all the other models. It seemed clear to me that the IT IS model was a cleaner, more fundamental representation than any of the others I could think of.
I began mentally reviewing various dualities that occurred to me, such as:
IS IT
- Light|Dark
- Energy|Matter
- Wave|Particle
- Hot|Cold
- Dynamic|Static
They lined up like a zipper.
This ultimate duality represents the ineffable life force forever flowing in and out of form.
Religious and philosophical texts have been describing this essential duality with colorful narrative descriptions for millenia, but rarely by a definitive name.
And suddenly there I was, sitting in that classroom and observing a crystal clear description of the fundamental duality, encapsulated in three letters — two words — one sentence — IT IS — that have been hiding in plain site before our eyes for hundreds of years.
Find out what happened next in The ISITometer Story: Part 2 – The IT IS Philosophy.