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Getting Taken to Cleaner

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Volkswagon, the world’s largest automobile manufacturer, issued a software patch for the 11 million vehicles sold with “clean diesel” motors. The patch links to Android and iOS smart phones, enabling the driver to replicate the acceleration profiles used during EPA emissions testing.

In announcing the patch, Volkswagon’s CEO said, “Those already taking directions from their smart phones will be perfectly comfortable with the new feature. Instead of ‘turn left in 200 yards’, the phone will command ‘release the accelerator by two millimeters in five hundredths of a second.'” When asked whether that was a practical solution, the CEO enthused: “That’s the beauty of the engineering! Do you know how hard it was to coordinate the voice announcement to end just in time to allow the driver to take action?”

Facing the prospect of billions of dollars in fines from environmental regulators across the globe, the new VW software prioritizes emissions above collision avoidance. As an explanation, the CEO offered, “Any deviation from the commanded – I mean ‘requested’ – acceleration sequence will cause the exhaust to belch a huge cloud of poisonous particulates. So the driver might as well run over the children in the cross walk.”

In a parallel, ISIS announced the availability of a new freemium game based upon the “Hit-and-Run” scoring system adopted by American teens to vent their frustration with dawdling pedestrians.

Understanding, Hope

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The ferocity of the wildfires raging in Northern California was given a human face last Monday morning when one of the staff at AMC shared that two members of her family had lost their homes and everything they owned when their town was devoured by the flames. As I write today, the fires have destroyed 1400 homes.

To some, it is human crisis that makes global climate change palpable to them. For me, once a wanderer of the trails above the Conejo Valley, the cries of nature have weighed on my heart for far longer. The day that I first encountered the great Muslim love poem, Yusef and Zuleika, these words caused me to weep as I looked out over the hills:

To my wounded heart this soft balm to lay,
For not beyond this can I wish or pray.
The streams of thy love will new life bestow,
On the dry, thirsty field where its sweet waters flow.

After services at St. Kolbe’s today, I was moved to stand on the floor where the gaze of Christ fell. I was struck suddenly that the last thing that he beheld was the earth under the cross. The earth that held in place the instrument of his destruction, but also that had carried him on his wandering, that had brought forth food for him to eat, and provided all the tools of weather and life that had responded to his authority as he tried to teach his people to heal the world.

We could have avoided this destruction. Not just the destruction of families, cities and nations, but the loss of species and the poisoning of water and earth that will delay their recovery. Both to the reasoning mind and the intuitive heart, these consequences have long been apprehensible. Now, faced with the undeniable evidence of doom, we still hesitate to act, for we think first of what is close to us. Our families, our homes, and our land: they all suffer, and so we take from elsewhere to preserve them. We take from those with no voice: the poor, the uneducated, and the natural world.

But what else are we to do?

I write here because I understand things that others do not, and so I perceive solutions that are beyond their grasp. It may seem small-minded to decry the folly of Elon Musk and his peers, desperately trying to disperse the human species so that it can survive all the threats of the natural world: black holes, solar instability, and human greed. But I do so with sympathy for them, for they cannot see how much power is available to us if only we understand it.

On the New Physics page I offer a model of physics that holds these truths: space is not empty. It is filled with a medium in which light propagates, the medium that physicists once called the “aluminiferous ether”, and now call “dark energy.” That medium is wrought through with threads that appear most obviously to us as electric charge when bound to the medium, but that may also float in the medium. The floating threads interact, merge and evolve to form what we know as “souls.” The souls merge with matter to “live” as plants, animals and people. In that form, they are capable of warping the fabric of space. In most cases, that warping occurs through the use of their physical manifestation – in humans, we commonly use our legs, hands, and mouths.

Through our actions, we join other things in the service of our will. That can be a temporary affair, such as when we throw a light switch or press the accelerator pedal. We are often seduced by the temporary thrill of such expressions, a thrill made accessible through the efforts of engineers to remove souls from the world around us, ensuring that it responds only to our will.

But any great lover knows the permanence of the bonds that arise when we ask permission before enjoying a gift, and attempt to reciprocate in kind. In those exchanges, we make persistent spiritual arrangements – persistent precisely because the participating souls do not seek to escape them.

So this is how we save the world: we surrender our self-concerns. We open our hearts in compassion to the suffering of the world. We marshal the displaced souls of the natural world and join them together to warp the fabric of space to create a lens that bends light away from the earth. And we reward them every day with the expression of our gratitude for their service.

Are we enough to do this, by ourselves? Perhaps, and perhaps not. But we should consider this: there is a billion times as much energy leaving the sun than comes to us on Earth. The source of that energy is not unintelligent. It is, in fact, the “Ancient of Days” described in Daniel’s Dream of the Four Beasts. It would help us if it could, but we are so terribly small, and one mistake would destroy us all. It needs us to guide it.

I had a friend challenge me once that with faith we should be able to move mountains. My response was: “Yes, if every living thing on the mountain and the land around it agreed that the mountain should move, the mountain would move.” But if any voice claimed privilege over that power, the result would be chaos. It is for this reason that I decry the ugliness of the Republican debates. If we are going to save all of the world, the power of such voices will still be among us. The destructive effects of their expression cannot be risked. They must learn self-control.

I was late getting to church this morning. As I organized my thoughts to write this post, I sat down to the reading from Acts. I wept as these words were read [James 4:2-3]:

You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

Oh, humanity! Why must the world suffer so?

Bulding Bridges

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Jeb Bush on Barack Obama:

Barack Obama is a talented man — and by the way he’s an American, he’s a Christian — his problem isn’t the fact that he was born here or what his faith is. His problem is that he’s a progressive liberal who tears down anybody that disagrees with him.

Well, Jeb, you’ve got another eighteen debates to overcome two precedents that establish that the Republican Party can’t put forward any candidate that can build bridges even within the Republican Party.

Much less put together the two-party coalition that passed the Health Care Affordability Act, much as the flip-flippers would like to disown it.

Freedom from Government through the Governance of Love

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In explaining the necessity of God in Tragic Sense of Life, the Jesuit philosopher Miguel de Unamuno asserts that it arises when every man, naturally desiring to control the world, confronts the inevitability of death. As the latter treads on our heels, even the most powerful are pressed to the conclusion that the only way to live forever is to embrace a God that loves us enough to grant us life.

Atheists are inclined by this logic to conclude that faith is a delusion. Marx certainly saw it that way, declaring that “religion is the opium of the masses.” But the underlying pressure is evidenced in the pronouncements of some technologists, among them the man I described yesterday who saw our digital sensors, networks and software as empowering us to build God. Others are more humble. At the ACM fiftieth anniversary symposium in 1997, Nathan Myhrvold, then chief architect at Microsoft, envisioned (somewhat playfully) a future in which we could escape death by creating digital simulations of our brains. The video skit included Bill Gates rubbing his chin as he thoughtfully considered the reduction in Microsoft’s benefits budget.

But if delusion is pathetic, oftentimes in the powerful avoidance is grotesque. We have Vladimir Putin, assassin of Russian patriots, proclaiming that Jesus will find no fault with him on Judgment Day. Or the effrontery of Donald Trump who, protected by his army of lawyers, knows that so long as he asserts righteousness, no one has the means to contradict his claims of competency and benevolence. Thus he continues to assert – in contradiction of the actual birth certificate – that his lawyers have compelling evidence to reveal regarding President Obama’s citizenship. Both of these men suffer from the same affliction, the tendency of our bodies to respond to successful acts of aggression by manufacturing more and more testosterone, the chemical driver for aggression. This is a positive feedback loop that was broken only by death in the cases of Hitler, Franco, Mao, Stalin, Kim Yung Un and so many other tyrants. In the prelude, millions of people were sacrificed on the altars of their psychological invincibility.

This dynamic is writ small in the lives of many businesses, congregations and families. People addicted to the rush of adrenaline and the power of testosterone manufacture experiences that stimulate their production. This is why it is said “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The desire for power arises from the biological thrill of success, and to continue to receive that thrill, the addict must continue to risk his power in ever greater contests. In the heat of passion, the suffering visited upon others is ignored.

There are three antidotes to this dynamic. The first is popular rebellion. Paradoxically, this is the very force that pushed Putin and Trump to prominence. At a stump speech yesterday, Trump opened the floor to questions, and the first person to the microphone began to rant hatefully about President Obama and an imagined domestic Muslim threat. Trump did not defuse the situation, instead responding “We need to hear this question!” But often rebellion is merely another manifestation of the drive to power. Unless tempered, it rages out of control, as happened in the Jacobian tyranny following the French Revolution.

The second antidote is reason. Reason builds discipline that forces us to reconcile our actions with their consequences, thereby disciplining our aggression with objective evidence of failure. The tension between reason and will is not just moral, however: heightened levels of adrenaline actually degrade the higher thinking centers of the brain. This creates a terribly contradictory dynamic, perhaps manifesting itself in the fact that most academics do their greatest work in their youth. While testosterone serves the reasoning mind in creating the thirst to conquer and claim ideas, as the successful mind expands, so do levels of testosterone and adrenaline, which destroys the power of reason. In that context, the methods used to sustain power are not as brutal as those used by the social tyrant, but have their own unique form of cruelty, and leave lasting scars on the psyche. Isaac Newton, cheated of credit for a scientific insight by his predecessor as head of the Royal Academy of Sciences, had the satisfaction of burning the man’s portrait. Most victims of intellectual tyranny are consigned to obscurity.

It is natural for supporters to gather around the social or intellectual tyrant during his rise to power. Claiming benevolent intention is a great way of rallying support from the oppressed. Unfortunately, this dictum holds: A man will change his beliefs before he will change his behavior. When that behavior is organized around aggression, enemies must be created when there are none left at hand. All tyrants eventually turn on their lieutenants, often using hallucinatory rhetoric to justify their actions.

A peer once offered to me that all the greatest scientists were lovers of humanity. This brings us to the third antidote: love. This arrives upon us through many pathways. It can be through sex and maternity. It can be when an infant first grasps our forefinger. It can be through service to those in want. In those moments a bond is established, a linkage that makes palpable the suffering we visit upon others. That can be rationalized in material terms: tears on a beloved face or cries of shame are evidence of our failure. That breaks the vicious cycle of success and aggression.

But there is another aspect that goes beyond negative feedback. Aggression stimulates the loins and the mind, but barely touches the heart. Exchanging love with someone just feels good. It opens us up to a world of experience that can be touched in no other way. Ultimately, its rewards are far greater because no one that loves themselves objects to being loved. They do not turn on their friends for satisfaction, because their friends offer them satisfaction every day.

Democracy attempts to combat the urge to power by institutionalizing rebellion. In America, the two Presidents that were awarded most authority were George Washington, who gracefully surrendered power after two terms of service following universal acclamation by the Electoral College, and FDR, who literally worked himself to death through four terms in office. Both those men were governed by a sense of duty and love for their country, a commitment affirmed by the popular voice that is expressed in elections. At the end of the 20th century, those that seek the freedom to act always as they please (the ultimate manifestation of power) responded to electoral constraint by attacking our faith in government. Driven by testosterone and thus unable to govern themselves, they have invested huge amounts of money creating personalities such as Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. As visible in the Oklahoma City bombing and the events surrounding the Republican nominating process, the end result has been to stimulate the resort to violence by others.

Thus we have the wisdom of Jesus: “Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar’s.” We have the promise of Jeremiah: “For I will write my law on their hearts, and no man will be told ‘Come learn about my God’, because all will know me.” And we have Christ’s summation of the Jewish experience with law (the rule of reason) and governmental control: Love God and your neighbor.

It is through self-regulation that we discover truth and peace[NIV Matt. 7:13-14]:

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

But what other government would we choose, except the governance of our hearts? And to what other authority would be choose to submit, other than the authority of compassion in another? Why do we delude ourselves that there is any other way?

The Soul of Technology

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My father, once holder of an open fascination with Darth Vader as the ultimate integration of man and machine, for many years sought to keep me focused on technology by disputing the validity of my spiritual experience. He’s mellowing in the last few months of his life, and we’ve had some great conversations. Sunday afternoon’s brought us around to Elon Musk’s ambition to terraform Mars. He asked my opinion of the idea, and I said that I felt a certain sympathy for Mr. Musk. I countered the claim that we needed an escape route from the mess that we were making of Earth. We’re going to have to solve our problems here, and when we do, the personality of Mr. Musk – from wherever it is at that point – is going to look back on this life and say “Wow. What a boondoggle that was! What a complete waste of my time!” He seems like a man with good intentions, and I’d just like for him to be able to look back and be proud of what he has accomplished.

When I was blogging out at Gaia, one of the most persistent voices in the “Question of the Day” group was a Kiwi nearing the end of his life. Every question produced a number of lengthy posts on the same topic: the necessity of investment in digital technologies that would allow us to monitor everything, and then to link the information to a master control system that would ensure the well-being of everyone on earth. When pressed, he claimed that this was important to him because if it didn’t happen really soon, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to live forever. I offered him the observation that he seemed to need God so deeply that he believe that mankind must create him.

The protagonist in both Ma and Golem is an alien named Corin Taphinal, come to Earth to try to protect life from destruction at humanity’s hands. He describes the situation this way:

The digital technology of [Earth’s] civilization had fascinated him. It was based upon the conversion of the most mystically inert substance in the universe – amorphous silicon – into precisely contaminated crystals. Its proponents spoke of blanketing the globe in digital sensors, constructing communications networks and data centers to aggregate the data, and the development of expert systems algorithms to assure the stability of human communities in the face of massive ecosystem disruption.

Why, in the name of all that was sacred, would anyone choose such methods? Over billions of years, the insinuation of Life into any planet’s surface established a far more sensitive and detailed sensory apparatus, supported by the most widely and freely distributed source of energy available, with representatives far better adapted to local conditions than people.

With this background, you might ask, “Why, Brian, do you work in technology?” Is it just to pay the bills?

I’ll protest my own rhetoric: that’s just going too far. Just because I don’t believe that technology is the ultimate solution to our problems doesn’t mean that I don’t find merit in its pursuit.

First, the world is an unstable place. I’m not just talking about natural disasters: for large parts of the year, seasonal variation makes life pretty tough for most animals. Technology stabilizes local conditions, allowing us to focus on developing our personalities. I appreciate that I don’t have to think full-time about weather, but can rely upon sensors and actuators controlled by computers to do it for me. That our solutions are making the challenge more difficult (global climate change) doesn’t mean that the technology isn’t valuable. The problem is that most of us, rather than developing our personalities, use our freedom from existential threat to indulge our procreative urges.

The solution to that is education. While knowledge is dangerous (life is incredibly vulnerable in engineering terms), I believe that understanding empowers us to make far better choices. We know that when the value of a woman’s mind has been affirmed through education they become pretty determined to limit the number of their children. The response of traditionalists has been to beat women down with fear. In that case, the best means of breaking down the rationale of political demagogues is disintermediation: bringing people together to demonstrate that the “enemy” is a lot like us. Communications technology addresses both of these problems, providing open access to knowledge in the privacy of the home and bridging the distance that separates us.

And finally – motivating my particular fascination with programming – software rescues philosophy from academic obscurity. The purpose of philosophy is to strengthen our ability to describe experience and thus to negotiate solutions. Through linkage to our financial and industrial infrastructure, software allows us almost instantly to express the solutions we negotiate. That is not just a one-off experience when (as in object-oriented design or COBOL) the software is defined using terms understood in the application domain. These act as sign-posts for the maintenance developer given the task of implementing new requirements.

I spoke, however, of rescuing philosophy, and I mean that. Software encodes philosophy, not as a book on a shelf, but as an agent for delivering solutions to the philosopher’s constituency. With the Affordable Health Care Act, software allowed us to implement social programs, assess their effectiveness, and adjust the rules to achieve better results. This is a demanding test of our philosophy, both as regards the degree in which they reflect the truth, and its value in organizing the use of our intelligence when conditions change.

As I have offered before (see The Trust Mind), I believe that eventually we will be freed from the material infrastructure we use to distribute power. However, as I see the long period from the Covenant of the Flood (in which humanity was authorized to create Law) to Jesus as an exercise in demonstrating the fallibility of fixed systems of rules, so I see this era (as articulated by Jeremy Rifkin in The Empathic Civilization) as a proving ground for our compassion. As technology accelerates the pace of change and resources become more and more scarce, only ideas of real merit will survive. Every thinking being will be confronted with the necessity of disciplining his thoughts.

While the demagogues continue to rant and rave on television, conditions are evolving under which every individual will find such blathering contradicted by direct personal experience. Then we will progress beyond the “birthing pains” mentioned by Jesus into the full flowering of the influence of Christ in our lives. When our ideas are angelic, they will be received and implemented by angels. Life will be vastly different then, and our digital infrastructure, with all its energetic excess, will largely fall away.

I see my work as intimately connected to the manifestation of that future. My work in motion control creates systems that relieve people of drudgery, thus liberating their energies for mindful and compassionate engagement with the world around them. My work in as a software developer builds discipline that is essential in organizing and propagating ideas that I believe are of merit. It’s not enough that those ideas are clever – they actually have to work.

Artificers of Intelligence

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The chess program on a cell phone can beat all but the best human players in the world. It does this by considering every possible move on the board, looking forward perhaps seven to ten turns. Using the balance of pieces on the board, the algorithm works back to the move most likely to yield an advantage as the game develops.

These algorithms are hugely expensive in energetic terms. The human brain solves the same problem in a far more efficient fashion. A human chess player understands that there are certain combinations of pieces that provide leverage over the opposing forces. As opportunities arise to create those configurations, they focus their attention on those pieces, largely ignoring the rest of the board. That means that the human player considers only a small sub-set of the moves considered by the average chess program.

This advantage is the target of recent research using computerized neural networks. A neural net is inspired by the structure of the human brain itself. Each digital “node” is a type of artificial neuron. The nodes are arranged in ranks. Each node receives input values from the nodes in the prior rank, and generates a signal to be processed by the neurons in the next rank. This models the web of dendrites used by a human neuron to receive stimulus and the axon by which it transmits the signal to the dendrites of other neurons.

In the case of the human neuron, activation of the synapse (the gap separating axon and dendrite) causes it to become more sensitive, particularly when that action is reinforced by positive signals from the rest of the body (increased energy and nutrients). In the computerized neural network, a mathematical formula is used to calculate the strength of the signal produced by a neuron. The effect of the received signals and the strength of the generated signal is controlled by parameters – often simple scaling factors – that can be adjusted, node by node, to tune the behavior of the network.

To train an artificial neural network, we proceed much as we would with a human child. We provide them experiences (a configuration of pieces on a chess board) and give feedback (a type of grade on the test) that evaluates their moves. For human players, that experience often comes from actual matches. To train a computerized neural network, many researchers draw upon the large databases of game play that have been established for study by human players. The encoding of the piece positions is provided to the network as “sensory input” (much as our eyes do when looking at a chess board), and the output is the new configuration. Using an evaluative function to determine the strength of each final position, the training program adjusts the scaling factors until the desired result (“winning the game”) is achieved as “often as possible.”

In the final configuration, the computerized neural network is far more efficient than its brute-force predecessors. But consider what is going on here: the energetic expenditure has merely been front-loaded. It took an enormous amount of energy to create the database used for the training, and to conduct the training itself. Furthermore, the training is not done just once, because a neural network that is too large does not stabilize its output (too much flexibility) and a network that is too small cannot span the possibilities of the game. Finding a successful network design is a process of trial-and-error controlled by human researchers, and until they get the design right, the training must be performed again and again on each iteration of the network.

But note that human chess experts engage in similar strategies. Sitting down at a chess board, the starting position allows an enormous number of possibilities, too many to contemplate. What happens is that the first few moves determine an “opening” that may run to ten or twenty moves performed almost by rote. These openings are studied and committed to memory by master players. They represent the aggregate wisdom of centuries of chess players about how to avoid crashing and burning early in the game. At the end of the game, when the pieces are whittled down, players employ “closings”, techniques for achieving checkmate that can be committed to memory. It is only in the middle of the game, in the actual cut-and-thrust of conflict, that much creative thinking is done.

So which of the “brains” is more intelligent: the computer network or the human brain? When my son was building a chess program in high school, I was impressed by the board and piece designs that he put together. They made playing the game more engaging. I began thinking that a freemium play strategy would be to add animations to the pieces. But what about if the players were able to change the rules themselves? For example, allow the queen to move as a knight for one turn. Or modify the game board itself: select a square and modify it to allow passage only on the diagonal or in one direction. I would assert that a human player would find this to be a real creative stimulus, while the neural network would just collapse in confusion. The training set didn’t include configurations with three knights on the board, or restrictions on moves.

This was the point I made when considering the mental faculties out at http://www.everdeepening.org. Intelligence is not determined by our ability to succeed under systems of fixed rules. Intelligence is the measure of our ability to adapt our behaviors when the rules change. In the case of the human mind, we recruit additional neurons to the problem. This is evident in the brains of blind people, in which the neurons of the visual cortex are repurposed for processing of other sensory input (touch, hearing and smell), allowing the blind to become far more “intelligent” decision makers when outcomes are determined by those qualities of our experience.

This discussion, involving a game without much concrete consequence, appears to be largely academic. But there have been situations in which this limitation of artificial intelligence have been enormously destructive. It turns out that the targeting systems of drones employ neural networks trained against radar and visual observations of friendly and enemy aircraft. Those drones have misidentified friendly aircraft in live-fire incidents, firing their air-to-air missile and destroying the target.

So proclamations by some that we are on the cusp of true artificial intelligence are, in my mind, a little overblown. What we are near is a shift in the power allocated to machines that operate with a fixed set of rules, away from biological mechanisms that adapt their thinking when they encounter unexpected conditions. That balance must be carefully managed, lest we find ourselves without the power to adapt.

The Real Deal: Towering Ambition on Mars

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Having seen the Trump stump rhetoric on the Iran nuclear deal evolve as predicted in earlier de-porting (as “re”-porting is to offer again the truth, “de”-porting must be to claw it back), this blogger was emboldened to follow the communications links that tie the Trump real-estate empire to the Iranian mullahs. New revelations expose the growth of the Trump ego from global to interplanetary dimensions.

With suspicions (and hackles) raised by Trump’s refusal to promise to place his holdings in blind trust, records of real estate transactions in the Washington, D.C. area were examined to expose the true cause of the Chinese stock-market crash: profit-taking by Chinese investors buying up huge swaths of the Washington landscape. It appears that Trump has arranged for multi-billion dollar Chinese support for his PAC with promises to lift the height limitation on Capitol Hill development, which by federal law is constrained by the cap of the Washington Monument.

In fact, PR documents in development attempt to paint the Monument itself as a hidden Iranian ICBM, similar to those revealed to have been concealed in the minarets of Iranian mosques. The Monument is slated for demolition during Trump’s first hundred days in office, to be followed immediately by construction of a huge Trump Tower complex on the Capitol Mall.

As if that was not sufficient outrage, it appears that the pull-back of the Obama-Islama resort complex announcement in Kenya is related to plans for Mars hinted at in a bizarre exchange between Elon Musk and Stephen Colbert on the late show. Mr. Musk suggested that Mars might be made habitable by liberating water and carbon dioxide trapped in polar crust using nuclear explosions.

It appears that Mr. Trump has promised to have NASA let a contract to SpaceX, the private rocket company owned by Mr. Musk, to design and construct a system to relocate the Iranian uranium enrichment complex to Mars. Rather than launching nuclear missiles from earth to Mars, the bombs will be manufactured on Mars itself using the transplanted Iranian machinery.

As a quid-pro-quo, the Republican majority in both houses of Congress will be expected to grant to Trump right of first refusal on all development deals as habitable terrain evolves on Mars. Support for the legislation is expected to be sealed with authorization of a “climate change exchange” that will allow fossil fuel companies holding land on both planets to average hot days on Earth against cold days on Mars.

In related news, the Bush nominating campaign is targeting a narrow climate-conscious fringe of the Republican party with a study of the correlation between local temperatures and Trump campaign rhetoric.

This blogger awaits further developments with basted breath.

Curating the Treasure

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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.

Reflection: Yoga Beyond Asana

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It’s coming up on the end of my fourth year of practice in the Bikram Yoga school in Agoura Hills. Obviously the primary impact has been physiological. When I was out at the Skeptics Conference in Pasadena in May, a number of people commented that I had excellent posture. As I am painfully aware right now, that process is ongoing – I realized just recently that when standing, my right hip is shifted about an inch to the left. The pain derives from a shortened band of muscles in the right side of my lower back. Every class, I stretch them out, and every evening they crawl back to the length they have had for the last thirty years.

I didn’t realize how great the changes in the rest of my body had been until I met again with Balwan Singh yesterday. Balwan works at Bikram headquarters organizing teacher trainings. He is very Indian, struggling still at times with his English, but humble and joyful to the core. He had taught in Agoura Hills on Saturdays while the studio was establishing itself, often coming by with his lady-love Sharon (who is now expecting). The first words out of his mouth were “You look really good.” Sitting on the floor in the second session, I looked in the mirror and finally saw what people have been talking about. My body has filled in, and it responds gracefully to direction.

Most teachers in the Bikram method hew tightly to the established environmental constraints – primarily to keep the room near 105 degrees and the students in posture. The conditions were established while Bikram was developing his practice in Japan, and as a 6’6″ physically active American, they are really brutal on me. Most of the advanced practitioners in the studio are actually proportioned like the Japanese.

Balwan always catered to my challenges, and yesterday was no exception. I set my mat up in the back in the path of the air through the door. It came open early, and the oxygen that came with the air made it a very different practice. When the owner Rachel, who was set up just to my right, indicated that she wished it closed, Balwan remarked that advanced practitioners created heat internally, and the environmental controls weren’t as important as for beginners.

Rachel is a really beautiful lady, both inside and out, and I’ve been trying to facilitate her union with some angels that have been floating around in my orbit. Balwan got us to focus on breathing from the get-go, and I surrendered the tension in my chest to let the air really fill my lungs. I got into this rhythm with Rachel, each of us just looking into the other to see where the energy was getting stuck. For me, the most surprising impact of that collaboration came during head-to-knee posture. For the first time I really got up into the second stage, balanced on one leg with the other held out parallel to the floor in front of my hip.

When the practice was over, we were offered a lecture by Arvind Chittamulla, organizer of MokshaFest here in LA. As anyone who has studied the Vedic practices knows, there is far more to Yoga than the physical training, or Asanas. The ultimate goal of Yoga is to allow the purifying energy from the divine source to flow into the world through us.

As Arvind explained, here in the West yoga has spread as a physical practice. As I see it, that reflects the forces that Western society organizes to channel our behaviors to the purpose of creating wealth for those that employ us. They are reinforced by media images that impose air-brushed standards of beauty. We lack both consciousness of the psychic costs of internalizing these forces, and methods for purging them. Yoga asanas allows us, to a certain degree, to at least regain control of our physical manifestation.

But there is much more to yoga than that. Meditation is essential to management of our minds, and breath-work grounds us in the world. Asana, meditation and breath-work are connected: if we don’t have control of our mind, the corrupt thoughts that we entertain during asana practice will infect our bodies. For this reason, Arvind sees that the narrow focus of yoga in the West actually hurts many practitioners.

Arvind walked us through the other seven limbs of the tradition. In Indian studios, orientation to the first two, involving morality and life action, are often prerequisites to practice of the asanas. The remaining five manage the inward journey that opens into relationship with the divine.

The lecture was directed towards the teachers in the room, and Arvind’s ultimate goal is to broaden instructor certification to include, at a minimum, meditation and breath work. As a business proposition, he believes that the idle hours at many studios could be filled with sessions that offered students those tools.

I know that I have benefited from the coupling of my physical practice to my spiritual development. As I explained to Arvind, the difficulty of the conditions during a Bikram class forced me to completely surrender my ego – I had to accept that I had a lot of work to do before I could achieve the postures even in their initial expression. Given that surrender, the consistency of the sequence ensures that I am able to enter a meditative frame, letting my muscles do the work until something doesn’t work, and then focusing only on that. I have learned to ignore the other students in the room while still sharing the energy that arises between people committed to a common goal.

So I must wish Arvind success in his efforts, although I think that he might find more acceptance if he packaged them as advanced certifications.

The interaction with Arvind came with some tensions. I was glad to be with Balwan at the end of the evening. He was talking with one of the other attendees, and I circled around behind to put my hand on top of his head and share a hug, wishing him all the deepest joys of fatherhood. He sent me off with a heart-felt “Thank-you, Brian. Thank-you so much.”