Home » 2015 (Page 5)

Yearly Archives: 2015

A Demonstration of Strength

Posted on by | 3 Comments

The juxtaposition could hardly have been more jarring: after completing today’s post, at morning break the lead story reported the attacks in France. In the worst violence since WW II, in coordinated attacks jihadists murdered as many as 120 people at three separate locations.

The reference to WW II is notable in revealing how much the world has changed. In relative terms, civil war and ISIL’s terrorist opportunism has brought Syrian suffering comparable to that of European populations during WW II. However, where indifference allowed Hitler to spread war across the continent from 1938 to 1944, cautious intervention in support of the rebels coupled with airstrikes and economic isolation has limited the spread of violence from Syria. As a result, to date the net cost to France of its intervention in the Middle East is tens of thousand of times fewer deaths than it suffered in WW II.

The natural response of the French government to these renewed attacks must be heightened scrutiny of Muslim populations, and Islamic authorities in France should be expected to both increase cooperation with security services and publicly condemn extremist activities.

But how do the events in France reflect on my post this morning, obviously an assertion that peace must be our aim?

While I will not participate in physical violence, I am not a pacifist. We fight cancers with surgery and chemotherapy. Both courses of treatment weaken the body. So with our struggle against terrorism, whether state sponsored (as in Syria and Ukraine) or indigenous, we must reduce its virulence by withholding resources and legitimacy from the perpetrators and seek when possible to destroy the mechanisms of its operation.

But there is more than that to the process. We must maintain vigilance in the spiritual domain to ensure that in the course of executing our campaign of violence, we do not become infected by the mentality that sustains self-justification in the mind of the terrorist. My practice extends even further: in manifesting that discipline, we also gain the power to immerse the jihadist in our knowledge of the benefits of peace.

It is this second battle that I have joined, and I am merciless in my own way. The mentality against which I struggle is ancient, and thrives when the actions of specific individuals are characterized as justifying violent prejudice against entire populations. That was the response of the victors to German resolve in WW I, with WW II the inevitable consequence. It is also the response of the jihadist to global inequity in the allocation of wealth and political influence for the benefit of Western populations that do not comprehend the egregious magnitude of our self-indulgence.

As I see it, every military action should be advertised as a failure of the mechanisms of peace, and reported with regret even when it is successful in reducing the threat of violence on tactical and strategic terms. Even more, I would hope that every announcement would be accompanied with a summary of diplomatic efforts to empower peace-loving peoples seeking to reassert control of regions in turmoil.

So in the months and years to come, I pray that the French people recognize the strength reflected in the asymmetrical results of Middle Eastern intervention. This will almost certainly not be the last such experience they will suffer, in a history dating back to attacks in the ’70s and ’80s, and modern access to secure communications almost guarantees that individuals committed to violence will continue to succeed in their aims. In absolute terms, though, the jihadists and their dependents, isolated and starved of resources in their caliphate, suffer far, far worse.

But to reiterate: it is essential, on the spiritual level, to recognize that the attacks reflect the insanity, in the context of modern technology, of the expression of ancient patterns of predation. While that mentality will lash out more and more violently in its attempts to survive the return of Christ, its impotence is revealed in the increasing brevity of the interruptions it can generate in the creative outpourings that emerge from love.

Working the Truth Out

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Among all the proofs of the efficacy of loving, none is more compelling to me than the existence of institutions of learning. I am one of the most favored and grateful recipients of the investment made by others in discovering and sharing the truth.

During my freshman year at UC Berkeley, my dorm roomie was a talented pianist named John Schmay. John would sit down at a piece of music and spin out a million notes in extemporaneous composition that wandered effortlessly across musical genres. He tried to tame the volcano within through meditation at a self-made Buddhist shrine. Inspired by that example, I turned within as well. As the year progressed, through meditation I had a series of conscious transitions, an opening of doors to ever larger realms of truth. I realize now that those transitions were facilitated by others, and reflected a judgment that I would be respectful in my navigation of those halls.

Since leaving the UC system (I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the first eight years of my professional life), I have tried my best to bring the gifts of truth into my work in the commercial world. It is an ongoing struggle. Our hierarchical corporate structure and the legal framework of property rights both support and sustain the exercise of tyranny. This is expressed in a psychology of management prerogatives that extend, in the most aggressive case, to the idea that a supervisor has a right to untrammeled access to the sources of truth in our minds. In my own case, access has been sought through appeals to lust and greed, and when those failed, through raw threat to my survival and the survival of those I love.

Of course, as one that has surrendered fully to Christ, this is all terribly wearisome. I don’t own the truth; I don’t control the truth that flows through me. Having been given the gift of wandering in it, perhaps to a greater degree than anyone now alive, I perceive that remit to be a jewel precious beyond measure, and something that death will not steal from me. It will only interrupt the process of living that allows truth to manifest itself in the world through me.

Paradoxically, upon realizing that none of the afore-mentioned inducements will gain access to the truth that reaches out through me, a subtle psychological shift occurs. Instead of negotiating an exchange of value, the world itself is raised as a threat to the survival of the truth in me. The assertion of authority is not one of merit, but rather a claim of allegiance from one providing protection. Of course, this is always the last resort of the tyrant. When they no longer can command weakness in their subjects, they manufacture enemies without.

What has been essential to me, in working through this resistance, is to recognize that it is not the specific individuals that concern the truth. They are merely attempts to manifest a pattern of relation that has engendered habits of thinking – just as I manifest a pattern of relation (unconditional love) and habits of thinking (a relentless plunging into the veils that hide the truth).

Having exhausted the resistance of ownership, in America the next barrier is the defense industry, the enormously voracious “protector of liberty.”

So last night I awoke to a dream of captivity to Jihadi John, the target of yesterday’s drone strike in Syria. As I was injected into the scenario, I firmly resisted the garb of a victim, instead asserting that I saw this as a demonstration that would undermine the rhetoric of fear. Firmly enmeshed in the illusion of captivity, I shared with the jihadists that I had never finished reading the Qur’an, and asked them to provide me an English translation. With that link established, I offered them the truth as I understood it, opening my heart to reveal the love that I have received, eclipsing in measure any claims of my worth.

In that moment there was a lifting away. Something gave way, an ancient predatory spirit that has roosted in the Middle East.

Gently I asserted to the jihadists, “Isn’t this the goal you desire?” Their affirmation spread throughout the region. I then became one with that spirit that watches the world from outside, gently guiding our hearts, spreading the hope that one day we will stop fearing the consequences of receiving it – foremost being the power that it brings to elaborate wills that are not yet strong enough to resist the self-tyranny that is our self-concern.

And to my countrymen, I then turned to ask, “Did you really believe that the truth needs protection?”

You can run but you can’t hide.

It is that which is.

We were/are/will be that which we were/are/will be.

Abuse in the Linux Kernel Community

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Proclamations of concern over the abusiveness of the Linux Kernel Community of been growing louder in the open-source world. Steven Vaughn-Nichols summarizes the concerns in Computerworld. My comment on the matter?

Ancandune remarks wisely on the problem that “rude and hostile” imposes to the transmission of knowledge. I do not necessarily subscribe to his characterization of the motivating psychology. Perfectionists are driven by their own set of hostile interior voices. They don’t just produce something and throw it over the wall – they lie awake at night thinking about all the ways it can blow up in their face. What Linus may be attempting to demonstrate in his communications is how he goes about thinking when he writes code.

Is Linus a healthy person? That’s for him to judge.

The important question is whether the community is healthy. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had boardrooms filled with over-sized egos to help them manage their succession plans. What is Linus going to do? Anoint a successor? Or will the community devolve into a WWF RAW! donnybrook with the last man standing holding the belt? Another possibility is that the corporations that finance many contributors will step in and appoint a successor.

Linus’s authority arose organically over many years. The community allows him the right to be critical. But it is not being critical of others that conditions his success – it is his ability to think critically. The community should recognize that distinction, and mercilessly criticize and purge those that emulate his style without bearing his gifts or responsibilities.

To illustrate my point regarding self-criticism, here’s the content of an e-mail characterizing a problem we had with the build at work recently:

It’s the usual stupidity – I don’t even remember why I created this file, but it’s just a copy of MotorIDCommander.cpp. It was probably intended to link AutoCommCommander with MotorIDCommander, but I never modified the contents.

Anyways – it’s excluded from the build in debug mode but not in release mode. Khalid is off at physical therapy today with the project file checked out, so I can’t publish a fix. If you can do it locally, that would get you moving forward.

Sorry

Brian

This is like the fourth or fifth time I’ve done this – left a file in the build for release mode after excluding it in debug mode.

Balancing Yoga Bliss

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Having played tennis and basketball as my primary fitness outlet for the first fifty years of my life, upon starting yoga I was immediate impressed by the imbalance between the left and right sides of my body. During the first two years of my Bikram practice, that manifested in a number of chronic stress injuries, particularly around the right hip and lower back.

While the problems were impossible to ignore, I was pleased with the gross changes in my body. I lost my fluff, slowly converting it to muscle. That was really a first for me – I had never succeeded in building much muscle mass through weight lifting. Bikram is an isotonic practice, holding postures for up to a minute under strain, and that seems to really agree with my physiology. At this point, the deep wells in my clavicles have been filled in, and a little bit of six-pack is peeking through from under my middle-age padding.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t until the last year that I realized how the two things went together. One way to maintain an isotonic posture is to lock all of your muscles. In my case, that reinforced and even exacerbated muscle imbalances. I would do my best, checking in the mirror after every posture to make certain that my shoulders and hips were aligned. After many “strong” sessions, however, when the lights came on to start practice two days later, I would look in the mirror to find myself twisted completely out of whack. The instructors were a little put out by my laughter and pawing at my eyes in disbelief.

Simply, in most postures the mirror is a liar. You can take a standing bow posture and think that you’re aligned, but in fact one hip is higher or lower, or forward or back. Sometimes it’s your limbs that hide the truth, and sometimes it’s that the mirror only shows you one view of a multi-dimensional picture. Psychologically, then, the breakthrough was to stop letting my eyes lie to me, ignore what my muscles were doing, and focus on where my bones were.

This culminated recently with the realization that for as long as I have been doing yoga, when I bend over I drop my left ribs inside of my hip. I was collapsing on that side while the right side stayed strong. Consciously avoiding that exposed tightness in my left shoulder, which naturally came forward with my ribs. I’ve been dragging it back, resulting this weekend in severe muscle fatigue that extended to the right side of my neck. Camel posture has been a real revelation in this regard, as the tightness in my left shoulder forced me to rebuild the posture from scratch over the last three weeks. I just couldn’t get back as far as I did when I allowed my left side to collapse.

The other major side-effect has been in the right side of my lower back. I’ve always wobbled in the standing series, and assumed that it was just poor muscle coordination. But in projecting my left side forward, I realized that I’ve been stabilizing my vertical alignment by locking the right side of my hip. Particularly in the lower back, the muscles on the right side were significantly shorter than those on the left. I focused on lengthening them during class, but could feel them snapping back as I walked to the car every night. But of course, that was because I was also using my right hip to project my balance forward while walking.

This was resolved two Sundays ago down in Culver City. I went to the dance celebration and spent about an hour-and-a-half walking around the perimeter of the floor, stopping occasionally to raise my feet gently in point, paying particular attention to maintaining proper support in the left side of my chest. It was frickin’ miserable! I wore myself out in half an hour!

Given the muscle fatigue in my back from my maniacal focus on keeping my left shoulder back, I was a little worried about class on Monday night. Indeed, I did have some trouble with forward bends, but as for the rest, I actually had fun for the first time ever. I had been wearing myself out trying to keep from keeling over to the right side, and having gotten the bones into alignment, all the stabilizing muscles can relax until their use is required by a specific posture. The heat no longer bothers me, I recover faster from postures, and I was able to get far more length because I wasn’t fighting locked muscles.

What can I say? Being a poser is to be your own worst enemy. Bliss arrived in learning to feel what my body was doing.

Doh!

Domain Domination

Posted on by | Leave a comment

As a person with broad intellectual interests, I might be an anachronism. One of the problems of free market economics is that it exploits our strengths and exacerbates our weaknesses. People that seek a healthy balance don’t fit naturally in the system. Fortunately, I took up my career as a software developer during a sweet spot of sorts – enough infrastructure had been established that we don’t have to worry about the details of how a computer manages memory and peripherals or does arithmetic on different data types, but the industry had not yet become a self-sustaining economic system driven by the generation and sharing of digital data. As a generalist, then, I was valuable as a translator between the digital realm and the “normal” world.

I was struck by the magic of the digital reality. My father enjoyed sharing stories of how he could make programs break in the early days by abusing their input devices, but by the time I had come on the scene, the electrical engineers had succeeded in creating a world in which the computer never seemed to get tired, made your mess disappear without fuss, and always did exactly what you asked. Knowing men, I wasn’t surprised that many were seduced completely by that fantasy. In my case, I was seduced by the fact that if you knew a little about software, you could get any productive person to talk to you in the hopes that they could partner to parlay their expertise into dot-com fortune.

In translating those conversations into software, I was fortunate to have object-oriented development methods to exercise.  It allows me to create software abstractions that correspond well with the goals of my users. In engineering applications, concerned with the operation of actual machinery, object-oriented methods are a particularly strong fit.

That’s not so much the case in the software industry today. Companies such as Google and Facebook have managed to compile huge stores of data, and aspire to correlate that information with economic activity. There’s really no definite theory behind those explorations, so we’ve seen the rise of languages that describe efficiently algorithms that filter, transform and correlate random pieces of data.

The recruiting challenge facing engineering companies is lampooned in a GE ad in which a new hire finds himself competing for attention against the developer of a mobile app that puts fruit hats on pictures of your pet. GE is competing against nascent monopolies (Google and Facebook again the exemplars) that throw money at developers just to keep them out of the hands of their competitors. I faced the same challenge when seeking to grow my current team.

But when exploring the technologies (Haskell, Clojure, and others) used by Google and others for analysis of large data stores, what struck me most was how terribly dry they are. There’s no sense of connection to people and the choices that they make. To me that takes a lot of fun out of my practice.

This has been expressed in my working through of the examples in Troelson’s Pro C# and the .NET 4.5 Framework. Confronted with examples with names like “ExtractAppDomainHostingThread” and “MyAsyncCallbackMethod”, I found myself figuratively tearing out my hair. Yes, these names are self-documenting, in the sense that they forecast accurately what we find in the code, but they aren’t even entertaining much less actually fun.

When Troelson begins exploring how .NET supports an application that has to perform many separate tasks in parallel, he introduces a class called Printer that writes a number to the screen and then waits a short time before writing the next number. By running many Printers in parallel, we can see clearly the unpredictability of the results in the screen output.

Of course I am offended by this whole concept. No Printer in the world ever behaved like this. So, given this class that does something meaningless while wasting time, I renamed it “Useless.” Rather than invoking “PrintNumbers”, I tell my Useless class to “WasteTime.” As methods for corralling wayward tasks are advanced, I further the metaphor with methods such as “WanderIdly” and “LanguishInAQueue.”

My son and I meet most Saturdays for lunch at the Fresh Brothers in the Westlake Village Promenade. When he interrupted my exercises, I talked him through these examples, and he burst out laughing. Now that’s success.

So what’s the developer trapped in the digital world-view to do? My suggestion would be a return to assembly coding. At Los Alamos in the ’50s, my father picked up the habit of trying to read the consonant-rich listings. He would become mightily amused as he punctuated them with lip-smacks and shrill sirens, decorations evolved in the secret society of machine developers trapped on the isolated buttes of New Mexico.

Dialog with John Zande: The TOOAIN Thesis

Posted on by | 21 Comments

If you have followed a link here from rationalwiki, please be aware that this dialog is a response to trollish behavior on the part of Mr. Zande in a number of forums in which faith was discussed by people seriously concerned with fundamentalism, many of whom are trying to heal its impact. As Mr. Zande appeared immune to criticisms from some that he was not contributing to the dialog, I found it of interest to deconstruct his teleology with the goal of creating a single point of reference for future discussion. In other words – “Yes, John, we’ve discussed this before – everybody just look at this post over here.” What was of interest to me was that I actually obtained some value from the exercise – the single axiom differentiating our two strains of “logic” is the existence of the soul.

I would hope, in turn, that Mr. Zande would recognize that he gained from an analysis that reveals the shallowness of his parody. I might encourage him to strengthen it, except that there are far more important goals crying out for the investment of his intellectual energy.

The original discussion follows.

 

This post establishes a forum for dialog with John Zande. The comment from John was originally posted on my New Physics page, but I am relocating it here because it does not address to material there, but posts his own thesis.

Here is my original comment that explains my frustration in trying to dialog with John, and my characterization of the distinction between our points of view:

You choose not to engage the material on my blog and then accuse me of not presenting a formal rebuttal? Well, if you get to control the axioms and terms of debate, how is that possible? Nobody can counter logical deduction if they are not allowed to challenge the argument’s precepts. That is why I pointed you at my site – to fill in the gaps in your precepts.

But to characterize the distinctions: It is obvious to even the casual observer that human initiative has vastly altered the world from its natural condition. I focus on the improvements, you tend to focus on the costs. My thesis is that the improvements are more significant and reflect a divine agency that is engaged in a slow process of healing. Your thesis assigns a hidden malefic intent that will undermine our efforts. I would argue that your justifications are similar to withholding trust in hospitals because every time you look inside you discover sick people, and even to go further claiming that the sick people actually control the doctors.

Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of power. Time will tell which one of us is right. As I see it, your thesis is disempowering. It saps human will. I have enough experience of the power of love in my life that I have absolute faith in the efficacy of the strength it awakens in myself and others.

John’s reply was (I have added point identifiers below to facilitate discussion):

A formal rebuttal would address the central thesis. Your opening sentence to me on the post in question reads: “The proposition of good and evil is not a functional moral dichotomy.” To which I answered directly: “First up, one must disregard all common concepts of morality. Good and bad are meaningless in this thesis, and any deferral to such terrestrial notions will only create confusion.”

https://thesuperstitiousnakedape.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/the-owner-of-all-infernal-names/

Here I am telling you specifically you must disregard any and all ideas of some dualistic universe where forces of good and bad are locked into some eternal battle. That has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the thesis. I went to great lengths to explain this to you, over and over again, but you simply couldn’t get your head out of this notion.

The problem, of course, is you haven’t even read the thesis. If you had you would know there is no Problem of Good, which is what your entire objection seems to be centred on.

And you continue to make the same mistakes:

“But to characterize the distinctions: It is obvious to even the casual observer that human initiative has vastly altered the world from its natural condition. I focus on the improvements, you tend to focus on the costs.”

No. Again, you have no idea what the thesis even says. You’re just shooting blanks. The Creator is thrilled humans (all life, in fact) tries to improve themselves. A ship must be floated and launched before it can be drowned and sunk. Good and evil do not exist. Good is not something distasteful or hurtful to the Creator. Good is not a wave of dissent, a rebellion growing inside Creation like some determined cancer, a tumour. Good is neither a disease nor a corruption, for good is not the equal and opposite of evil but rather an evil (what we humans would call “evil”) unto itself. It is a flavour of evil, a dialect, or perhaps more accurately, a variation in temperature there to be experienced in those moments when there appears to be a temporary reduction of perceptible suffering.

For this reason, good feels real, distinct, because to both the observer and the one directly experiencing the good, it is. It has a presence, an impression of substance, of form and body. It is valid to the touch and capable of moving individuals in miraculous and meaningful ways, and for those who want to believe it to be true they can easily convince themselves that they see good spawning good. And in a manner of speaking, it can, and does. Good can appear to inspire more good. Grooves can be made deeper, channels widened, but the appearance of good birthing good is, at its heart, an illusion. The shadow cast by good acts and good times can expand, pleasure can build upon pleasure, swelling, but it is not a virtuous growth if its source was evil itself. It cannot be considered excellent or righteous if it comes from the perfect corruption.

“Your thesis assigns a hidden malefic intent that will undermine our efforts.”

No, that is not my thesis at all. Not even close. The Creator does not interfere or meddle.

If you were to address the thesis in a meaningful way (meaning after actually “reading” it, rather than simply assuming you know what is in it) you would have to confront three central points:

1) demonstrate (with working examples) that this universe is not a complexity machine tumbling relentlessly forward from a state of ancestral simplicity to contemporary complexity,

2) demonstrate (with working examples) that complexity does not father a wretched and forever diversifying family of more devoted fears and faithful anxieties, more pervasive ailments and skilful parasites, more virulent toxins, more capable diseases, and more affectionate expressions of pain, ruin, psychosis and loss, and

3) demonstrate (with working examples) that the very constitution (the design) of this universe is not profound teleological evidence for the mind of a malevolent designer… an architect who so clearly cherishes His anonymity, and has quite purposefully painted Creation in impenetrable naturalism.

The discussion wanders around a bit, leading eventually to this response to John’s request:

  1. The Christian experience (shared by all mature practitioners of every religion) is that the Creator is not distant and uninvolved, but supports the expression of love. (satisfying criterion 3)
  2. I have offered a model of physics that explains the mechanisms by which this process is elaborated. (satisfying criterion 1)
  3. The most powerful and influential figures in history have been those that preach that there is an escape from this reality into a realm of infinite possibility. To those that understand spiritual experience, this is evidence of the truth of their proclamations. (satisfying criterion 2)
  4. My conclusion, stated at the beginning of this discussion, is that this reality is a hospital – a place of healing for a personality infected with selfishness. (satisfying criterion 2)
  5. That conclusion is backed by my own personal experience including access to spiritual energies that (satisfying criterion 2)
    1. heal my wounded heart when I engage the brokenness of the world, and
    2. empower me to offer healing to others.

As I see it, to TOOAIN hypothesis disempowers you. I reject it because I choose to live in joy. I encourage you to do the same.

Decrescendo

Posted on by | Leave a comment

For the last two years, I have had my head “catch on fire” in Catholic services when the congregation sings:

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

Today was different. After finishing Sera Beak’s Red, Hot and Holy, I perceive a pathway out of annihilation – to offer destructive personalities the option of surrender through the Divine Feminine for rebirth on another planet.

That still left me scratching my head and wondering why I’m going about it this way. The only hint comes from the practices that governed access to the Holy of Holies during the years in the Desert. The High Priest would prepare himself carefully for his annual encounter, lest he corrupt the energies within and bring ruin upon the people.

So what rules apply to those in the vicinity of events that bend the tide of history? We find some clues in the Bible: only John stood at Calvary with Christ, and only he died a natural death. Was it the will of Christ that the others suffer as he did, or was it their guilt that fed into the stream he forged through time? And what of Mary Magdalene, obviously deeply in love with Jesus, who was warned “Do not cling to me!” Raised to believe that the Messiah would rule as king, how would she not have been dreaming of bearing his child, and securing eternal peace for her people? What would have become of those dreams, cast into the river of Jesus’s will, in the circuit of time that leads from the cross to judgment day and back again?

And what of all those, such as Judas and Pilate, who saw themselves as pawns caught up in events beyond their control? Tied in remembrance and spirit to their cowardice and treason, would they have injected rationalizations of their virtue into the stream of time, attempting to bend it to their own benefit?

One way to deal with that pollution is to confront them with the same choices under circumstances that ensure they won’t face any personal threat (either material or spiritual) from either choice. It is to say to them, in effect: “You didn’t understand the weight of the decisions you were making. Now you do. Well, do you wish to participate or withdraw?”

In my particular case, they are all withdrawing, which liberates me from codependency. I think that I’ve given the last of them their freedom. It’s time to rest, heal from the pathologies they bred in me, and prepare myself for the work to come.

As for this audience: I think that this has actually been a tool for expanding my radar. It may have served its purpose.

It’s amazing. After all the strain and passion, I finally feel peace, alone here in my “nation of one”, as a Jewish elder characterized me one night in a dream.

Beyond Red and White

Posted on by | 1 Comment

Today I finished Sera Beak’s Red Hot and Holy. Up to the last 30 pages, this was the most constructive way that I could deal with it:

I could elucidate the undercurrents of misandry in Sera Beak’s Redvolutionary Theology, but what is essential of my critique of her book is not specific to her dialectic, but instead universal.

Sera has been seduced by spiritual power and comforting logic, but that seduction adheres to a process that has led many people – both men and women – into a similar trap. The trap is the rationalization of personal powerlessness through construction of a historical narrative that liberates the primitive mechanisms of survival. While Sera’s historiography is not overtly incendiary, in contrast to that of a man like Hitler, it carries the same traps: it focuses us on the past rather than liberating us into the realization of a future rooted in trust.

The fundamental cause of Sera’s error (shared by so many others) is to believe that the material circumstances of our existence, currently dominated by the manifestations of human will, are the cause of our suffering. It matters not whether one is Richard Dawkins looking back 7000 years to an era of superstition or Sera Beak looking back 9 million years to the origins of patriarchal dominance. Both critics of the “status quo” fail to recognize that the source of our trouble goes back much further than that, and so they fall into the same trap that many Christian theologians do: laying blame on humanity (or half of humanity) for originating sin.

The wisdom I have to offer is this: it matters not why we are in pain. It matters only whether we can find healing. My experience is that true healing will arise only from a conciliation that melts all dichotomies: man and woman, matter and spirit, science and religion, artifice and nature, animate and inanimate. Why? Because the reason we suffer pain, as Sera recounts, is that we are incomplete. The only way to fill the gaps that distort our personality is to welcome what we are not.

This is what loving is all about. It’s not about healing us individually, because that hope is misplaced. True love, offered unconditionally, heals divisions and creates harmony.

Sera, you need to tell Kali to stop being such a narcissist. It is not about her. It’s about everything.

So then I get to Chapter 20, and Sera turns around and pronounces everything that I’ve written to this point. Her historiography is indeed a projection of a spiritual infection in the Divine Feminine. She recounts accepting and facilitating the destructive suppression of feminine spirituality through a long sequence of lives, much as Saul did to Christians before encountering Christ on the road to Damascus.

The only insights I have to offer at this time, Sera, is this: you are capable of incarnating the Rouge Lady in this place because she sees in this place, at this specific time, the potential to heal her infection through you. Spirit cannot do work on itself, it needs matter to disentangle the twisted threads of personality. It is as Jesus said [NIV Matt. 16:19]:

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

I hope that you realize that it is not in spite of men that this work is possible. The Divine Masculine is also making his presence felt, and doing the best that he can to clean his house. It would be beneficial to compare notes. Solidifying the truth of Their manifestation may be possible only through the mutuality of a response to this, the last of the exhortations Jesus delivered with tender compassion to the rulers of his age, as he looked through the centuries of pain their weakness would cause them:

You! Say I am!

Whitenessing the Truth

Posted on by | 1 Comment

My response to Sera Beak’s “Redvolutionary” theology has been pretty passionate, and I’m planning a post on programming to let things cool down. But before I do, I’d like to elaborate the claim that I made yesterday: “There’s so much more for you than that.”

Perhaps the most popular spiritual autobiography at the opening of the 20th century was that of the “little flower”, St. Terese of Lisieux. While I was at first disturbed by Terese’s testimony to desire to die so that she might embrace Christ, I have come to understand that her recorded life was probably a last parting from those that were bound to her in family, in particular her father.

What was she releasing herself into? The answer is given to us in her revelation of a vision: Terese found herself in the company of three veiled women. One of them, Teresa of Avila, was the founder of her penitent order, and a woman who famously experienced an erotically ravishing love from Christ. Teresa parted her veil for the daughter of her grace, and Terese reported being bathed in the purest light. With an embrace, Teresa offered this paean: “Christ is well pleased with you.”

Why do these women hide their light from us? I offer a parable in that regard in Golem. We here on earth are a mixture of grace and corruption, a mix that cannot be sundered easily. When the pure light of truth shines upon us, the corruption must flee or be destroyed. The light is veiled because, as Moses was warned in Exodus, those not prepared to receive it will by destroyed by its power.

With the saints encountered by Terese, so it is with Christ [NIV 2 Peter 3:9]:

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

And so to experience life in the fullness of its beauty. Can you imagine, ladies, what it would be like to have souls passing through the healing cauldron of your womb, not in a brief spasm, but as a steady stream that grows into a mighty river?

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

[NIV Rev. 22:1-2]

Please follow me here: Eve had her own gifts to tend, and to share them with men was never going to work. You, O woman, were meant to manifest the Tree of Life.