Away, Away…

Posted on December 27, 2015 by Brian Balke | 2 Comments

“There’s been a lot of deterioration since last night,” my mother told me.

He’s really weak. When I came through the door on Thursday, I could see the light in his face. Saturday he did not stir until I sat down next to him. We eventually rolled him over on his back. As he stared up into the lamp hanging from the ceiling, my mother asked him “Is Brian supposed to take that down yet?” There was a green piece of ruled paper curled up in the scroll work. “It didn’t make much sense,” she told me.

I thought, “Oh, but it does.”

On Christmas eve I had told him about the lineage that he was struggling with. Yesterday we felt our way toward freedom. He suffered from childhood polio, which left him with neuropathy in his legs. “Do you remember what it was like to run, before your legs became sick?”

He paused, trying to reach back. “No. I don’t.”

“Well, maybe your mother or grandmother can help.”

As I sat on the bed beside him, I rested my hand on his hip, and then caressed downward towards his lifeless feet. “Away, away the bad stuff.” It was where the domineering will had pooled. For three hours, off and on, we worked through it, sometimes holding hands. I felt the pain of the arguments and rejection he had suffered in his childhood, mostly from family but also from the peers that enjoyed bullying this genius who graduated from high school at fourteen. “I will receive that from you,” I promised him.

Indeed, I did, as the day passed into evening. He was lying on his side, looking at me hopefully, and I put my right hand on his cheek. A look of bliss came over his features, and I cemented the connection by placing my left hand on the crown of his head. The tears came as his sorrow poured into me – carrying all those lesser spirits that had been forced into him but that didn’t have a place.

“I’m so glad that you were my father.”

He, Too

Posted on December 25, 2015 by Brian Balke | Leave a comment

I go down to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels for Christmas and Easter each year. It forces the Church to confront certain realities. They manage these buildings, and so control whether and when the flock comes and goes. That tends to create some confusion regarding the nature of the shepherd, and many among them take offense when confronted with the authority of love.

So it is at the end of every age.

But while I was down in the crypt, I encountered this stained glass window in the baptismal chapel. Who knows which child, survivor of the school of tyranny, will rise to teach redemption to humanity? Who would turn away that hope?

The Holy Family seeks safety in Egypt.

Fun? What is this ‘fun’?

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Brian Balke | 1 Comment

Greg got a great laugh out of it at the time. He called me over to the computer and said, “Hey, Dad, you should try this game.”

“What is it? Run-escape? What’s that?”

“No. RUNE-scape.”

My Runescape avatar, Trichronos, watching the plotted mushrooms grow.

It started off as something for us to do together on weekends, and the chat channel let us stay in touch while they were away at their mother’s house. When I was forced to surrender my custodial rights to take a job up in Livermore in 2004, the game became a stress breaker. Runescape involves a lot of mindless, repetitive skilling activities. I would sit down with The Economist and mouse away, half the time without even looking at the screen.

My avatar, Trichronos, was once a negative image of me. Now my hair is mostly white. The original Runescape was pretty raw, with a lot of adult language, misogyny and racism. I chose the character as a reaction to the last, and have been called a ‘nigger’ more than once. And when others complain that they wish there were more female players, I always trot out my original error, “Well, it’s because girls parse the name as ‘Run! Escape!'”

On the flip side, I have observed over the years that Runescape does grow player communities consisting of disabled vets, students, the chronically unemployed and the elderly. They follow each other’s lives and often provide support in solving real-world problems.

One of the draws of a fantasy game is that you get to chose what kind of hero you want to be. Combat is a big draw to some, although the tactics and visual effects in Runescape are tame compared to those in games that focus narrowly on combat. I do enough combat to be able to do the quests, but filled up my time with skilling.

As the ecology in California began to collapse, I felt compelled to focus on the farming skill. It was my first “max” skill two years ago. Changes in the game mechanics made it easy to max out on the other skills since, but also introduced rewards for further achievements. So while I don’t have an interest in the other skills except as they factor in quest outcomes, I am trying to complete the farming achievement. It represents a bounded but not insignificant draw upon my energies: logging in for twenty minutes four times a day to harvest patches and plant new crops. I estimate somewhere between 120 and 200 days to achieve my goal.

“Trichronos” is obviously not a name I would give to a child, but has specific meaning to me. “Tri” is obviously the prefix “three,” and Chronos is the Titan of time in Greek myth. The choice references both my model of physics, in which I posit additional time dimensions, and my sense of my deep past, as in “third time is the charm.” It’s not time to explain that second one yet…

Father, Finally

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Brian Balke | 6 Comments

My father is in the final stages of his journey here. For the last month, he has been surrendering to the prostate cancer that is invading his bones. His principal fear has been of being a burden to my mother, and so he has methodically tried to further the process. The degradation of his sense of taste is facilitating his resolve. It is clear that his extremities are being consumed in the effort to maintain the operation of his heart, lungs and brain.

I could mourn the loss of his brilliant intellect, but that intellect was a mixed blessing to his intimates. It was a very powerful tool that supported convictions that could lead to harsh judgments. What I am finding instead is that as he weakens and submits to confusion, for the first time in my life I am able to proffer simple acts of tenderness. Stroking his head, rubbing his chest over his heart, holding his hand: these have been rewarded by looks of wonder.

I was caught up, for much of my life, in my father’s ambitions for programming. On the title bar, the “Programming” link offers entries that introduce his philosophy of design. It is my own formulation: my father adopted obscure terminology to ensure precision of meaning, and believed that practice under his tutelage was essential to competence. In fact, inspired by Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game”, his vision of a training center was a monastery. Having grown up with Diagrammatic Programming, when I joined him in the family business in 1995, I rapidly began to innovate. He found this intolerable, and when I finally had the opportunity to articulate my logic to him, his retort was “Well, it’s clear that if you talk long enough, Brian, you could convince people of anything.”

My mother dreaded our conversations. Even as recently as a few months ago, she would retreat into her office when I came by to visit him. I recognized the dynamic that evolved between us, but also saw that the problem was far more complex than just our personal history. During a transfer to the residents of ownership of the mobile home park property, my father fought a tremendous legal and spiritual battle with the lawyers seeking to maximize the developer’s profits at the cost of displacing old friends. My father eventually shared that the lead lawyer was ticketed on a DC10 that crashed when the cabin door popped open in flight, but chose at the last minute not to board. (Yes, a textbook case of misdirected anger.) I had my own struggle with the family law community that cultivated fear on the 7^th floor of the Van Nuys court house. After one conversation with my father, I heard the thoughts of one of them admitting of me, “He’s far stronger than we’ve given him credit for.” Eventually I used my father to send a message back: “I’ve done what I’ve done in order that it couldn’t be said that people weren’t given a chance to do the right thing.”

In spite of his spiritual capacities, my father always pooh-poohed my own experiences. I received several clues as to his motivations over the years. Having suffered the traumatic losses of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., he observed once that “All the good people get killed.” Although he was bailed out of the financial consequences of his own ambitions by an inheritance from a distant aunt, he worried about my financial insecurity, and may have considered wasteful my itinerant attendance at churches throughout the Conejo Valley.

But there was a deeper aspect to the problem that became clear only in 2008 when I went out to the Netherlands on a business trip. As I stepped to the visa counter in Amsterdam, I caught the thought “Well, [the Americans] are finally producing real people.” I immediately entered a warm and open relationship with the engineers we had come to visit, and a couple of nights into the trip, I woke up to them poking around in my mind. They found my father, and showed me behind him the tomb of an ancient Germanic king, still struggling to retain control of his line.

My father never had a father. Grandfather Balke left my grandmother, at the time a professional ballet dancer and later an anesthesiologist, after my father was born. From my father’s response to my physical affection, I came to see that the lack of a father was the wound that his antagonists, both ancient and modern, used to attempt to control him and his children.

That realization brought me back to a day when, returning to work after lunch, I waited at a stop light outside the executive suites rented by my brother. The usual argument over priorities was raging in my head. Suddenly, a wave of energy moved through my mind from left to right. Both the stop light and the radio in my car went dead at the same instant, and a woman’s voice announced firmly “His job is to prove to people that love works.”

My father worried about his lack of success, voicing his concern that he didn’t know what it was about him that brought failure where others less talented had achieved success. On Sunday he let me tell him this: “There’s so much good in you, Dad, but the world is full of things that see good and pile dirt all over it. It’s really hard to love somebody without leaving an opening back the other way. One of the great frustrations in my life has been that every time I tried to reciprocate your caring was that you shut me out, as though there was something frightening inside of you that you wanted to protect me from. I’m sorry if I became angry with you at times.

“There are some things about loving that a man can learn only from a father. Next time, find a good father, Dad. It will be a wonderful life.”

On Whether I’m Right

Posted on December 20, 2015 by Brian Balke | 3 Comments

This was previously attached to “Faith and Intellect.”

Club Schadenfreude’s position appears to be that I believe that I have proven souls exist. Well, that seems fair, although my reference is not physics but the recorded history of spirituality. I believe that I have presented ideas that lead in the direction of reconciling our observations of physics and cosmology with the existence of spirit. Club Schadenfreude’s complaint appears to be that I shouldn’t ask people to consider them until I’ve received broad agreement from the community of working scientists. My general point here is that working scientists don’t do as good a job of explaining the world as they generally take credit for, and so until they solve the problems I’ve identified, it’s fair for me to offer alternatives, and UNFAIR for people to use science as proof that spirituality is just plain-old craziness.

Some of the contents, and in particular the characterizations of my relationship with my sons, are clearly out-of-bounds under my Comment Policy.

This is still incomplete – I’ll be transferring the comment thread over from “Faith and Intellect” as I have time.

Club Schadenfreude:

I am wondering, if your hypotheses in physics are so great, then why have you done nothing to show they are true? There needs to be evidence. It seems you want others to do the work you should be doing. It’s also curious that you claim you can use physics to show that “love” works, when all of your fellow theists are claiming that only their religions can show this.

ideas are indeed strongest if they are shared. Threatening your child so he won’t share his ideas so yours aren’t challenged is quite the hypocrisy and the actions of someone afraid that his claims will be shown wrong.

Myself:

Have you read the material? The writing documents clearly the contradictions in current physical theory. The community should be looking for new answers. They are not. By your criteria, I am doing their work for them, not the other way around.

You mischaracterize the situation with mu children. My elder son immediately accepted that he was unfair to his brother, and his peers at school are astonished by the energy he invests in helping others to succeed. That has manifested in very lucrative and sought-after internships – last year at SpaceX and this coming summer with one of the largest high-tech companies in the world.

But you misdirect from the central issue: interpreting your comment as an indication that you are an atheist, what is your position on spirituality?

Club Schadenfreude:

I’ve read the material. It does nothing of the kind. And again, you have no evidence to support any of your claims. You have no answers and you are not doing any work at all, for anyone else or to show your hypotheses are true.

I do not mischaracterize your relationship with your children at all. You made a threat and your son backed down. What your claism about how wonderful your son is have to do with the matter at hand, I do no know. I suspect that your son never got an internship at SpaceX or at this unnamed high tech company He very well may have and then would know that his position was right and his fathers was wrong and only supported by threats.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by spirituality. If you mean the claim that there is some god or something “bigger” that we are attached to, I find it a claim that has no basis in fact. Theists and others who make claims about magic and gods have nothing to back up their claims. There is nothing to show that the mind and the brain are separate. If this were true, brain damage would not change people as it does.

Myself:

Your observation regarding brain damage is accommodated by my model. If the brain is an interface, damage to the interface will affect the linkage to ideas.

You assert that I present no evidence, but much of the evidence that I present is actual research results by working scientists. The cosmologists and nuclear physicists have all kinds of problems they can’t explain – the particle theorists just ignore them.

Please be advised that your ad hominem attacks on my character are inappropriate for this forum. I will edit them out if they continue.

Club Schadenfreude:

If the physical interface can be damaged, then we should be able to detect these magical emanations, if they interface with reality e.g. the electrochemical brain. Do you have such evidence?

And yes, there are problems that can’t be explained *yet*. Where is your evidence that your claims are true, Brian? All you have so far are claims that others are wrong but nothing at all to show you are right.

And it’s “ad hominem”, not “ad nominee”. You may want to know what you are accusing me of before just throwing something out there randomly. I have not attacked your character. You have indicated you made a threat.You have made claims without evidence. I am happy to wait for that evidence if you have it.

Myself:

While I am happy to comply with your request, realize that you would procure information far faster if you would simply ask, rather than attempting to construct a moral claim against me.

First, electrical fields are also magical emanations, similar, as I’m sure you are aware, to a quark, a gluon or a Higgs boson, which no one has ever seen. Physicists posit them as an explanation that correlates with observations of the behavior of macroscopic experimental components. So I’ll provide you a list of observations that defy “conventional” explanations and have often been attributed to “spiritual” phenomena.

Those interested in reading the New Physics material will eventually find that I believe massive particles are formed when the smallest unit of electric field is tied to the components of the dark energy field. So “spirit” is actually unbound “electric charge.” They’re really the same thing, just under different conditions.

The Princeton Electronic Anomalies Research Study was commissioned by the Air Force when fighter jet flight recorder data showed that electronics were generating signals that should have been impossible in the circuits as designed. The investigators could not explain the data using electrical engineering. For reasons unclear to me (perhaps interviews with the pilots) the study examined the correlation between electrical signals and the emotional state of experimental subjects. They found a positive correlation even when careful steps were taken to ensure electrical isolation.

The study was followed up by IONS, which in collaboration with other institutions runs a set of random number generators. The study looks for correlations in the sequence of numbers generated by the independent sites. They discovered inexplicable synchronization of the generators around the time of major stock market crashes and the 9/11 attacks.

Both studies have been ignored. As a recall, PEARS has been actively suppressed.

Robert Monroe (whose work is carried on by the Robert Monroe Institute) published an exhaustive study of out-of-body experiences. He would tell his subjects when he planned to “visit,” and ask them to record their activities. He duplicated their records, which I recall were sent independently to a third party for verification.

There is also exhaustive documentation of reincarnation and faith healing. I published a review of The Lost Language of Plants by a trained biologist that documents his experiences. Again, these studies are ignored or denigrated by the scientific community.

Studies of mature meditators uncovered a third resonance mode of the brain, adding a gamma mode to the previously known alpha and beta states.

Finally, there is the evidence and testimony of philosophers, mystics and theologians throughout the history of mankind. If you want to go to the outer limits, I suggest F. Scott Peck’s Glimpses of the Devil and Father Amorth’s An Exorcist Tells His Tale. Both of these men faced professional condemnation for publishing their experiences.

But of course to put all this in front of the physics community would be really too much, wouldn’t it? I chose to organize my campaign by focusing on issues that they consider to be appropriate for publication in refereed journals.

Thanks for pointing out the typo. I intended to write “ad hominem.” The spell-checker intervened.

At some point, I will elide all the personal attacks and publish them in a separate post. I don’t have the energy for it now.

Of course parents make threats – although I prefer to call them “clearly defined consequences.” I was angry. Believe me, it wasn’t the first time the behavior had been exhibited, and I had tried other methods previously. Obviously I followed up with my son and repaired the damage. And – BTW – he’s still an atheist, and I love him just as he is. He’s not ready to share the work that I do in the world, and I’m just glad that he’s enjoying his life when mine has been such a struggle.

Club Schadenfreude:

You’ve made quite interesting claims here. According to you, electrical fields are magical. That is not true and your attempt to bring quantum physics into this is nothing more than the usual attempt by a charlatan to validate his nonsense with actual science. Current science has that we do know the Higgs boson exists and we have evidence for it. No one needs to see it with one’s own eyes, one only needs evidence. Unsurprisingly, you have no evidence for your claims at all.

You do make a lot of claims. Evidence that they are even remotely accurate? No. You’ve simply made up nonsense. What are these “components of the dark energy field”? What is the “smallest unit of electric field”, because those terms don’t mean anything? The PEAR claims are considered at best controversial and at worst utter nonsense, claims that cannot be replicated, not even by the people who originally did them. So you are starting with questionable and likely false information to base your claims on.

The Institute of Noetic Science is an organization that has the same problems with being able to show any proof of their claims as PEARS, just like groups like the Discovery Institute, ICR, etc. For all of the claims they make of doing research and promises of evidence real soon now, they never can show this evidence or replicate it. These claims are quite similar to claims of prophecy, where there is never anything seen before some event to actually be of use, but lots of claims of correlation are made after the fact with no ability to show actual causation. They certainly get a lot of mileage out of selection bias. It’s also the usual attempt to try to cloak nonsense in sciency sounding words to make it sound true when it’s nothing more than fantasy, like the idea that thetans are souls of extraterrestrials who came earth and were destroyed by hydrogen bombs and you can sense these being by meters.

Now, I am expecting you to offer the usual excuses, that no one understands the science but you, but if it is actual science, it can be supported with evidence and understood, if your claims aren’t simply made up. The studies have been ignored since they are untrue. There is nothing support the claims about these studies. PEARS was discontinued since its mission was a failure and the only people who accept its claims are those who can’t produce any evidence, just like them. It was not actively suppressed at all, it’s available to anyone who wants their information. That’s the great thing about the internet. So, your claims of conspiracy also fail.
Publishing a list of claims doesn’t make those claims true, and there was no “exhaustive study” of OBE or NDEs or faith healing, reincarnation, etc. They are just repetitions of the claims and no analysis done at all. Unsurprisingly, you only claim a recollection, not actual evidence. Who was this third party, Brian? Unsurprisingly, faith healers always fail when they are actualy required to show evidence. The usual excuse by people like this is that somehow “unbelievers” keep their magical powers from working. How convenient.

Claiming that the “Lost Language of Plants” is somehow true since the author is supposedly a “trained biologist” is an appeal to authority, and in no way confirms that the claims are true at all. If I claimed that crystals have magic properties isn’t true just because I am a trained geologist; I have to provide evidence of my claim. There is no evidence offered, only anecdotal claims. If the results are true, then they should be replicable without concern. They aren’t. The reason that they are ignored and denigrated by the scientific community is the claims are false and they don’t work, just like claims of perpetual motions machines, engines that run on water, etc. What’s sad is that people die because they believe in such nonsense.

Yep, there are lots of testimony from philosophers, mystics, etc but there is no evidence to support their claims at all. Unsuprisingly, again, no evidence of demons or devils, nothing at all but claims of causation and no evidence at all. Peck (and his first initial is M, not F) and Amorth deserve ridicule and professional condemnation for telling such stories. I enjoyed how Peck decided to take it upon himself to redefine what an exorcist “really” is, and inadvertently making this god of his rather worthless letting all of these demons run around, which does a great job of showing how believers invent their own nonsense. Amorth’s stories are no more believable. Again, amazing how slack this god is in leaving demons all over the place, just for priests to show off evidently, since if it is to be believed, Amorth did around 2 or more exorcisms a day. Now, he claims these powers are from his god and references matthew 10. Funny how such imaginary things can be claimed to have been done but something that would actually have evidence to support it, healing people of sickness and injury and even more spectacular, raising the dead, these beleivers just can’t do that at all. How convenient. Not one healed amputee, not one person suddenly free of leperosy. But imaginary demons, why we take care of thousands of them.

Theologians make all sorts of claims and again, no evidence for their claims. No gods, no miracles, no events as described in their holy books, just myths and then excuses why there is no evidence. The magic decoder rings come out and each believer decides what is true and false based on what they want to believe, not what is supported.

No, it wouldn’t be too much at all to put this to actual review and experimentation in front of the physics community. That’s the excuse of someone who doesn’t want his claims actually examined. Rather than finding your own evidence for your claims, you insist that it is other people who have to do that. Unfortuantely for you, the burden of proof for your positive claims is on you, no one else.

It is no surprise at all that you offer an excuse for not actually showing the supposed personal attacks you accuse me of making. You can write many many paragraphs but cutting and pasting is just too hard. It’s evidently also too hard to explain why your magical emanations can’t be detected by other electrochemical instruments if they can be received by the brain.

Parents do make threats. Your case is different than just a threat to behave. You made a threat so your opinion wasn’t challenged. I’m sure that did make you angry that someone dared to point out the problems with your claims. That’s not the reaction of someone who is sure that their opinion is true and can support it. A claim that has nothing to support it must have no challenges offered. I suppose you did follow up with your son and insisted that he believe no one but you. It seems you are little different than many parents, who want their thumbprint on their child’s mind, creating their own external validation.

Still waiting for evidence for your claims, just like I’ve been waiting for evidence for ESP, faith healing, etc. It would be great if such things existed. I used to read Fate Magazine, watch In Search of.., hope for evidence of aliens on earth and hope that gods existed. As of now, there is absolutely no evidence that these claims are true.

Myself:

Please see my recent post titled Comment Policies.

I have made an honest attempt to provide you with public information that matches my experience of life. I have met some of the people that work in these institutions, and they are good, earnest, and care deeply about the future of humanity.

We are clearly at a political impasse, and I believe that continued discussion is not going to serve the purpose of illuminating the content of the original post. My goal here was not, contrary to the thrust of your comments, to prove that I am right. My goal was to voice my befuddlement that researchers facing a huge theoretical deficit in their field should be so deaf to new ideas – much as some claim Christians are deaf to new ideas.

As this entire thread is irrelevant to the OP, I’ll build another post from its contents so that future readers don’t have to wade through it.

As for the personal attacks: “It seems you are little different than many parents, who want their thumbprint on the child’s mind, creating their own external validation.” At this point, my belief is that you are transferring your own experience onto my relationship with my son, WHO IS STILL AN ATHEIST.

Club Schadenfreude:

It is unsurprising that you have decided to create a brand new comment policy to keep people from commenting on your claims. Since your comment policy didn’t exist when I posting comments, your claims that the posts are out of bounds is a lovely example of attempting to retcon a situation. Again, still waiting for you to show where I was making ad hominem attacks. I am sure I do offend your sensibilities; no one likes to be shown their claims fail. However, your sensibilities don’t make your claims true. They still fail. You further make false comments about others and your bible. You call people sociopaths and you claim that anyone who disagrees with you is somehow abused, in order to ignore their positions. The claim that the New Testament “deprecates” the commandments in the bible is most curious since the character JEsus Christ says that all of his father’s commandments should be followed, until earth and heaven pass away, that those who follow them are the first in his father’s kingdom (Matthew 5).

You have yet to give any evidence of your claims. You cannot explain what you mean by your terms. You ignore questions about your claims that point out the failures in your hypothesis. The claims by the organizations and people you mention are just as baseless as your own. They have been shown to be false repeatedly. It doesn’t matter how good or earnest or deeply caring one is if one is spreading false information.

“We” are at no kind of impasse. *You* have refused to support your claims. It’s always quite curious that you claim you aren’t here to prove you are right, but that is the only thing you have claimed, by saying that current science is wrong, that atheists are wrong, etc. It seems that you are trying to say you weren’t claiming you are right in order to excuse yourself from actually presenting evidence. You did not voice your “befuddlement”, you said they are wrong and claimed your position was correct. But when asked to show how you know, it is no surprise that you have now come up with one more excuse so you can run away from supporting your claims again. Show your “new ideas” are supported by fact at all. You made the positive claim, so the burden of proof is on you.

It seems that you are afraid to have people read this thread and are going to do your best to present it falsely. Again, unsurprising. You claim that this thread of comments is “irrelevant to the OP”. This is not true, since the comments address your claims and point out how they fail.

You seem to have no idea what an ad hominem attack is. This is bringing up something unrelated to the discussion at hand to throw doubt on the position of an opponent, for example saying that someone is ugly and that should make one doubt him. When I pointed out that you seem very little different than many parents that want their children to think exactly like them, this is relevant to the discussion that contained you claiming you threatened your son for his daring to contradict you by telling your other son you were wrong. His still being an atheist is not relevant, though it is good to hear. Your actions are relevant as they apply to your claims and your reactions to those who question them.

I shall ask you my questions again: What are these “components of the dark energy field”? What is the “smallest unit of electric field”, because those terms don’t mean anything? If the brain is only a receiver, then why can’t we detect these mysterious emanations you claim exists, with electrical or chemical devices since that’s all the brain is, no magic needed? Where is the evidence that supports your claim “those investigations force them to confront his existence.”?

Myself:

You demand proof in terms that you accept. Why should souls comply?

Let me provide you an analogy: let’s say that you were friends with a neurosurgeon and you both had brain cancer. The friend comes to you and says that he’s going to dismantle your brain so that he could cure himself. Would you participate?

Souls take billions of years to construct. Scientists are reductionist – they take things apart. Why would souls submit to validating their bag of tricks?

Our brains evolved to couple to souls over billions of years. They are the tool that is provided. We should use them appropriately.

And you posit your conclusion in your question: “Since that’s how the brain works.” If you study neurophysiology, you’ll discover that there are many manifestations of behavior that cannot be explained using the “electrical signaling” theory of the brain. Nobody actually knows how the mind works.

As for detecting these emanations: people have been known to turn the lights of in a room so that they can see my halo.

Club Schadenfreude:

Still waiting for evidence for your claims. Again, you claim others are wrong and you are right. What supports this? And no, Brian, you haven’t just used spirituality, you’ve claimed that the brain is a receiver. If this is true, then the soul should be detectable by electrical or chemical means since that’s how the brain works. Can you show this?

Myself:

You claim to have read the material under the “New Physics” tab. You obviously have not. A comment thread is no place to deal with material as complex as I am presenting.

My comment policy is not new. I have exercised it in the past. I am publishing it so that I can provide reference to it in the future.

Your comments are not relevant to the OP. Your comments may be relevant to the material on the “New Physics” page. But as I explain “On Whether I’m Right”, you are demanding proof for something that I don’t claim. The ideas that I’m presenting are in their infancy. All that I seek to prove here, as explained in “On Whether I’m Right” is that there are huge gaps in our understanding of theoretical physics that allow for the existence of the soul. I’m just surprised the someone isn’t interested in the topic.

Comment Policies

Posted on December 20, 2015 by Brian Balke | 1 Comment

When I published my books, I established Facebook pages for them and cultivated a presence in a group that advertised tolerance. I’m pretty open about my spirituality, and had several deep and rewarding interactions with members seeking fellowship as they navigated life’s many crises. I also express a great deal of confidence in my interpretation of scripture, defining clear and consistent boundaries between Hebrew and Christian teaching.

I obviously became a thorn in the side of the moderator. The moderator frequently directed people to a sister web site containing an exhaustive collection of religious dogma and creed. The material was frequently drawn upon by atheists in the group to deconstruct arguments for faith. As I methodically asserted the message of love offered by Christ, they became more and more antagonistic. Ultimately, the moderator revealed herself as a troll. Facebook is a conversational experience, and as a working professional, I often came late to discussions, and had trouble maintaining the focus of the threads I established. She took advantage of that, posting warped “explanations” of my positions, and then referencing them elsewhere to create the impression that I was trolling the group. When it became clear what was going on, I responded to the last of her posts with notice that I was leaving the group, and told her not to expect that I would lose any sleep over it.

Since establishing myself here in Word Press, I have noticed a lot of similar back-and-forth in the comment threads. I don’t tolerate it here on Ever Deepening. This is a place for ideas. I am happy to discuss them with anyone. I do take on sacred cows, and occasionally lampoon boorishness in our public figures. But I don’t allow anyone to tell me who I am, and do the best that I can to avoid labeling the individuals that visit here.

I do allow leeway. While the situation on Facebook was clearly sociopathic, I recognize that the issues I discuss are often sources of deep sorrow. In “The Sociopath Next Door,” Martha Stout identifies five sources of trauma, and one of them is spiritual abuse. Stout characterizes this as arising when an authority figure places themselves between their victim and an authentic personal experience of God. When I was a member of the local Unitarian Universalist Church – a community dominated by pagans and humanists – I encountered many people recovering from Christian spiritual abuse. This is often sourced in the threats of the Pentateuch which New Testament scripture deprecates. I recognize the problem, and often hear pain behind the angry statements made by those the disagree with me.

Recognizing these realities, I tend to be pretty tolerant of suggestions that a specific idea is wrong or that I am misrepresenting the ideas of others. But broad generalizations were the technique applied by the troll that managed the group on Facebook. Attempting to maintain the focus of the threads I was managing, I would respond to specific claims, and then discover that the broad generalizations were reasserted as characterizations of me as a thinker.

I have seen two strategies in response to this kind of dialog. One is to ask the poster to reference specific statements to back up their claim. This degenerates into a he-said-she-said pissing match that detracts focus from the subject of the original post. Another is to edit or delete posts that offend the sensibilities of the blogger. This is not consistent with my purpose here – I want to have dialog built upon disagreement. The ideas I offer are often abstract, and require elaboration through discussion to support concrete realization.

So what I do here on Word Press follows two steps: I’ll take the dialog to one side, and identify the specific statements that violate my sensibilities, and ask the poster to restructure their points as affirmations of their personal experience and perspective. If they continue with personal denigration, I delete the offending material and add their names to my comment filter so that I can review anything they post.

Balancing Yoga Bliss

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Brian Balke | 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 November 10, 2015 by Brian Balke | 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.

Decrescendo

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Brian Balke | 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.