I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday afternoon, plowing through the examples in Troelson’s Pro C#, and a large gentleman waved his derriere in my face as he sat down at the adjoining table. I kept my head in the work, but he interrupted to offer “Sorry to stick my butt in your face like that.” I responded, “It happens,” and kept on grinding.

The place began to thin out at five, so I shifted to the counter against the wall, as the tall chairs allow me to open up my abdomen and breath. He followed a few minutes later, actually pointing out that he was following me. Trying to make it clear that I wasn’t avoiding him, I explained that I preferred the bar seats.

What followed was one of these interesting negotiations that I recognize as attempts by concerned spirits to engage with the work that I do. I remarked that I had noticed his interest in cosmology (he had been perusing a shelf copy of Hawkings’ A Brief History of Time). Through a process of disconnected association – in which the same words were repeated with different meanings – he revealed that he held a patent on a new electrical motor drive method.

Along the way came this story of how he had found a card for a $10,000 invitational for venture capital funding. He thought that was an interesting message from the universe, but when he called the number on the card, the responder just hung up again and again. Not to be deterred, he went to his Ninja master who advised him to print a fake business badge and gain entry to the venue on the pretext of inspecting the air conditioning. Changing clothes after entry, he made his way to the meeting. Identifying a British peer among the investors, he waited at the exit as the body guards passed before reaching out suddenly to grab his hand.

Intrigued by this intervention, the peer invited him to have lunch with another group of investors. The locale had a Japanese temple gateway, which my new friend understood required him to remove his shoes and bow before passing the threshold. He was followed by a group of Japanese investors, which marveled at his sophistication. Into this milieu came the peer, who congratulated him on having “married” the Japanese, who were considering a $400 million investment with Lloyd’s, the British reinsurance group.

After lunch, the peer took him aside to determine his interest in the VC meeting. My acquaintance offered the idea of laying a motor design out flat, as was done in a large accelerator facility. When asked how the idea was originated, he had offered that it came from a privileged supernatural source.

The story wrapped up with the observation that Thomas Edison had succeeded with direct current power because he knew the ins and outs of politics, while Nikolai Tesla just wanted to play with alternating current.

By this time, I had returned to typing in Visual Studio, prompting as I did so with questions just to let him know that I was paying attention. Story concluded, he pressed a business card on me and left.

There are people of influence, such as the British peer, who wander the world casting the net of their wealth around them to attract opportunity. They don’t understand the mechanisms by which it works, they just rely upon it as a privilege. The peer rewarded my acquaintance because he was a sensitive and responsive tool for facilitating the acquisition of wealth.

And then there are those that submit to the purpose of that talent – the goal of joining all of life in a web of mutual concern – to whom that actual mechanisms of the process are revealed. They are given possession of the treasure of the fields, of which Jesus said [NIV Matthew 13:44]:

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

Lack of money isn’t the problem. The problem is the injection of selfishness into a process of co-creation that makes the participants (both biological and ethereal) incredibly vulnerable to exploitation. Once we learn to discipline ourselves, we’ll find that there is far more power available to us than is required to solve the problems that we confront.