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To be loved is to receive power. If you are loved, you should feel stronger every day.
Don’t fall in love.
To fall into love is to surrender to mutual emptiness.
Awaken to love.
Awaken to new perspectives. Awaken to new feelings. Awaken to new possibilities.
Eyes open, clear-headed, self-controlled.
But most importantly:
Awaken to JOY!
Social Media is a method for seeking the thing that can only exist when we create it for others.
When I went out last to the Skeptics Society meeting in Pasadena, I had to apologize to the presenter for my difficult questions. My three sites (Love Returns here at WordPress, and the philosophical treatise at the original everdeepening) are not random ruminations, but develop messages. In interacting with other intellectuals, I tend to drive conversation into those oceans of meaning.
The challenge is their eclectic foundations: physics, philosophy, theology, spirituality, sociology, politics, and psychology. I have been blessed to live in an era during which people exploring at the edges of those fields have been nibbling at each other’s cheese, so to speak. Unfortunately, those feasting on the resources established to support mainstream thinking have also become adept at avoiding discussion of alternatives.
But I am proud of the body of work I have amassed, and believe that it deserves consideration. Since I earn enough to make ends meet, I’ve decided to finance that process through Stumble Upon.
It’s bracing. I set up two campaigns, one pointing at Love Returns and the other to the New Physics page here. I went in pretty hard, setting up to spend $100 a week. In both cases, I decided to target under-forty audiences, expecting that they would be more open to new ideas.
I was warned when I established the advertising campaign for my books. Click-through rates are about 3%. So while views on my sites have indeed mushroomed, only about one in twenty appear to actually click through to read the development outlined in the initial page.
Feedback is limited, much as it is here. New Physics has gotten three likes in 300 views. Love Returns four likes and five dislikes in 500 views. I’m actually surprised that it’s that positive: the target audience are Christians, and I was expecting dogmatism to push the dislikes far higher.
When I was in my first year here, I had a couple of visitors from the Philippines start at the very first post and walk all the way through my blog. That hasn’t happened in either of my Stumble Upon campaigns. People pick and choose their content, based upon the thumbnails on the anchor page.
But people are looking. I can’t maintain $100 a week, given that I’ve got $100 a month already in outlay here and at Wistia for the video feed at Love Returns. I’m not expecting anybody to contact me to ask me to come speak to them. But I think that I’m getting enough click-through activity that I’ll keep it going at about half the current outlay. That corresponds to 1000 views a month between the two campaigns. We’ll see if it tails off at some point.
NASA’s New Horizons probe is flying through the Kuiper Belt (home of the Solar System’s comets) and about to survey a large rock. The rock is named “(486958) 2014 MU69“, which would sound nice when tweeted from R2D2, but is a terror for newscasters.
So NASA is running a contest to select a name to attach to the rock for their PR campaign. Recommendations include “Mjolnir” (Thor’s hammer) and certain mythical cities in the heavens.
My suggestion is “Ziggy Froid.”
The rationale? In honor of David Bowie, of “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” Because “Ziggy” is a diminutive of “Siegfried” and “Sigmund” which ties in to the Norse mythology of the Arctic Circle through Wagner’s series of Ring operas. And because “Froid” – French for “cold” – is a near-homonym of “Freud,” evoking my sense that it’s crazy to attach names of power to the first rock that we happen to encounter in the Kuiper Belt.
Though there’s no purpose served, you can visit the contest site and vote for my entry.
On my New Physics tab, I have a set of links that document some important facts that are unexplained by modern particle theory. These aren’t obscure points of experience. Rather, they include facts such as “the proton weighs 50 times as much as it should” and “quazars precede galaxy formation.” They are “first order” facts that should cause every particle theorist to blush in shame.
Experimenters at CERN have now magnified the problem.
The reigning theory of the universe holds that it formed from a super-hot gas – so hot that the very fabric of space contained more energy than the existing particles. As the universe cooled, that energy was converted to particles.
One problem with this theory is that energy is converted to matter through a process called “pair production.” You can’t make only one particle – you have to make two.
Specifically, the particle comes with an “anti-particle” with equal mass and opposite charge. The conundrum is that those particles attract, and when they meet, they annihilate each other. The matter and anti-matter convert back to pure energy.
This leads the physicists to wonder: how did we end up with a universe composed only of matter? In principle, there should be equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, and every solid object should be annihilated.
The answer proposed by the theorists was that matter and anti-matter are slightly different – and most importantly in their stability. Anti-matter must disappear through some unknown process that preserves matter.
The experiment reported today attempted to measure differences between the most important building-block of matter – the proton – and its antiparticle. None was detected.
In consequence, everything created by the Big Bang (or the Expansive Cool – take your pick) should have disappeared a long time ago. There should be no gas clouds, no galaxies, no planets, and no life.
If that’s not a reason to be looking for new theories of fundamental physics, then what would be?
Were the bullets like the angry fists that pummeled your growing body?
Was the scurrying below meaningless, like the gambling that you used to hide your pain?
…but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die.
[NIV Gen. 2:17]
Is that the only escape from the sorrows of this world? An escape into death?
Was that the truth you wished to communicate before you took your own life?
Oh, dear brother, why were you immune to the Lord’s promises? Did no one tell you?
I will give you a new heart and a new spirit. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
[NIV Ezek. 36:26]
For now you have fallen prey to the illusion of death. The savior reached out to you with a healing embrace, but instead of receiving that gift, you chose to bear arms.
I first heard the claims from a Mormon colleague at work. The constellation Virgo was overlapped with some planets creating a configuration of twelve lights in the sky. On Monday night at Bible study the parallels with Revelation 12 (in which the Sacred Mother descends with twelve stars in her tiara) were elaborated further: one of the lights was Jupiter, which exited the constellation on September 23rd, the basis for claims that the seven-year trial of tribulation was now under way. Only one element was missing: the simultaneous descent of the dragon. The claim was that NASA had somehow “blocked out” that part of the sky, hiding one-third of the stars (the dragon’s tail?).
I kept on stating firmly “The stars in Revelation are angels,” but the speaker wouldn’t listen, doggedly pursuing the story, repeating “But there’s more.”
Given this propensity to seek material evidence of God’s forthcoming intervention, I find it wondrous that nobody has linked the first letters of Harvey, Irma and Maria to spell out “HIM.” Santa Maria is also Christ’s virgin mother. Powered by the sun and arriving in hurricane form, she struck Puerto Rico at night – I’d assume hiding a full moon.
For those that followed the video series out at Love Returns, we know that we’re well past Revelation 12, close to the seventh bowl in Revelation 16. I won’t support that claim here, however, for there’s something revealed more directly by the tragedy in Puerto Rico.
Samuel was the first to warn God’s people concerning the limitations of government, and the Resurrection itself must be taken as repudiating all earthly powers.
Puerto Rico is a potent support for the argument that government is destined to betray our hopes. As a center for drug manufacturing, the island had a successful economy until about 2005, when Congress ended tax credits that benefited pharmaceutical companies that manufactured there. Shipping goods from an island nearly 1000 miles from the mainland is expensive, and the factories soon closed, kick-starting Puerto Rico’s descent into poverty.
Maria devastated an island already on the verge of collapse.
Why did Congress end the tax credits? A hurricane is a dramatic event, focusing our awareness of tragedy, but many communities in rural America are facing similar circumstances. Corporate American has off-shored their jobs, and constricting government payrolls are knocking the legs out from under small town economies. Into that misery the pharmaceutical industry is pouring a torrent of opioids.
The anger of rural America delivered the White House into the hands of a petty tyrant. In tweets to his sycophantic chorus, Trump attacked the mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, stating that her incompetence was the reason that FEMA hadn’t been able to deliver aid to 3.5 million American citizens facing slow death from thirst, hunger and disease.
Trump’s cruelty was triggered by the words of Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, recorded earlier in the day criticizing the Administration’s characterization of the relief efforts as “wonderful.” Mincing no words, she pointed out that people were dying, and that if an effective response was not mounted immediately, the federal government would find itself presiding over a genocide. Clearly suffering from trauma, Cruz characterized Trump’s attitude as that of one consigning citizens to “die like animals.”
But of course.
It is not government that delivers us dignity. Government is not worthy of our faith. It is only in God that we find the strength to suffer in dignity. Facing death, it is only to the faithful that certainty is given that we possess a spirit intended to receive infinite love.
So, please, Mayor Cruz: don’t pray to government. Pray to Him, for it is the lack of Him that has brought us to this impasse. The physical and social forces that brutalize the poor are huge, and far beyond the capacity of governments to overcome. Security, dignity and grace are found only in God.
The first time I read Louis Cozolino’s The Neuroscience of Human Relationships, I read a treatise on the chakras in between chapters. I was surprised by the correspondences: the progression of the Vedic practitioner through the chakras closely paralleled the stages of human maturity that unfold as a human child replaces primitive survival responses (imitation and crying) with behaviors motivated by social expectations (cooperation and empathy).
Cozolino emphasizes the role of a mother in the progression. Cuddling, nursing and facial expressions offered by the mother all create the expectation that physical needs will be met. The growing cortex learns to suppress behaviors that avoid danger in favor of behaviors that create engagement.
This is to speak of the ideal, but mothers may also distort a child’s development. Seventy percent of mothers operate in Cozolino’s “good enough” regimen. They allow the child to explore independently while remaining open to provide support when frustration or danger arises. These “free-autonomous” mothers produce securely attached children.
Further along the spectrum, “dismissing” mothers fail to provide consistent support. Their children are “avoidant,” not becoming upset when left alone, but not seeking affection either. Anxiety becomes obvious in the children of inconsistent mothers that remain aloof unless seeking to control the child’s behavior. At the far end of the spectrum, mothers that respond inappropriately or amplify fear may raise children that act out (even to self-injury) to deflect attention from external dangers (in effect trying to protect the parent).
The experience of children along this spectrum has a direct impact on the development of brain centers that integrate our social experience. In his therapeutic vignettes, Cozolino describes how conscious experience can be used to improve that integration, allowing the patient to attain more reward from relationships.
The difficulty in reversing the programming received from mothers is that much of it is encoded early in our lives in the non-verbal parts of the brain, the seat of Freud’s “sub-conscious.”
In Buddhist circles, the role of conscious self-reflection (“meditation”) is lauded as a psychological practice for bringing our behavior into better alignment with our social reality. We grow up, and our mothers no longer dominate our lives. In meditation, we learn to replace our instincts with conscious action.
As I watch people struggle with this programming in Christian communities, I now wonder how the image of God the Father as taught by Jesus might relate to this process. It is not rooted in physical experience; rather, God exists in heaven, projecting love down upon us that we may choose to reject. Even then, the parable of the prodigal son promises that God still loves us.
I wonder whether there might be some therapeutic advantage in having a Father-God image in this role, as opposed to a Mother-God image?
The centerpiece of my vacation was attending the Soul Play Fall Fest. Soul Play is a conscious living, dance and spiritual awakening experience held in the Sierras between Yosemite and Lake Tahoe.
I have been re-reading Louis Cozolino’s The Neuroscience of Human Relationships. Early in the book, he explains brain laterality. The right side of the brain integrates our individual experience to identify threats and opportunities. It is emotional, intuitive, non-verbal and non-linear in its reactions. The left side of the brain abstracts experience to seek patterns and commonality.
With this re-iteration, I was shocked by the realization that I have spent most of my life in the left side of my brain – to the extent, in fact, that I have difficulty thinking of myself as an individual.
For the last two weeks, I’ve been seeking to reclaim the right side of my mind. The most immediate side-effect has been a hardening of my boundaries against women (many of them sympathetic to my plight) that have been seeking to manage that part of my mind.
My first hope was that Soul Play would stretch and shake up my personality, facilitating the reclamation of the individuality rooted in the right side of my brain. As that progressed, I hoped also to find a safe container in which to begin restructuring my experience of women.
I was conscious of the risks. Among the gypsies of the conscious living movement, sexual experience often tends to what Christian moralists would consider “licentious.” Within the movement itself, sex is viewed as a joyous celebration of the sublime gifts of our materiality. Spiritually it is seen both as a reward for virtue and a method for its propagation. That sounds pleasant, but I have yet to find a community for whom it is that simple. People – no matter how enlightened – will compete for love.
So I wasn’t certain what to expect. That expectation was fulfilled, for the outcome was, well, unexpected.
Naturally, my engagement with women began on the dance floor, and progressed rapidly into healing. On the first night, I found myself sitting on the floor, a woman laid out over the inside of my right thigh as I probed for the source of pain in her hip. This continued into the first full day of sessions, dominated by contact improv and movement lessons.
But I want to focus on the breakthrough experiences, and the first of those occurred on Saturday morning. Parmatma Cris is a Brazilian yogini and tantrika (female practitioner of Tibetan tantra). Her offering, Movement Alchemy, was physically the most challenging of the courses I took. The exercises emphasized circular movement of the feet, hips, shoulders and arms that had to be carefully coordinated to conserve balance. This was described by Parmatma as generaion of “spirals” with our bodies.
After the frustrating warm-up exercises, she had us sit on the floor and led us through breathing exercises. The first was simple: inhaling while arcing the chest up and back, and exhaling into a deep forward curve. This advanced with circular motion of the sacrum, shoulders and arms.
The breakthrough came at the end. Abandoning the complex spirals, we were asked to swing our heads around in a circle, allowing our abdomen to follow its motion, inhaling on the upward stroke and exhaling as we fell forward.
This may sound uncomfortable, and indeed I paused after a couple of minutes, feeling dizzy and nauseated. Parmatma interrupted her instructions to order “If you feel dizzy or like throwing up, keep on going. It’s only your habit patterns trying to preserve their control. Most people don’t throw up, but if you do, that’s fine.”
So I went back to it, picking up the pace at her suggestion, and finally felt a shift in the right side of my brain, as though fluid was moving into it.
In that part of my personality, I saw a cluster of woman that had taken possession of my core personality two thousand years ago, in an act of violence that I have been hiding from others for most of my life. Confronting the methods and effects of that spiritual rape, I began sobbing and weeping uncontrollably, until one of the other students bent toward me to offer support.
“No. I’ll be fine.”
Parmatma paused for us to cool down, then pulled over mattresses so that we could all lie together with our heads pointed toward the warmth of the fireplace. I tried to relax, but the memories leaked back in, and I began sobbing. Her right index finger touched the middle of my forehead, cool and soothing, and then the rest of her hand draped itself over the right side of my head.
Namaste, sweet tantrika, sweet dakini. Blessings be upon you in your journey of peace and compassion.
Before I went on vacation, the company owner told me that I was responsible for my own anxiety.
I thought about that while I was on the road on Wednesday. I have several reasons to feel anxiety at work, but late that night, as I struggled to find the peace of sleep, I realized that they were all attempts by others to poison public perception of my conduct.
Putting those anxieties aside, then, what I was left with was this: standing in the door of my colleague’s office, telling him that I despite three books, a web site and three blogs, I have failed to build any interest in the truths that have been entrusted to me. That, and the images of the destruction wrought be hurricanes Harvey and Irma, with the fear that many would believe that God had forgotten them.
And I saw myself going to the camps of the displaced with boxloads of my Love Returns t-shirts for the children. The message was simple: the waters of death and destruction had risen against you to drown your faith, but the waters that Jesus offers are the waters of life. You are not forgotten – you are beloved.
The sermon on the boat in Galilee also came to mind: not from the perspective of Peter, but from the perspective of the fishes that hid from the nets all night until Jesus commanded Peter to let them down again. The vision was of children hiding under blankets in the corner when their parents came to look for them. When the children don’t show, the teacher sends the parents outside. The children remain under the blankets until the teacher goes to the door to tell their parents to “Try again.” Then the little class rushes forward to happily embrace their parents.
With these visions, all the negative thoughts vanished.
But I woke at 5 AM. Entering the town that the retreat I was attending was located at, I drove up Interstate 80 for ninety minutes, past Rocklin and almost to Truckee. Following the directions, I found myself at the supposed destination in the middle of an empty stretch of road. Checking my e-mail notices from the retreat, I learned that it was actually outside Sonora, almost four hours away.
Having left early, I was still going to make the first Thursday session, but I felt foolish and ashamed. I pushed that aside and focused on my good fortune: I was still going to be there early. As I approached Rocklin, I began wondering whether there wasn’t a reason this happened. As I entered Rocklin, I decided to search for some Christian music on the radio, and found AirOne. After a few songs played, a notice came on: AirOne was looking for two big data analysts to work in Rocklin.
Those that have been following this blog will remember that I had been taking courses in this field through eDx last year before I started the video series at Love Returns.
No prize to those that predict that I’ll apply. It’s the only way to clear up my deepest anxieties.
everdeepening 