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Much Ado About Women

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When I went to my thirty-fifth high-school reunion, I ran into one of my old cronies. After observing me dancing by myself, he remarked that I was “still afraid of women.” Thirty minutes later, I had a lady drag me out on the floor, saying she wanted me to dance with her friends. The eight of them made a circle around me, laughing and shrieking until I reached my hand out and spun around to link their hearts in a circle, rhetorically asking “What’s the energy for, ladies? What’s the energy for?”

So, no, it’s not fear.

But I didn’t know quite how to put it until I recalled a scene in the recent live-action Alice in Wonderland. The caterpillar rejects her identity, and in response to protestations from his friends merely observes to Alice, “You’ve lost your muchness.”

This reflects on a recent conversation with a woman who testified that she spent her youth protecting the weak from bullies, until a man that she recognized as an old teacher (from lives stretching back 4000 years) observed to her that she “didn’t have to be Joan of Arc all the time.” I walked away from the conversation reflecting that she had surrendered her greatness to him so readily.

So, please, don’t do that. Jesus was an exemplar, not a substitute. Make much of yourself, my dears.

American Myopia

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So I’m listening to Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow going on and on about the nominating process here in America, analyzing the psychology, political ideology, fund raising and electoral dynamics in New Hampshire. It was all very loud and breathless.

And then comes a notice for the Academy Award nomination for Winter on Fire, documenting the Ukrainian revolution, showing footage of citizens in confrontation with security services, and an under-age youth describing the dead falling around him.

What’s happening in American politics is exciting, but it’s not the only important thing going on in the world. Try not to feed the beast.

Conserving Liberty

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After my post Friday on Speaker Ryan, at Barnes & Noble that night I found myself disrupted in my technology research by a couple railing on about public sector unions. The particular focus of their wrath were police unions that negotiated full-pay retirement packages starting at fifty. As is well known in the West, some officers exercise that option and then take another assignment elsewhere, effectively double-dipping.

Now I agree that this seems unethical, and you’d think that some legislator would find a way to define “retirement” as excluding “leaving to take work elsewhere.” And the six-figure salaries being quoted ($200K) don’t sound like the compensation expected by a beat cop. Again, you’d think that redefinition of terms would be beneficial. There does come a day when a man can’t chase down an eighteen-year-old any longer, but that doesn’t apply to those pushing figures around on spread-sheets.

What was astonishing to me, though, was the framing of the discussion that brought such outrage to the conversation. During the 2008 down-turn, because of the pension obligations, Pheonix couldn’t afford to hire officers to replace those taking early retirement. This was set against the context of civilians that lost their homes in the mortgage melt-down.

For some reason, the couple ranting against the police union seemed to feel that was the union’s fault. Really? Not the financial wizards on Wall Street that stole another $500 billion from the public purse? What gall, to redirect anger against corporate financial fraud against the unions that seek only to secure the survival of the middle class that lost their homes!

This is what drives me crazy about conservative business owners. They rail about regulation as though it’s a confiscatory plot by the poor. Yes, we have the onerous terms of Sorvanes-Oxley that put a CEO at risk of jail if the corporate annual reports contains false information – but that was motivated by Enron’s manipulation or energy markets in California. Yes, we have the Affordable Care Act that requires all employers of more than fifty to provide health-care benefits, but that’s against the context of insurance company manipulations that denied coverage to many with pre-existing or chronic health conditions. And yes, we have rising taxes on fossil fuels, but that reflects a race against time against temperature rises that threaten to wipe out civilization as we know it, a race that has been road-blocked by oil companies (led by the Koch Brothers) propagating fraudulent science in an attempt to prevent governmental action to stimulate replacement of fossil fuels with renewable sources.

Let me focus the point: did nobody in the business world know about these transgressions, some simply moral, but in the last case rising to the level of crimes against humanity? Where were your voices speaking in outrage? Or were you all among those business leaders celebrating the “success” of practices that allowed executives to build huge estates and buy private jets with the gains from stock options that transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from share-holders funds into personal bank accounts?

Corporate America benefits every day from the investment made by middle-class America in roads, schools, emergency services and governmental process. They provide a steady steam of educated employees. They ensure the free movement of goods and safe working conditions. Access to those benefits is not a right, it is a privilege. Securing great wealth from that system comes therefore with a responsibility: to raise your voice when your peers abuse the public trust. Do so, and you’ll find that a lot of regulation would go away, because the cost of cleaning up from long-running abuse would be modest compared to the benefits that accrue from a freely running economy.

Russian to the Brink

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While Nikita Khrushchev once pounded a negotiating table with his shoe, promising that “[the USSR] will bury you,” Vladimir Putin seems committed to a course of “let’s all drown together.” Whether it be oil or violence or rising oceans, the real risks facing his people are clouded in his mind by the demands of keeping a nation of eight time zones under his thumb.

As an industrialized nation whose ports are locked in ice for six months each year, Russia has a mania for warm weather. That was expressed in the ’50s in currying favor with its neighbor Iran, and in the ’80s with the invasion of Afghanistan. As global warming gained steam, the failure to secure a warm-water port made Russian nominally the only nation standing to benefit from climate change.

That wasn’t enough for Putin, whose seizure of Crimea was a thinly-disguised grab for an outlet to the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, a good piece of Ukraine stood between Russia and its new acquisition. Western opposition to the dismemberment of the Ukraine has frustrated Putin’s ambition and exposed the weakness of his military. The flurry of airspace violations by Russian fighter jets has died down as the maintenance bill mounted.

Instead, Putin has shifted to support of Bashar Assad in Syria. This is an escalation of the asymmetrical warfare epitomized by suicide bombers, except in this case the walking dead are the refugees fleeing conflict. The cost of managing the millions fleeing the region is mounting, and borne almost exclusively by the European countries who have responded to Russian adventurism with diversification of their fossil fuel supply.

Again, this geopolitical aim is shrouded in a lofty rationale: Russian claims to be fighting Daesch, the Islamist caliphate that is looting the abandoned regions of eastern Syria and western Iraq. In reality Russian military might is strongly aligned with Assad in his battle with the rebellion again his criminal regime.

In the meantime, Russia continues to pump oil into the Chinese and other markets. Its primary competitor in supply is Saudi Arabia, whose cheap production costs and small population allowed flexibility to decrease production during an oil glut to stabilize global output. Unfortunately, Sunni Saudi Arabia is locked in a regional struggle for dominance with the Shiite regime of Iran, nominally a supporter of the Allawi regime in Syria. This has led it into military adventurism in Yemen, at the cost of $17 billion a month, and is now prompting the Suadi’s to consider intervention with ground troops against Daesch in eastern Syria. An obviously a side-effect is to secure the existence of a Sunni bastion in a region about to be dominated by Shiite states. But it also creates a drain on the Saudi treasury that forces it to sell oil, driving down the price even further.

Saudi Arabia is not the only threat to Russian control of Syria. The rebels being bombed by Russian jets are not going to go away should the regime reestablish control of their strongholds. They will melt into the population, and continue to operate as insurgents. And of course, there’s all those returning refugees to provide for. Just as in Ukraine, Putin is setting himself up to be trapped for the long term in the Middle Eastern quagmire.

Finally, we have the paradox of the melting Russian tundra, composed in no small part of methane crystals that are evaporating. How much of Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure will be swallowed in sinkholes is anybody’s guess. At the very least, we can expect roads and rail lines to be disrupted. Worse, some estimates are that the continental shelf along the Arctic Ocean will soon burp up enough methane to drive global temperatures up by 2 C in the next ten years. That will moderate as the methane burns off, but the effect will be to increase desertification of Russian agricultural land. While warming Siberia is huge, it is dominated by tundra and boreal forest, possessing only a thin layer of soil. It’s not going to be a breadbasket anytime in the next thousand years.

Russia has always been a marginal state, held together by the repressive fist of the tsars. As the last of that line, Putin is playing a game of personal power on the global stage driven by the need to prove his strength to the Russian people. While it’s anybody’s guess as to how soon the Russian state will collapse under the weight of his ambitions, all we can hope is that there’s something left for the Russian people to rebuild with.

“Judeo-Christian” is an Oxymoron

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As Eastern mysticism enters Western culture, its practitioners have adopted Western marketing techniques. Starting from the proposition that Western seekers of enlightenment have been failed by their institutions, the Daoist or Buddhist teacher seeks a rationale for the failure that will entice victims of “Judeo-Christian” spirituality to sample their methods. The central tenet of the narrative is that Judeo-Christianity imposes a view of human nature as fallen into sin that disempowers its followers. In contrast, the Eastern tenets and practices of “mindfulness” open a doorway to self-knowledge and self-control that leads into joyful exploration of life’s possibilities.

Having respect for Eastern methods, I’m not going to dispute the beneficial consequences of its practices. Rather, I want to emphasize that it’s not an “either-or” proposition.

In the Bible, the confusion arises right at the start, in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. As I explain in The Soul Comes First, this is a parable for a community living in direct relation with the spirit of unconditional love. In Vedantic terms, this is to interact with an occupant of the higher astral realms. The problem was not that Adam and Eve partook of the “Tree of Knowledge”, for they were given great knowledge of the world in that era, as necessary to assuming stewardship of the Earth. Rather, it was because they chose to partake of the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” They chose to exercise independent moral judgment. They chose to make mistakes that would cause suffering in others, rather than disciplining themselves to the dictates of love.

The immediate response of the personality described as God is to establish a safe distance. A repeated theme of the Old Testament is the pain caused by the Chosen people to its God, and in the New Testament that culminates in human experience. To love is to give power, and when that power is misused, it causes pain. What is amazing about the devotion of the God of Abraham is the investment made in human maturation in the face of that pain. But to remain in immediate and direct contact with humanity as it went through that process would have been disastrous. Love is an amplifier. It empowers whatever it touches. It needs to keep evil out, lest that destructive force run amok everywhere.

But the devotion to our maturation is clearly visible in the Bible, and follows a logical progression. The story of Abraham and his descendants ends with Joseph, the first man in the book with the strength to be steadfast in danger and to resist his primitive sexual drive. It progresses with Moses, who introduces that Law of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus to instill the discipline of logic in the Chosen people. In modern psychological terms, God was trying to create a people who were capable of using their cortexes to control the survival instincts of the brain stem and aggressive emotions of the limbic system.

Unfortunately, any fixed system of rules is inevitably corrupted by those responsible for its administration, who find it all too easy to manipulate it to deny rights and even life to those that they wish to control. It was against the corruption of the Judaic system of Law that Jesus set himself, eventually confronting both the Sadducees and Pharisees with this great truth [NIV Matt. 22:34-40]:

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

In effect, what he is saying to these experts of legal interpretation is “The Law has taught you to think. Now think about love.”

This is evident throughout Acts in the teachings of the Apostles, foremost among them Paul, but not exclusively. The message is that there is nothing that we can do to attain salvation from this corrupt existence except to call love into our presence. Having been born into corruption, which is to say in a spiritual context of Darwinian competition that requires the theft of resources from other living creatures, the fastest way to healing is to call upon love – which is to say “God.”

Judaism and Christianity are therefore two distinct spiritual practices. Because humanity is composed of individuals, both practices have value to individuals struggling with maturity. For those in thrall to aggression, lust and fear, the discipline of a system of rules still gives strength to the cortex. For those that shine hope into that struggle, love grants not only peace and joy, by a powerful transformative capability that is best exemplified by the devotion still awarded to Jesus, the man who died on the cross to prove that death has no sway over those that surrender to love.

So when looking at Eastern methods, what I see is a way to spiritual maturity without wading through the dangerous waters of Law. I see the possibility of “Veda-Christianity” that guides the seeker far more reliably into the healing spring of love.

Be a Mom, Hillary

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“You know, Senator Sanders, my biggest concern for you is that if you win office, the same thing will happen to you that happened to President Obama. You make promises that you can’t keep to a young sector of the electorate. When President Obama did that, he stepped into the White House with every intention of delivering on his promises. He fought every day of his two terms to accomplish them, investing the energy of his Cabinet in determining what leeway there was to take executive action when the Congress refused to act on climate change and fair pay, and using his veto to frustrate Boehner and McConnell in their attempts to claw back our gains in health care, social justice and taxation.

“But despite all of his efforts – and I believe that history will show that Barack has been one of the great American presidents – when the chips were down in 2010, the people that elected him chose to stay home. Rather than doubling down for President Obama, they handed control of the House, Senate and many state legislatures to a party that has gerrymandered to protect their tenure, that has attacked public and private sector unions to drive down wages, that delayed action on global warming in service to private oil interests, and that held the entire government hostage to secure tax breaks for their wealthy taskmasters.

“You talk about moneyed interests and their power in politics, but the fact remains that President Obama was elected twice against those interests. The American system with its voter protection laws makes it extremely difficult for an informed and active electorate to be cheated of their rights. What my experience with President Obama has shown to me is that your youthful supporters need to get out and vote. They need to walk out of the factories and restaurants and schools on election day and support those that fight for them.

“Senator Sanders, we have fought for the people of America for decades. You describe that as a struggle against moneyed interests, while I highlight the goal of empowering each person. But we can’t do it alone. The American people need to support us in turn. The key to accomplishing our shared goals is not to whip them up in anger, because that hot emotion will just turn to frustration as the road gets steeper. The American people need to make a strong and reasoned commitment to stay the course. They need the wisdom and understanding to confront injustice themselves in city halls and state houses across the nation. But most of all, they need to make their voices heard on election day!”

The Process

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A while back The Smithsonian had a Christmas issue that highlighted thirty people that matter. As part of my scatter-shot method for letting people know that I was in the world, I decided to send out Christmas cards to them every year for a few years. This was the message in one of them, and is my best attempt to explain what it will be like to live through the process that we are navigating.

The Eve

Standing in the twilight at the end of day,
Fears and wants surround us, searching our lost way.
Circle we the borders, shutting reality out,
Or open now our hearts, bringing rest to doubt?

EMBRACE the tortured land, the dark, abandoned waters,
Fauna’s angry sons, Flora’s timid daughters.
Conceiving in our minds patterns just and true,
Guide the subtle elements into balances anew.

This has been our calling, since consciousness begot.
The gates of time will open, racing through our thought.
The Eternal formed in instant, joining women and men:
Wisdom that was given, WE shall give again.

So rest your burdensome body. Dawn is evening turned!
Love moves with, in, through us: grace our destiny earns.

That word “grace” is often seen as something given to us by God, but here it suggests an end to our resistance to the love that is tendered to us. In other words, it means “lack of drama.”

Life of Sorrow

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Frieda Kahlo, in a letter to her husband Diego Rivera, testified that he was “by far the worse” of the two disasters that defined her life. The first, remarkably, was the perforation of her uterus in a bus accident at age 18.

Of all the insensitivity of men, Diego epitomized the worst of it. Not only was he extravagantly unfaithful to Frieda, but he failed to appreciate the huge investment of self she made in him. Frieda, in many of her self-portraits, put a bust of Diego on her forehead. The day after her death, a friend observed that he appeared to age ten years, and finally testified that “I never knew how much I loved her.” No, lummox! You never understood the power of her devotion to you!

Diego did care for Frieda, supporting the drain on his finances of more than thirty surgeries related to her accident and spinal bifida. But he eventually divorced her, and this pressed Frieda into depression. Self-portraits of the period show her attempting to reclaim the European mantle carried by her father, where for years she had dressed the part of the Mexican peasant. A few weeks before her death, she penned the line

I hope the end is easy, and I hope never to return.

This strikes deep into my heart. In Golem, I write of a cosmic convocation of masculine minds that lost their women to sorrow. Their ladies take haven in a place that masculine minds cannot penetrate, the super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy, leaving men without their primary inspiration in the struggle for justice. We need women like Frieda, and any testimony of their abandonment of us is, frankly, terrifying.

I learned the details about Frieda at a seminar presented by Dr. Gloria Arjona. Dr. Arjona is also a singer, and these two passions combined in her investigation, as Spanish Lecturer at Cal Tech, of the fragments that Frieda inscribed on her self-portraits. Most penetrating of them are these words from a Mexican adaptation of Cielito Lindo:

Arbol de la esperanza mantente firme

Tree of hope, be strong

Dr. Arjona spoke of Frieda as representative of the universal human condition, which is the struggle against sorrow and pain. After her presentation, I stopped to take her hand and thank her for “representing Frieda so faithfully.” For Frieda does indeed represent that struggle so universal in Latin America, though foreign to the American middle class. The experience on Saturday was a link for me, as I learned this morning when humming the tune to the chorus of Cielito Lindo

Ay, ay, ay ay. Canta y no llores

“Sing, and do not cry.” It is an assertion of will emanating from those that have nothing but their voices, and even then only in moments of private celebration that are yet always touched by the pressure of sorrow. It is to claim the right to be loved, a claim that almost broke my heart as I began to weep.

I love you. We are strong enough. Come to me.

Quantum Entanglement

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John Markoff at the New York Times has been heralding an experiment at Delft as disproving Einstein’s view of the universe. While I have my own issues with Einstein, I am not as impressed with the Delft demonstration as Markoff and others appear to be.

The quantum world is incredibly mysterious to us – we cannot observe its inner workings directly, but only observe its side-effects. This means that we can’t make statements about the behavior of any one system of particles, but only about many systems in aggregate.

Let me give a classical example. When we toss a coin in the air, we know that there is a fifty percent chance that it will land “heads up.” If we could measure the coin’s position and rate of spinning and also knew precisely the properties of the floor that it would land on, as it was in flight we could calculate precisely which way it would land. But we can’t do that, so we believe that there is an element of “chance” in the outcome. In the terminology of quantum mechanics, we might say that the coin in flight is in a “quantum” state: 50% heads up and 50% heads down.

Now let’s say that we put two people in a room and asked them to toss a coin. Since we can’t observe the thoughts in their mind, we might consider them to be in an “entangled” state. We know that if we ask one the answer, we’ll receive the same answer from the other We then separate them by miles and ask the first one what the result of the toss was. If she says “heads,” we know instantaneously that the second person will also say “heads.” So we might say that the state of the pair has “collapsed” to “heads” instantaneously, and we know what answer will be given by the second person.

But the information didn’t travel instantaneously from one to the other. The two people from the room knew all along what the answer was.

If this is actually the nature of quantum entanglement of very small particles such as electrons (the subject of the experiment in Delft), why do scientists become so confused about the process of information transfer?

That chance in coin tossing actually reflects the randomness of the tossing process: the position of the coin on our thumb, the effort of our muscles, the condition of the floor: only with great practice could we ensure that all of these were identical on each toss. If that investment in discipline were made, we could actually control the outcome of the toss, achieving heads 100% of the time.

Now let’s say that, unbeknownst to us, the coin tossers are actually trained in this skill. How would we find out? We couldn’t find out from one experiment. Even after a second experiment, there’s still a one-in-four chance that a random toss would achieve “heads” in both cases. No, we’d have to run many experiments, and decide how improbable the outcome would have to be before we accepted that something was wrong with our theory of coin tossing.

In other words, the confusion comes in because the philosophy of quantum mechanics confuses the problem of proving the correctness of the theory with the actual behavior of the particles that produce any specific outcome. In our coin-tossing case, the quantum theory holds that we’ll get heads 50% of the time. But to prove that, we have to do many, many experiments.

Let’s extend this to the problem of Schroedinger’s cat: a cat is in a box with a vial of poison gas and a radioactive isotope. When the isotope decays (at some random time), a detector triggers a hammer to smash the vial. In the “accepted” philosophy of quantum mechanics, the state of the isotope evolves over time, being partially decayed. This means that the state of the cat is also partially dead. When we open the box, its “wave function” collapses to one state or the other.

We can clarify this confusion with a thought experiment: In our coin tossing example, let’s say that we put coins in boxes and had children run around the room to shake them up, randomizing their state. In quantum mechanical terms, we would say that the state of any one coin was “50% heads.” When we look in a box, the state of that coin is determined: it’s wave function collapses to either heads or tails. It is only by observing all of the coins, however, that we can determine whether the children actually were successful in randomizing the state of the coins.

By analogy with this, we can only prove Schrodinger’s theorem about the “deadness” of cats by performing many experiments. At any instant, however, each cat in its box is either alive or dead. It is unfortunate that we’d have to kill very many of them to determine whether the theory of radioactive decay was correct.

So I side with Einstein: I don’t see any mysterious “action at a distance” in the experiment at Delft, and I certainly don’t see it as proof that information can travel faster than the speed of light.

My own proposition is very different: it is that the dark energy that permeates space and constrains the speed of light can have holes opened in it by the action of our spirit. Once it is removed, the barriers of time and distance fall. When such bonds are created through fear, the subject of the fear seeks to escape them, and the strength of the bond dissipates. When the bonds are created in love, the entanglement persists by mutual consent, and grows inexorably in strength and power, eventually sweeping all else before it.

What kind of confirmation could the physicists at Delft provide of this? I’m not certain, but it would be an experiment in which the electrons were separated, and a manipulation of one was reflected in the other. In our coin-toss experiment, it would be if the two people in the room were separated before the coin toss, and the second knew instantly what the result was of the toss performed by the other. From the video they made, I don’t think that’s what is happening at Delft.

This post in memoriam of Professor Eugene Commins who taught my upper-division course in Quantum Mechanics at UC Berkeley in 1981, and who benefited during his doctoral studies at Princeton from conversations with Einstein.