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Dissolving

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I began blogging back in 2003 at Zadz/Gaia/A New Gaia. That early writing I characterized as my “spiritual travelogue.”

We all carry history forward from our past lives. I have brought a deep reticence regarding the influence that I have over people. My father asked me one day “Brian, do you understand how you keep on finishing people’s sentences for them?” When I said that I did, he asked whether that wasn’t a talent that I could use to accomplish a lot in the world. I replied, “Well, but that wouldn’t be fair.”

And I was focused on other things. I didn’t understand why until I was about forty two, but I spent most of my life pursuing knowledge of the world. While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis, I was reading the Christian Science Monitor and Science cover-to-cover every week, as well as the monthlies Scientific American and Foreign Affairs. I told my father that I was trying to reduce the world to an integral to be solved. There was a certain anxiety about it, and when I came into my spirituality, I realized that I had been running as hard as I could to find a way around, under or over a wall of pain that was crashing down on us.

As the millennium turned, I became frustrated with my failure, and began to express derision and anger about the people that possessed the power to make a difference. That led to some paranoia about my relationships at Gaia. I said some things that weren’t helpful, and spent a lot of time trying to understand my spiritual landscape. We move through time together – powerful events bind us into spiritual clusters. Sometimes to take the next step forward we have to reorganize ourselves. I have done a lot of that over the last fifteen years. I suppose that to the people around me I appeared narcissistic.

The wisdom that I brought out of that period was this: People that hurt others are often walking around the world doing unto others as was done to them, hoping desperately that they will find someone strong enough to show them how to heal. And so I try now to focus on offering the best wisdom I have regarding the power of love that I have been given to experience.

Over the last seven years or so, I have been struggling against fear of love. It’s sad to me, but people do the most terrible things to themselves in the name of material success. They try their best to ignore it, surrounding themselves with shallow diversions. Then along comes love, and they see all these great big, gaping wounds in themselves. It’s kind of like a soldier in shock looking down and realizing that he’s missing both legs. They become frightened, and often simply try to make the love go away.

So I’ve been struggling with that fear and anger, and it’s been brutal. Again, I’ve said a lot of things over the last seven years that haven’t been helpful. I’ve been really fortunate to have had my Shia colleague at work. He’s finally given me some affirmation.

I feel that period of my life coming to a close now. We take anger and fear into us and it can erupt unexpectedly when we’re tired or frustrated. I’ve just kept on pushing it away, and it’s been slowly dissipating from my relationships. I realize that a lot of the people around me have been simply the tip of the spear. Many of the behavior patterns they manifest are ancient. I’ve just made it steadily clear that the love that they want won’t collaborate in those behaviors, and tried to describe the alternatives as I see them.

That’s been the thrust of my writing here. There are so many wonderful, caring people in the blogosphere. They are passionate, and sometimes that flares up in expressions of anger and frustration. I do my best to express the alternatives, and to share my confidence that there is an enormous reservoir of good will waiting for Humanity to grow up and learn to play nice.

This has been coming to a focus for me. I went out to a new social venue on Thursday night, and had to rise above some unwanted attentions in the early morning. When it was over, I felt this beautiful glow in my heart, and the world appeared next to it. I wasn’t entirely awake, which always leaves me open to suggestion. For whatever reason, I began making circles around the world with my heart: around the equator, and two circumpolar passes that divided the globe into eighths. It was just the most beautiful thing – my heart was filled with warmth and peace.

But now I don’t know how to describe what I am about or why. It’s a raw energy that courses through me. I can explain why I do what I do, but that explanation means nothing without the axiom of that relation. I don’t know how to describe it, and I can’t prove that it exists. When I feel it moving through me to someone else, the common reaction is one of disbelief.

So I feel like I’m dissolving, adrift in this deep ocean in which food and cars and buildings simply sink out of sight. There is nothing left but the raw flame of the friends that have chosen to draw close to my heart.

Thank-you all for your company!

Women: Being Loved by Christ

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When Jesus first taught in the synagogue in Jerusalem, his neighbors received him with skepticism verging on outrage [NIV Mark 6:2-6]:

“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

This contrasts with the events just prior with a woman who had bled for twelves years, and was healed simply by touching Jesus’s clothes. Shocked by the experience, the woman hid in the crowd, but Jesus persisted [NIV Mark 5:33-34]:

Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

How does this work, spiritually? The aura that forms around the head of a saint is generated by souls pressing against their minds in the hope of discovering meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are discovered most readily in the saint because they have surrendered themselves to love of the world, and the world in turn reveals itself to saint’s examination. It is as said by Tagore:

Power said to the World, “You are mine.”
The World kept it prisoner on her throne.
Love said to the World, “I am yours.”
The World gave it the freedom of her house.

The saint looks into the world and sees its spiritual needs. Among the souls that surround the saint are such that can fulfill those needs. The saint has the privilege of facilitating the union of the two parties. But where the party in the world (the soul currently “living”) seeks instead power, the union fails. The souls choose to remain to the company of the saint. That saint, honoring the compact of their company, accepts them back.

Spiritual union can be ravishing, having many of the aspects of intercourse. For this reason, Catholic nuns once referred to themselves as “brides of Christ.” But the union can be a tenuous thing. If Jesus had not been present to voice his approval, would the hemophiliac woman have maintained her cure?

When I encounter woman struggling with this dynamic, I offer the encouragement, “Believe in yourself!” There are angels in the air wishing to enter into you to heal the world. Yes, it feels wonderfully sensual, but you don’t need sex to receive them. You don’t need the approval of a father. Spirits becoming angels yearn only for the spiritual union we know as “Christ” that found its steward when Jesus took up the cross. To receive them, you need only their approval, an approval gained most powerfully through a commitment to love and heal the world.

My Background in Particle Physics

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I earned my B.A. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1982. That spring, I was asked by the undergraduate adviser where I had been accepted for graduate studies. I told him that Princeton had rejected me, and that Harvard expected me to find $10,000 a year. Face paling, he excused himself to go talk to the department head. When he came back, he said, “Here’s an application for graduate school at Berkeley. Fill this out. I’ll walk it down to the admissions office. If you don’t get accepted, don’t worry: you won’t have to pay the application fee.”

So I did my graduate work at UC Berkeley as well, receiving a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1987. There were two significant things about this era. First, it was when the fundamental ideas of particle physics and cosmology (the study of the early universe) were assembled.

Particle physics had been pursuing the use of group theory as a framework for unifying our understanding of the four forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravitational). The theory had some really ugly problems. It did not account for particle masses, it produced infinities in its calculations that had to be “renormalized” away, and it had no satisfying explanation for the mathematical structure of the four forces. With the exception of the first, these problems were resolved by bringing gravity into the framework (through a Grand Unified Theory that was finally refined as superstring theory).

With regards to cosmology, the Big Bang had become dogma back in the 30s when Hubble discovered the red shift. The only available explanation for the result was the relativistic Doppler shift. The problem was that the universe was far too smooth to have been created in an explosion involving normal matter. The contribution of Alan Guth was a model of the early universe with ten spatial dimensions heated to the Planck scale, followed by an “inflation” driven by a Higgs-like particle with extremely large mass. Normal three-space and matter would only appear after the universe had cooled enormously, and light would slow down tremendously in the process. However, it turned out that there were tens of millions of possible configurations of the laws of physics in that cooling. Again, there was no way of explaining the mathematical structure of the four forces. This was addressed by assuming that our universe was only one of an infinite number of universes spawned from the original super-heated Plank plasma.

The second significant aspect of this era was the rise of Big Science in these fields. I was lucky to work on a team of eight, and turned my Ph.D. around in five years. Most of my peers worked on far larger projects, anywhere from one hundred to (at the end) a thousand researchers. The projects involved hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Because the work had absolutely no practical utility, the arguments for funding became more and more abstract (often invoking science as a fundamental moral imperative), and then became simply political. To illustrate: the organizational success of the particle physics community, in alliance with the Department of Energy, was scandalous to the material science community, whose funding was drained to support the construction of large and larger particle colliders. The rebuttal came in the form of a proposed designer for a linear collider to study particle zoology at the Plank scale (10^40 electron volts, as opposed the the 10^15 electron volts at CERN). The sarcastic concept drawing showed a linear collider superimposed on the galaxy.

I was offered a job at BellCore (the telephone systems research lab) after graduating, but decided to give Particle Physics one more chance by joining a neutrino mass project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The woman that taught me particle theory, Mary Gaillard, was despondent. I had the feeling that she felt that I was joining the evil empire. Indeed, the nuclear weapons facilities were a vortex that absorbed a lot of talented particle physicists (I guess that DoD was worried that we’d go off and invent something even more destructive than the hydrogen bomb). So the ten years that I spent there were amidst a vital community of theorists, and I was able to keep abreast of developments in particle physics and cosmology.

I chose my position at LLNL because I knew that if particle physics didn’t appeal to me, I would be able to change careers. I did so after three years, entering Environmental Science. Unfortunately, I became married in 1994 to a trauma victim of the Soviet secret police. That trauma made it impossible for my peers to sustain their relationships with me. I was encouraged to leave the Laboratory for industry.

When I made a decision to restructure my personal life in 2000, I went through a period of enormous volatility in my career. My peers at LLNL (some of who had intervened in my personal life with disastrous effect) decided to throw me a lifeline, and I was back there in 2004 and 2005. The latter was the centenary of Einstein’s “anno mirabilus”, when he published his papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity. The speaking schedule that year was dominated by cosmologists and particle theorists. I was able, in that venue, to come up to date on current developments in the field. What I came away with was confirmation that nothing had changed, and that theorists were simply adding parameters in order to match data that they couldn’t explain, often with unsatisfactory results. It was so dire that the NSF head of fundamental physics declared that the field needed “revolutionary” ideas.

I had begun to assemble the thoughts presented here in 2000 (see the “New Physics” tab), and offered them to some of my peers. It was then that I ran into political restrictions. I was told “wait ten years,” which was the foreseeable duration of the CERN research program. Well, that ten years is up.

I did receive some recognition while I was there. During a budget cutting exercise, funding of the National Ignition Facility was threatened. I ate lunch frequently at the NIF cafeteria, and one day found myself looking at the promotional poster on the wall, wondering how to make the program work. As I sat there, I had the sense of having a conversation with researchers from a number of disciplines. When I published that analysis (several months later), the budget discussions were resolved with an increase to support new research directions, and I was invited by the Associate Director’s office for a program participant’s tour of the facility. It was the only concrete evidence I received of the political contributions I had made to the laboratory in the eighteen months that I was able to remain there.

Why I Can’t Sleep at Night

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The power of the creative mind is directly related to the degree to which it inhabits the truth.

All day long, I’m conscious of policing truth’s borders. When at night I fall asleep from exhaustion, the lies begin to worm their way in again. When I cycle back out of deep sleep at 3AM, their clamoring sets my mind back to work.

Can’t you give it a rest, guys?

No, not you, dear reader. Them.

Suppression

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She asked, “What does that card say? I can’t read it.”

“Guilt.”

She waved it off, and then, ignoring the facilitator’s instructions, launched into a description of how she would run a workshop like this.

I broke in. “Mine says ‘suppression.’ When I read it, I remembered a conversation with a man that told me it was time to ‘unleash the dragon.'”

She smiled slyly. “Dragons are powerful creatures.”

“Yes, but my power comes from a different source. That’s why what he said didn’t work. I’ve spent a long time dealing with hostility to my aims, as a means of understanding the reasons people pose for resistance. I guess that it’s time for that to end.”

Our shadow cards put aside, one of our late-arriving “tricksters” found the “maturity” card as the lodestone for our journey. To aid in activation of our shadow side, we were instructed in “shaman breathing”: two sharp inhales through the nose, and then a vocal exhale. My partner escaped to the far side of the room before we donned our blindfolds.

I knew what I needed to do, but I have always tried to keep others out of my struggle. I filled my lungs with short snorts and breathed out with a low moan. Focusing on my brain stem, I allowed it to fill with energy, placing fingers on my neck to guide it more deeply. Distracted by the moaning and grunting around me, I concluded that trying to control the process wasn’t going to work. I inhaled harshly and deeply twice, raised my face, and roared at the sky for ten seconds.

When I finished, a man’s voice exclaimed “Whoa!” But we were no longer just in the room. I was in a jungle, 140 million years ago. The air around me was filled with frightened chirps and the thumps and grunts of herbivores. The echoes of the day filled the room.

Thus began the long dance forward through time. I gloried in all the tools of the predator: teeth, thumb-claws, powerful legs and tails. We swept through the sky and water, and bestrode the land. For a time the dance became arhythmic: music did not move us – it was the twisting of the land and the rolling of rocks that punctuated our steps.

I rolled myself into an egg and listened for danger before cracking the shell. My snout dug into the belly of my prey. But the pressure of disaster dragged at me. I became the last saurian, dragging my limbs through the smoke-laden air into death.

Settling on the floor, I listened disdainfully to the shuffling around me. I had lost my body, but I still had fear. I pounded hard on the floor. I am present! The room shifted nervously. Again! I sat as a king and surveyed the herd, turning my will first this way and then that. I ruled as Emperor from the pyramids in Tenochtitlan. When Europe arose, I sent cannons into the field. After war was tamed, I rose heavenward on skyscrapers, driving my claws into the flow of money to suck energy from human industry.

And then, with a sudden startle, I realized that the game was wearisome, tawdry, boring. There was no evolution, no innovation, no change. I was sinking into abstraction, losing myself.

And then a higher understanding came to me.

“I was told this by a woman that I loved very deeply:”

It’s just a process, Brian.

“Don’t feel guilty. Destruction clears the field. It prevents us from repeating the mistakes of the past.

“Work with us.”

The back of my skull twitches. It’s trying to get back in, but we don’t need the personality any longer. Just the principle, as one among many, in service to love.

Golem

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This post celebrates submission for production of my next book, Golem. Here’s the preface:

When in 2000 I resumed my journey into faith, I found myself wondering whether people had any sympathy at all for Jesus. It wasn’t enough that he had to suffer the pain of all the wrong-doing on our planet – no, he had to be responsible for everything, everywhere.

It has been painful for me to witness the success of escalatory monotheism in public debate. Even the atheists buy into it, blaming religion for all the magical thinking and selfishness that infects the world. The contradictory evidence of the natural world seems to escape their attention – predation has an enormously long pedigree. The anti-religious seem to have no sense of just how difficult it is to heal creatures that nature has programmed to hurt each other. Religion has no magical talisman to protect us from the prejudicial instincts of our neighbors – that requires us to relate to them.

Because life is so complex, every generation seeks solutions for the problems that are immediately obvious, often failing to realize that those problems are the cracks in the solutions to uglier problems addressed by their ancestors. The misguided impulse to sweep away rules and restrictions brings a satisfying sense of activity, but it also polarizes public debate. Both sides of the struggle advertise the proclamations of hysterics, impeding rational discussion and informed problem solving.

In this famous dictum, the Catholic philosopher George Santayana characterized the problem:

Those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In Three Philosophical Poets, Santayana marshaled his wisdom to illuminate the difficulties of living well. His source material, spanning two millennia, are the writings of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. The first extolled the virtues of reason, but Santayana observes that complexity runs reason into the ground with “analysis paralysis.” Dante upheld faith in Divine Love in his allegory of universal redemption, but reliance upon forces beyond our control leads to passivity and dependence. Goethe celebrates the accomplishments of forceful will now trumpeted by the elitist libertarians of the Republican Party, but a failure to negotiate with our peers generates ever mounting resistance that eventually crushes the solitary man, and brings the pyramid of tyranny crashing down under its own weight.

My first work of fiction, Ma, celebrated the feminine virtues of intuition, anticipation and compassion as a means of escaping these traps. It chronicled the psychological struggles of men caught in the limitations of Santayana’s world-view, and their liberation through submission to the caring of their women. The parallel story of Leelay suggests the psychological experience of a woman learning to support such men.

The deus ex machina of Jesus’s appearance at the end of the book was jarring to me. I rationalized it at the time as an assertion that Christ is called into being by the harmonization of masculine and feminine virtues. But it suggested to me that there was still more to be said.

I was also aware that Ma left many unanswered questions. The strategy of its construction was actually to overwhelm reason, forcing the reader to focus on the psychological experiences of the characters. When readers complained that I left a lot of loose ends dangling, I found myself playing with ideas that would tie them together.

Thus was born Golem. As a firm believer that love is universally redemptive, the work expands upon the dysfunctionality of digital technology, still characterized here as a unique manifestation of Earth’s unstable ecology, and then imagines its applications in reconciling the divide between gods and mortals.

But at the heart of the writing is a plea for sympathy for our great religious figures. In the crushing grip of the enormously destructive forces that oppress humanity, to be a seed of light can be both humiliating and painful. Adherents to faith may seem foolish or misguided, but ultimately they serve to dissipate those contrary forces, allowing the pure light of love to be liberated for all to see.

Two Conversations

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Down in Carson yesterday, I was trying to teach a young Hispanic girl how to shoot set-shots. I kept at it for a half an hour, and she just wanted to prance and play, so we didn’t get very far. That’s not true – she did get better over time, and seemed to improve in her accuracy. But after twenty minutes of encouragement and silly dancing around, she asked me:

How old are you?

Well, that didn’t seem fair, so I asked her how old she was. Then I told her I was more than five times her age. She kept on going with guesses until she learned that I was fifty-four. When I asked her why she asked, she said:

You act like you’re younger than that.

So I asked: “If I came here all serious and stuffy, would you be shooting baskets with me?”

“No.”

“But that’s what I’m here for. It doesn’t make a difference what you think about me – this is all about you. I work five days a week writing software and doing mathematics. But when I come here, it’s all about what works for you.”

My father says that if her parents find out, they’ll never let her come again.

And then this morning, to the priest who had just announced that he was leaving religious orders because his out-spoken passion for Christ had caused too much friction in the community:

As someone who has been told that his expressions of faith frighten people, my experience has been that sometimes I have to choose to say nothing, and let the broken heart of Christ within me speak for itself. Sometimes words will not do – we just have to let others feel what we feel. We have to take people into our hearts. It is as Jesus said: ‘Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For my heart is humble, my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

Coffee and Coaching PodCast Recording

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Caryn FitzGerald had me on today for her inspirational author series at http://www.coffeeandcoachingradio.com. I told her it was an honor to be her guest for “Render Unto Caesar” day (which brought a gracious laugh), and she prompted me to share the greater journey that led to the creation of my web site (www.everdeepening.org), my four books, and this blog. Reconstructing that experience – and reflecting on how they all support each other and the purpose I serve – was really valuable to me. It’s been a long intellectual and emotional journey.

The podcast should play in a month or so. I’m just worried that (as is typical, I guess) I had a lot of surprising things to say. When Caryn remarked that I was a very complex man, I had to admit that was why I am single – I’m just too much work. And then I turned around and remarked that it all seemed pretty simple to me.

Love is like quantum mechanics – it applies to everything, which can be confusing until you understand how it changes things. So while I was rattling on about corporate management, men and women, raising children, and Jesus, it was really all about one thing: let’s make life simple, people. Let’s just love one another.

Caryn is a gracious and affirming host, and the questions she asked were a powerful force in shaping the interview. She invited me to come on again, and I’m expecting to face interesting questions – and continue to benefit from the learning that entails – when I do.

Dawn of the Soul

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Midi Berry’s newly published Nights of the Road examines the mystical power of feminine devotion. The nominal protagonist of the tale is Sarah, a British refugee from bad relationship mojo, taking up a life as a psychotherapist in Los Angeles. The power driving her spiritual awakening, however, arises from the 17th century, where her ancestor Frances Coke earns the regard of those surrounding the Stewart court as its excesses succumb to Parliamentary discipline.

When I was a child, my father declaimed modern music by observing that it was the discipline of classical forms that allowed composers to create pieces that challenged listeners without alienating them. This seems a suitable metaphor for the structure of Midi’s work.

In both time streams, Berry injects the theme of a woman committed to a natural love with a devoted partner, but challenged in her course by the passionate attentions of an unstable and possessive creative genius. In the Stewart Court, Frances is frustrated in her love by an arranged marriage, albeit to a man who – as long as the forms of the relationship are honored – kindly accepts her devotion to another. In modern Los Angeles, Sarah escapes a political marriage through emigration, and falls captive to the reborn creative genius whose attentions were frustrated by social strictures in the Stewart Court.

The novel evolves through a series of tetes-a-tetes between the romantic interests. Sarah employs the language of modern psychology as a shield against strong emotions, eventually drawing her two competitors – both previously members of a band called Nights of the Road (whence the title, in part) – into collaborative reconciliation. As for Frances, I found myself thinking that her attitudes were entirely too modern, but then realized that so were the attitudes of Beethoven and Brahms. Frances makes a decision early on in the book to believe in herself, and thus speaks her mind honestly throughout, and so perhaps reveals wisdom of the feminine heart that has been long suppressed.

I found myself at times wishing that Berry would bring us into some of the historical experiences discussed by Frances and her lover Robert. However, the emphasis of the book is on transformation of relationships, and there is a lot of valuable relationship modeling in the story line.

The most significant flaw in the story – and this is nit-picking – may be the lack of forecasting of Frances’s mystical ascension as her death nears. For those familiar with such events, this is foreshadowed by the affirmation by a noble protector that Frances’s beauty, compassion and devotion have brought her unsuspected admiration from the royal entourage. Unfortunately, for some the connection may be lost, and so her wandering down the psychic road as she nears death (whence again the title) may seem a little jarring, if not deus ex machina.

But the book’s final chapter is golden. Antony, the creative genius of Nights of the Road, manipulates masterfully Sarah’s emotions, and precious are the lyrics sung as reflections upon her impact on the men that love her.

Berry’s heart-felt tribute to reconciliation and redemption casts light on the challenges of being a muse, and presents wisdom that readers will usefully apply when seeking to understand and deepen their relationships. As the Brits would say: “Give it a go!”

Loneliness

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Right on schedule (3 AM in the morning), I had this dream:

I was away in another city at a conference, feeling really lonely and adventurous in the way that one feels away from home. A Hispanic woman had adopted me, and decided that we were going to have sex. She wasn’t really pushy about it – it was just, you know, “Why not?”

So we go back to my hotel and get into the elevator. She pushes the button to the sixth floor, and we rise and rise and rise and rise. The floor indicator was on ‘6’, but we just kept on going for the longest time. Finally, the doors open and we step out into heaven.

There was an pleasant blonde at a folding table, the kind set up for conference receptions. She was dressed all in white – obviously the angel receptionist. I stepped forward and my companion just faded into the background.

The feeling of loneliness intensified, and I found myself laying my head down on the table. “Why haven’t you found me anybody? I’m so tired of being alone.” This went on for ten seconds.

Then I stepped outside of the dream. Taking stock of the women that were organizing it, I clarified for them:

I am not a supplicant in this place.

This life is unfolding just as I intend it.

I am the carrot.

You ladies need to do better for me.