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Love Doesn’t Do Anything

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It undoes things.

It washes away dirt and fear to reveal the world as it hopes to be.

When I was working as a Post-Doc, my friend Laurent Terray discovered Yoshi’s bar down in Oakland. Yoshi’s was an intimate club that drew jazz headliners such as Dizzy Gillespie.

Laurent dragged me down one night to hear a trio play – guitar, keyboard and percussion. I found myself drawn to the back wall where I could see all three pairs of hands at once. The music entered a timeless realm, the air resonated with beauty.

During intermission, I was chatting with Laurent when the guitarist came up and laid his instrument on the chair in front of me. I didn’t know what to make of it. Finally a young man came up and, looking a little scandalized, took the guitar and walked off with it.

I just didn’t understand, then, how much people crave to be looked upon with kindness. It heightens every experience.

Be good to each other. It allows light into the world.

Staying Cool with R

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Before returning to the control industry in 2008, I was employed in business systems development. My employer was hot to get in on the off-shore gambling business, but was kind enough to ask me what I was interested in. I offered my concern that people were overwhelmed with the demands imposed by 24/7 communications, to the point that their ability to actually immerse themselves in the experience of the moment was degrading. I thought that a system that guided them through reflection and looked for correlations between mood and experience might be the basis for helping them find people and places that would allow them to express their talents and find joy.

His reaction was to try to stake me at the gambling tables in Reno.

But he did recognize that I was motivated by a deep caring for people. That’s lead me into other directions in the interim. I’ve been trying to moderate the harsh tone in the dialog between scientists and mystics. I’ve accomplished about as much as I can – the resolution I have to offer is laid out in several places. I just need to let the target audience find the message.

So I’ve turned back to that vision. A lot has changed in the interim, most importantly being the unification of the Windows platform. This means that I can try to demonstrate the ideas in a single technology space. There’s only so many minutes in the day, after all.

I began with a review of statistical analysis. I’ve got a pair of books, bought back when I was a member of the Science Book of the Month club, on analysis of messy data. That provided me with the mathematical background to make sense of Robert Kabacoff’s R in Action. However it’s one thing to do analysis on the toy data sets that come with the R libraries. Real data always has its own character, and requires a great deal of curation. It would be nice to have some to play with.

One approach would be to begin digging into Bayesian language net theory and researching psychological assessment engines in preparation for building a prototype that I could use on my own. But I already have a pretty evolved sense of myself – I don’t think that I’d really push the engine. And I would really like to play with the Universal applications framework that Microsoft has developed. On top of that, the availability of an IoT (internet of things) build of Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi means that I can build a sensor network without having to learn another development environment.

So that plan is to deploy temperature and humidity sensors in my apartment. It’s a three-floor layout with a loft on the top floor. The middle floor contains a combination living/dining area and the kitchen. Both the loft and the kitchen have large sliders facing west, which means that they bake in the afternoon. On the bottom floor, the landing opens on one side to the garage and one the other side to my bedroom. The bedroom faces east behind two large canopies, although the willow tree allows a fair amount of light through. There’s a single thermostat on the middle floor. So it’s an interesting environment, with complicated characteristics.

While thermal balance also involves the state of windows, doors and appliances, I think that I can get a pretty good sense of those other elements by monitoring the air that flows around them. Being a hot yoga masochist, I’m also curious regarding the effect of humidity.

So I’ve got a Raspberry Pi on the way, and have installed Microsoft’s Visual Studio Community on my Surface Pro. Combination temperature and humidity sensors cost about ten dollars. While real-time data would be nice, I don’t think that for the purposes of my study I’ll need to link to the Wi-Fi to push the data out to a cloud server. I can use my laptop to upload it when I get home each day. And there’s some work to do in R: the time series analysis includes seasonal variations on annual trends, and I certainly expect my measurements to show that, but there will also be important diurnal variations. Finally, the activation of temperature control appliances (air conditioner and furnace) needs to be correlated with the data. I don’t want to invest in a Nest thermostat, or figure out how to get access to the data, so I’m going to see if I can use Cortana to post notes to my calendar (“Cortana – I just set the air conditioning to 74 degrees”).

Obviously there’s a lot to learn here. But no single piece is overwhelming until I get to the data analysis. Just cobbling together of small pieces. Should be fun! And if I can figure out how to manage my windows and doors and appliances to reduce my energy expenditures – well, that would be an interesting accomplishment.

Evening Out

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I’ve found two low-key venues to hear live music in the Conejo Valley area this year. One is actually over the hill (now don’t take that the wrong way) in Malibu – Ollie’s Duck and Dive. The setting is a little cramped: they lock the front door and stand the band up in the entry. The place is aptly name – long and narrow, with the front dominated by the bar, and most of the dinner seating actually in the enclosed patio outside. But on Saturday night the four-piece bands bring people in, and there’s a collection of steady regulars. The music is eclectic, and often loud, and dance-worthy even though they don’t play much in the way of cover music.

And – what can I say? – it’s Malibu. The people are classy, and beautiful in a self-conscious kind of way. If you sit at the bar, be sure and strike up a conversation with the tenders. They’re all good people.

The other venue is The Twisted Oak in Agoura Hills. The place has a checkered history, starting off as Moz Buddha Bar back around 2000. It was a hot pick-up joint for a while, with beautiful waitresses that would dance on the bar during the seasonal parties. The cover bands that came in drew great crowds, and the dance floor was always hopping. Unfortunately, the lead guy behind the bar seemed to have connections back in New Jersey, and the girls sometimes had morals that were a little shaky. When the joint stopped being trendy in 2005, they started Tuesday night jazz with small combos. While I wouldn’t miss it, the cultured music scene never took off.

The place was revived as a micro brewery and music club with a new investor. Roger is a great guy, and loves his brewing – everything from beer to smooth moonshine to wine. He also loves music, but it’s the dinner scene that pays the bills, and the bands on the large stage seemed to interfere with gatherings. So they knocked down the stage, opened up the bar with seating on both sides, and do something pretty much like what Ollie’s does: stand a couple of guys up in front of the brew vats. The music is eclectic, original, and really, really heart-felt. I can party at Ollie’s, but some of what goes on at The Twisted Oak can only be classified as a spiritual experience. If you want to take someone out for a light-hearted date, this is the spot on Friday nights.

Tonight they had a steel guitar and fiddle duo called Skin and Bones. While they packed up, I bought a CD out of the case, and Taylor came up to chat. Just a really classy young man with his lady-friend Stephanie. He let me rattle on about my sons, and took my compliments graciously before recommending that I come back out on September 11th to hear a couple of his friends play. I certainly look forward to it.

Body Call

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A few years back after the local UU speaker’s forum, I was waylaid by an out-of-area couple in the cool of the spring evening. The husband explained that they were trying to relocate back to the Thousand Oaks area, but his wife jumped in to speak of her commitment to caring for the son that had been disabled in the Gulf War. She mourned that sometimes it was so hard to be strong in her faith, that it felt at times as if the window was closing on her.

These impulses come over me at times: I formed a ball before my heart with my hands, then shifted them to the right and opened them higher and lower. “Here it is.”

She paused, hand held against her breast, and offered “Thank-you.” And they looked at each other and asked, “When does Jesus return?”

“When enough of us say ‘Yes, we understand now. We are ready to love as you did. Come to us, right here, right now.’”

These are the closing lines of my exegetical book, The Soul Comes First. The most significant contribution of that work is to explain the Book of Revelation (not interpret, but explain). What is left unanswered still is the why. Why does he have to come again? Why wasn’t once enough?

One part of the answer is that we have free will. I have addressed this before: the true evil of “sin” is that it disposes us to believe that we deserve our suffering. We’re like the judges of the Darwin awards that celebrate those that have committed such incredibly stupid acts that they’ve provided the rest of us the benefit of removing themselves from the gene pool.

To recognize our “sin” is to convince ourselves that we must earn our healing. In Jesus’s era, that was transacted through the priesthood using a system of indulgences based upon blood sacrifice. Jesus came and said “Well, enough of that bullshit. I will be the last sacrifice, and for my sacrifice you will be given forgiveness for your sins.” Now, looking back to Cain and considering the eternal nature of the Divine, obviously Jesus was not changing policy. He was simply trying to get us to stop beating ourselves up so that we could be healed.

In a recent discussion, I asserted that the authority of Jesus over heaven and earth is rooted in the irresistible admiration that comes with his perception of the possibility of our wholeness. This is what gives him the ability to heal the world: the fact that it comes not with scorn, but a joyous “Good job!”, much as that offered by the father to the prodigal son. “You were lost to me, but – Lo! – you have shed your burdens and now are returned!”

So in this framework, Jesus comes again to deliver us the promise of healing that can only be received when we stop believing that we don’t deserve it.

But there’s more.

In the end-times prophesy of Daniel and Revelation, we have the appearance of three corrupted beasts. The first of these in Revelation famously bears the number ‘666.’ This was first explained to me as a numerological reference to the days of Creation, with the conclusion that the beast was man. But that is to make too much of ourselves: it was not only man created on the sixth day, but all of the mammals.

Carrying this back to Daniel, it becomes clear that the beast (the fourth to appear in the dream) is the collective spirit of the mammals. In Eden, human intelligence was protected by the presence of God, but the Fall forced us out into the world to struggle with all the primitive urges that preceded us. Daniel sees this only abstractly: the beast bears teeth and claws of iron that destroy life. These represent the machines that we use to reorder the earth. We use them as predators, not attempting to integrate ourselves with other life, but exploiting it for our gratification.

In Revelation the personality of the beast is resolved in more detail. There are two of them, the second a red beast ridden by the feminine avatar called “MYSTERY.” So what does this tell us about the second coming? The masculine expressions of the primitive urges, represented by the first beast of Revelation, are the hunt and sacrifice. Jesus confronted and mastered them on the cross. The feminine expressions of the primitive urges are intercourse (the mingling of personalities through sex) and maternity. What about this aspect of human nature? When does that submit to Christ?

I feel this confrontation in my own life like a wall around my soul. It comes to the fore when I walk into a store and the counter girl pushes her breasts up at me, or when a pastor looks at me, interrupting my meditation on the cross to suggest that I am sexually harassing the members of his congregation. It has been the focus of so much conflict in my life, from the Sterling Men’s group that tried to force me to stay in my marriage, into the family law system, and in the workplace where brilliant women at home find that I disrupt their influence over the men at work. It is a wall rebuilt every night when I wake up at the witching hour with sex crawling all over my body.

How to resolve this problem, the problem of “MYSTERY,” the influence that reaches into our souls from a distance and leaves us wondering “Why did I do that?” Is the image of Christ in confrontation with this influence that of the rock star with a bevy of beauties moaning in the audience? Or is it the image of the celibate, relinquishing all experience of sexuality?

My two fiction books, Ma and Golem, are meditations on this problem. Ma begins with two dysfunctional erotic encounters – one a casual hook-up and the other a long-term political bonding – and evolves as a slow-moving train wreck with the men struggling against the consequences of their failure to honor their women. Golem elaborates with a truly amazing sexual explosion between Corin and Leelay, both introduced in Ma, that arises as an expression of their service to the survival of Life. And it confronts us with an encounter between the Goddess Zenica (Corin’s mother) as she uses sex to break the will of an old adversary to accomplish the end of her re-incarnation. In relating the events to Corin, she simply offers “I did what I had to do.”

Is that where it ends: sex as a tool?

Revelation does offer us an image [NIV Rev 22:1-2]:

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

To me, this imagery is incredibly sexual. And I think that is as it should be: there is no part of our nature that cannot be sacralized, that was not given to us for the purpose of healing ourselves and this reality of corruption by selfishness.

I believe that intercourse must be brought into the service of Christ. So this means that it should be a means of bringing Christ into our lives, of pouring the love that we receive from him out over each other. My interpretation of my experience in church is that the opposite has happened: we take sex as the center of our intimate relations, and when Christ enters into that he is perceived as a threat. Or for sexually active single women, the presence of Christ in a man is interpreted as an opportunity to have really great intercourse – that is, to receive a love that would be given to them directly by the source if only they would ask for it.

As long as this persists, we are going to continue to struggle. My question is whether this is really the business of Christ. Eve was sent to Adam as his help-mate. Jesus confronted the masculine pathologies on the cross. Is it really possible for him to do the same work on the feminine side? My sense is that the end game would be far less painful if women stood up to take ownership of their problems.

Being Boxed In

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The management guru fad of the ‘80s wound itself up just at the turn of the millennium. This may have been due, in part, to the rise of information technology that shifted analytical emphasis away from the personality of the leader toward those directly involved in creating value. That was evident in the last book I read on leadership, which warned managers that knowledge workers would simply walk away from organizations that did not adopt collaborative management strategies.

I find myself in such a situation at this point. When I started my current job, I sat through meetings that devolved into pitched shouting matches. Such altercations were a daily event between some of my peers. When I intervened with the HR staff to bring this to an end, I exposed patterns that dated back to the formation of the company by people that used competition to maintain control of knowledge workers. Circulating to upper management an essay on triangulation and its consequences did not make me a popular person. When I put a copy of “Breaking The Fear Barrier” on my desk, they just stopped coming into my office.

They kept me on because I sat in my office and did what I do best: create a garden in an overgrown software jungle. The application that I manage, which has always been a critical part of the user’s experience of our products, has gone from being something hidden until the sale is complete to an essential part of the sales process. At the same time I have created component libraries and leveraged them to build new applications, algorithms and regression test suites. Having gone eight years without a pay raise, however, it’s time for me to move on to a place that understands and appreciates the principles that I use to understand the needs of my customers and create success for them.

So I’ve been working on my resume and trying to visualize the kind of place that I would find success in. I have a certain sympathy for Microsoft, and went out to the Research site on Saturday to see whether I could put up a resume. The site indicates that researchers are expected to be recognized experts in their field with a substantial body of publications. Well, shoot, most of my career has been spent in top secret facilities or in small companies that use trade secrets to protect their intellectual property. Microsoft Research does have a category for applications developers, but that link led me through to the main Microsoft site.

And so I find myself where I was eight years ago: a really smart guy who was told by an honest recruiter that “if I knew someone starting an R&D program, you’re the guy I would recommend, but you just don’t market well as either a manager or a software developer.” Where most developers focus on coding efficiency and the arcane syntax, most of my effort is invested in understanding the application domain so that I write the right code. Whether it’s produced in JavaScript or C++ or C# is pretty irrelevant – once I’ve established the design, I evaluate and select an implementation platform, read a book, start writing code, and use the web to find answers to arcane syntax questions when they come up.

Most hiring managers don’t have a clue how to evaluate a person like me. They want a known quantity – a specific skill set that will allow someone to come in and deliver value on day one. They’re not willing to take a risk on learning, and don’t know how to evaluate that capability by probing past experience to determine whether a resume represents individual contribution, or simply takes credit for work done by others.

So I’m resolved to find my own opportunities this time – searching the web for job openings and pushing my resume through directly. I’m making culture an explicit issue by declaring that my loyalties lie first and foremost with the customer.

To those of you who have been following this blog, this probably resonates. I’m hard to pin down because I don’t specialize narrowly. Rather, I examine relationships (personal, institutional and intellectual), and advocate for deepening them where others pick a side. But, damn it, I don’t want to be in a conveniently packaged box that can be moved easily around (itinerancy being the biggest problem faced by software companies). I want a home, and I’m willing to meet people where they are.

LA Day of Dance Celebration

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As a special birthday bonus, yesterday I attended the Day of Dance celebration down in at the Civic Arts Center in LA.

I came planning to participate in the workshops, and managed to make it through the “warm-up” routine, but it was hot, hot, hot. The performers were up on a covered stage, and they were complaining. The crowd had only an artsy fabric shade cover, and only about a third were able to take advantage of its shelter.

So I quickly found myself standing in the shadows at the front of the Music Center. As for the rest – they were not about to be deterred. LA apparently has a growing dance movement. Many of the attendees were young people and their parents. The early workshops focused on dance routines that had been posted on the internet, and the personal flair in each interpretation was a joy to watch.

I was expecting to have fun and be inspired, but dance is an ancient practice. As the event rolled into the second routine, the fitful breeze wasn’t keeping me cool, even in the shadows. My thoughts wandered up into the heat. Answering back came a surprised gratitude, and then a deep sorrow. People have always danced this way, in celebration of the light. It didn’t want to oppress them. The sorrow spread, and began to encompass the flora and fauna. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be.

The early morning activities were meant to be accessible. There wasn’t anything done by the performers that I didn’t think that I could do myself, and the attendees were involved in an enthusiastic celebration. I finally broke away at 12:30 for lunch, and when I came back, the tone became a little more serious. The Australian Special Olympics dance team performed, and the music and movement conveyed clearly the struggle and pride they have in achieving independence. But the capstone of the event, for me, was the performance by the Jacob Jones Company. The accompaniment was a meditation of the nature of time. I found myself anchored in this nexus of energy, the celebration of the dance tying the past together with the future. When the dancers left the stage, I had the feeling that the audience had been reduced to humble awe by the power of their evocation.

The Civic Arts Center is conducting a series of Friday dance celebrations this summer. I plan on attending as I am able. For those of you in LA: Hope to encounter you there!

Trump Ratings Soar on Rewrite of Iran Deal

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In a majestic coup that recasts real estate deal-making finesse as international diplomacy, the Donald announced today that his mediation of negotiations between the “First Birther” and “Ayatollah Satani” had brought a “permanent solution” to the political ills of both nations. “Never send a bicyclist up against a camel trader. I’ve tossed that Kerry-on baggage.”

The deal pivots around the repurposing of Iran’s nuclear weapons complex (encompassing all of its nuclear enrichment centrifuges and several ICBMs concealed as Teherani mosque minarets) for creation of a Muslim-themed Kenyan resort complex, “ObamaIslama.” Both Obama and Khamenei have announced their intentions to retire from public life to take on wildlife conservation roles at the facility.

“I hear there are plenty of monkeys in Kenya,” Trump offered, speaking of Mr. Obama. And as regards Khamenei, Trump admitted that “He’s got a somewhat different idea of ‘wild life.’ Anyone know where I can find a steady supply of virgins? Wait – scratch that thought. I’ll talk to the producers of ‘The Apprentice.'”

Trump’s thunderous oration pre-empts the surprise announcement planned for the POTUS visit to Kenya. The White House admitted that an elite Seal squad had been sent to take down the media center at Trump Towers, hoping against hope that Trump would be chastened into honoring executive privilege. Speaking for the President, Josh Earnest credited the sartorial celerity of Trump’s hair stylist. “They just got the announcement off way earlier than we thought they would.”

Republican lawmakers on Capital Hill could not be reached by cell phone.

New Book Out

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For those of you that weren’t aware, I have three books in publication. They’re listed on the blog roll on my sidebar. Trafford just finished the web-site for Golem, which I really enjoyed writing. Its predecessors, Ma and The Soul Comes First are relatively short and extremely dense, reflecting the fact that they each poured out of my fingers in three weeks of evening and weekend writing. Golem was actually written in a normal way (e.g. – character sketches and plotting) over a six-month period, and I had more control over the characters and themes. If you’re at all interested in science fiction and spirituality, please check it out! All three books are available from Amazon and Trafford, in both e-book and printed formats.

BTW: while not the central theme, both Ma and Golem openly celebrate sexuality.

Purging Psychopathy

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When I was on travel in Portland a little over a year ago, I encountered a woman in recovery from an abusive relationship. As she described it, the most terrifying part of the experience was being abandoned by her family and friends.

While the most visible of our psychopaths seek temporal power, I think that this evidence confuses our response to them as personalities. The mechanisms of temporal power are useful only in that they can be used to induce fear in the victim. The victim, believing that there is no escape from their prison, ultimately surrenders their soul to be infected by the psychopath.

I have myself felt abandoned on more than one occasion. The ties of love, unfortunately, are a two-way street. Through them comes solace, but if we aren’t strong enough to keep the predator out, venom can flow back the other way. Often, it is those who have been most secure in their relationship that provide the most productive target to the predator. They lack defensive skills, and their personality is deeply embedded in a rich field of supportive relationships. The lady in Portland was ostracized by those seeking to protect themselves. In more primitive societies, the victim of rape might be “put out of her misery.” (The movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” explored this in a more contemporary context.)

Fear is an incredibly effective tool for acquisition of temporal power. Apart from certain privileged elites, almost every human society has been dominated by this dynamic. Even where established, the fragility of that privilege is evidenced by the tens of millions of people displaced by insurrections around the world. Guerrilla armies that do not seek to establish and defend fixed boundaries are almost impossible to control (witness IS, al Qaeda and the Boko Haram).

So how is the religious avatar to deal with this situation? The approach advocated by most is to “Render unto Caesar.” They surrender temporal power and gather to themselves the “weary and burdened,” those beneath the notice of fattened predators. But as that cohort grows, sooner or later the predators are enticed to feast on the spirits of the protected community. The avatar is then confronted with the reality that his charges are not strong enough to keep the predators out.

The challenge is faced by any individual seeking to sustain a blessed community, even if that be only a family or kindergarten classroom. This has been my challenge over the last twenty years. For a long time, I fought against the predators that surround me. They feel the power of my mind and the strength of the loving associations that I evolve through my writing, dancing and meditation. They create conflict in my life and then plead innocence as I fight back against their influence.

For the last seven years, I have woken up every night in the wee hours of the morning to take up consideration of this dialectic – the dialectic of “blame the victim” that becomes so convincing as the history of a relationship with a psychopath evolves. The psychopath focuses on the wrongs that have been done to them in the recent past, attempting to bury the seeds of the evolution of conflict behind a psychic wall. They use that wall to fence out the beloved community, to suck away the energy that we have accumulated through loving.

So two nights ago I took up a different tack: I simply announced, “I’m really tired of thinking about you.” I listened to praise music as a means of re-affirming the principles that guide my loving relationships, and I pushed methodically against the massed predatory presence. I forced them to the outside of my mind, and re-established the connections to my beloved community. When the poison began to seep back in, I visualized the arrival of guardians to turn the tables on them.

And last night, for the first time in seven years, I slept peacefully.