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Evolution of Love

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I have signed up for the Zacharias Trust’s e-pulse feed, produced by the Oxford Center for Christian Apologetics. The foremost member of that community is John Lennox, who has engaged Richard Dawkins and other militant atheists in debate on whether evolution disproves the Bible.

The conflict arises from the way that Genesis describes creation as occurring in six “days.” The term is vague, and long prior to Darwin we had Christian scholars cautioning that it shouldn’t be taken literally. But without any science to help interpret the book, the tendency was to take the common translation as cause to celebrate the glory and power of the Creator.

In the New Testament, that glory and power is manifested in a different way – it is through Jesus’s parables that explain that no matter how big a mess we make of things, it doesn’t affect God. He is going to love us anyways. Even more, when we turn our will and intelligence to caring for the world we live in, great power comes to us – power that is inaccessible through any other means. Power that gave Jesus authority even over death.

I met a family whose daughter studied with Lennox, and they shared his perception that the people he debates have a deep hunger for the love that God brings. They have just convinced themselves that the evil done by men proves that God doesn’t exist. In their quest to support their conviction, they use the conflict between the translation of Genesis and the fossil record to argue that the whole of the Bible should be discarded.

The apologists use a number of techniques to try to defend their faith. One is intelligent design – the idea that we can use evolution to prove the existence of God by demonstrating the infinitesimal probability that evolution could merge single-celled organisms into something as complex as a human being. Others shut their eyes and insist that if evolution is advanced as proof against God, then evolution must be wrong. And a final group insists that we should just stop arguing about it, and prove God’s existence through the works of our love.

But what of this: what if there was no contradiction? What if God prepared the way for reconciliation between naïve faith and sophisticated scientific understanding by writing evolution into the Bible long before it was formulated by Darwin? Would that not be a magnificent demonstration of his power and love for us?

For this is what I read. Genesis records that light allowed photosynthetic organisms to escape the dark depths of the ocean. From there they migrated from salt waters below to fresh waters above. Next they learned to survive outside of water, becoming plants that spread across the face of the earth. Then sight arose, resolving the light into the sun and the moon, and supporting seasonal migration. After the extinction of the dinosaurs, the fish and birds dominated the earth until the rise of the mammals. And finally we have man, whose flexible brain liberated life from the Darwinian struggle, to the point today that we can design simple creatures ourselves.

Evolution does not contradict the Bible; rather the elaboration of Darwin’s theory has substantiated the Bible. The Bible contains the history revealed by paleontology written thousands of years before science gave us the tools to interpret the fossil record.

So Christians, take heart: there is absolutely nothing to apologize for.

And let’s just put the argument aside and get around to the business of applying our intelligence to the restoration of the planet that God provided to sustain us on our journey to understanding.

Gravity Waves ‘Goodbye’ to Einstein

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I was out at the Skeptics Society science talk on Sunday. The speaker was Stephon Alexander, a theoretical astrophysicist at Brown University, who talked about the relationship between string theory and music. Dr. Alexander also plays the tenor sax, and has released his first jazz album. His new book, The Jazz of Physics, describes the relationship between his two passions.

The format was a discussion with Michael Shermer, the head of the Skeptics Society. Michael rounded out the conversation with the “big questions.” Regarding the future of physics, Alexander predicted that we would have a theory that reconciled gravity and quantum mechanics in the next fifty years. As for the ultimate origin of the universe, Alexander observed that the possibility of creating carbon, which is the basis for life on earth, is tightly coupled to the relative strengths of two fundamental forces: the first binds quarks together to form a proton, and the second binds electrons to protons to form hydrogen atoms. Even a 10% change in strengths would prevent the formation of carbon in stars. This is the kind of “fine-tuning” often exclaimed by theists, but Alexander allowed Shermer to lead the conversation into a discussion of the multiverse hypothesis.

As you might imagine, I ended up having to apologize to Dr. Alexander for the question that I raised.

The question was motivated by the history of physics, which has again and again used the equations of oscillating waves to describe complex phenomena. This is the technology of Fourier analysis, and its power lies in fact that waves can be composed to produce very complex patterns. (Just consider the surface of a swimming pool, for example.) But Fourier analysis has its weaknesses, and I am particularly concerned regarding two of them.

The lesser of the weaknesses is that close to the source of a wave, other mathematical methods may give a more concise description of the disturbance. For example, the surface of a beaten drum deforms with Bessel waves. This is also how the air moves in the vicinity of the drum. It is only far from the source that the pressure waves that we hear as sound are described efficiently by Fourier notation. So when applied inappropriately, Fourier analysis may make it difficult to understand the things that create the waves.

The second weakness is that the media in which waves propagate are not smooth – they are actually composed of particles. We have seen this again and again in physics. Sound waves can be described as waves, but until we accept that gases are composed of little atoms there are certain effects that we can’t explain – such as why our voice squeaks after we inhale the helium from a balloon. Considering water waves, Einstein himself was awarded the Nobel prize in part for explaining the motion of small impurities in water with the insight that the water was composed of atoms that bashed the impurities around, causing them to jitter and wander rather than flowing smoothly from place to place. More abstractly, James Clerk Maxwell predicting the existence of electromagnetic waves by combining the equations that describe the generation of electric and magnetic fields. Einstein’s Nobel award also recognized his explanation of the photoelectric effect with the idea that electromagnetic waves were actually composed of particles called photons.

Considering this history, it seems natural to wonder whether the theories that Alexander describes in his book – theories that hold that the cosmos is composed of quantum-mechanical waves – are going to be replaced by theories that posit structures inside those waves. In response to the question, he offered that there had been some ideas proposed of that type, but they hadn’t been developed because they were “unfashionable.”

I had the sense that I rained a little on Dr. Alexander’s parade, which upset me. There were a number of young Hispanic high-school students in attendance, and he made a powerful representation to them that anyone can aspire to be a scientist – the most important steps were to try, to keep your eye out for mentors, and to recognize whether it was truly your passion. That is an important message, and in casting doubt on his picture, I may have undermined the inspiration that he offered.

But I just couldn’t help myself. It was those questions asked by Shermer, to which I believe I have been granted such powerful answers. This I was able to communicate to Stephon when I stopped to have my book signed. During his talk, he enthusiastically related the vision that the universe of waves sings to itself, a vision not dissimilar to his experience of jazz improvisation.

While the specifics are different, the passion is common to us both. I offered to him that, not being an academic, I don’t often have the opportunity to share my ideas, and because I have been led by them into a view of the universe that contains such wholeness and beauty, I tend to become a little bit passionate when conveying them. However, I do intend them as gifts, and hope that they help people to escape fear that has no foundation.

And maybe, just maybe, one of those young people will be inspired by the analogy I offered. We know that the gravitational waves exist – they were recently detected by the LIGO collaboration. And we know what they propagate in: dark energy. It only takes the courage to break from what Alexander called “fashion” to cast down Einstein and offer a new view of the universe – a view that I am fairly certain explains spirituality, and makes evident the existence of God.

And, given Einstein’s views on quantum mechanics, famously stated as “God does not play dice with the universe,” I believe that the great man himself might forgive me the ambition to see him overthrown.

Imagine a World Without Imagination

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Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, has joined the cawing voices of academic atheists with the publication of his new book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. I haven’t read the book, and don’t see any reason to support the author’s rise to bestseller stardom. The supporting reviews on the book’s brag sheet are enough for me. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker all celebrate the book as another sledgehammer blow against the project that has occupied humanity’s greatest thinkers for millennia: how to get people to work together for the common good.

Is science a catalyst in that regard? I didn’t see that in evidence at the Skeptics Conference last year. In a panel discussion with an advocate for CERN and an advocate for advancement of space exploration, Leonard Krauss responded with “That’s just a stupid idea” to the latter’s appeal for money to clear the space junk that threatens our low-earth-orbit satellites.  Krauss’s statement came without technical analysis – it was a baldly political statement meant to ensure that the community represented by Krauss kept its stranglehold on the money that flows through CERN.

And then we have the double-edged sword of global climate research and toxicology studies. We cannot consider as a statistical anomaly the trifecta among the technical communities that advised the tobacco, fossil fuel and chemicals industries. Drawing upon the science of economics, they invested their resources for the benefit of their shareholders. Each of them, confronted with irrefutable scientific evidence of harm to the public, chose to invest in contrarian science and secrecy to secure their access to profitable markets.

Obviously, the contention that science in of itself disproves faith is supportable only if we discard the long history of spiritual experience. Fundamental physics has no explanation for that history, and as it has become clear that there is no explanation for spirituality in current theory, the position of rejection has hardened because to accept the need to explain spirituality is to cast into doubt the entire body of particle physics.

But the men listed in my introduction are not physicists, they are evolutionary biologists. They have waged a long war against scriptural literalists, and appear eager to crucify religion for the prejudices of its ugliest zealots. That zealotry arose in an era that lacked the evidence of the fossil record, and so had no means for explaining the obscure record of the Bible except to assert the power of the Almighty. With the fossil record, however, the story of Genesis is readily interpreted as the occupation of ecosystems by living things. Even more, the trumpets of Revelation are clearly correlated with the billion-year history of mass extinctions that occurred along the way.

Of course, how could the writers of the Bible have known all that without the benefit of modern paleontology? The program of destruction pursued by Coyne and his cronies would be completely undermined by that consideration.

What they would be left with is to pursue a proof, such as I have outlined here, that love is the most powerful force in the universe. This is the conclusion reached by all the great religious avatars, not-with-standing the hateful rhetoric of the zealots. What is really wrong with attempting to prove that conclusion?

Surely not something more wrong than lacking the imagination to believe that it is possible.

Then What are 1000 Pictures Worth?

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Reports of the dimming of the star KIC 8462852 have been debunked, causing SETI to revise its claims to have proven the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. The news also caused a crash in Appalachian coal futures, as CO2 sequestration speculators cancelled orders.

One insider, speaking anonymously to avoid being labelled as a “Koch-head,” revealed “when my employers were convinced that no earthly engineering team could dig an ocean through the Rockies, they were hoping that the ETs would do the work in the course of removing the sub-surface CO2 stockpiles they were hoping to establish in New Mexico and Arizona. No ETs, no CO2 sequestration, no last-grasp strip-mining in Appalachia. Oh well, there’s always that land trade for the Panama Canal!”

More seriously: it turns out that the original study of KIC 8462852, drawing upon analysis of old photographic plates, had failed to account for differences in the equipment used to capture the pictures. By comparing the apparent brightness of KIC 8462852 to that of other stars in the plates, it was determined that the the relative brightness had not changed.

Systematic effects (related to the design of the experimental system) were also a large factor in fueling the “cold-fusion” hype that I got involved in debunking back in the ’80s.

Getting in Line

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More than a decade ago, I proposed the idea that the universe is composed of one-dimensional structures. My motivations for seeking an alternative to the reigning standard model of physics, along with a fifty-year research program, were published as the Generative Orders Research Proposal (follow the New Physics link at the top of this blog). The idea is now making its way into the physics journals. (Did the Universe Begin as a Simple 1-D Line?)

What’s curious is that the Live Science report on the work is headed with a graphic that summarizes the reigning inflationary model of the early universe (still commonly referred to as the “Big Bang” model).

It’s nice to see the basic concepts of Generative Orders gaining traction – it moves us one step closer to a reconciliation of science and spirituality.

Ideas, Ideally

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I have been trying to reclaim (see 1 and 2) the philosophical tradition of ldealism that in the West was first articulated clearly by Plato. Idealism is one of two threads of discourse that attempt to explain the relationship between ideas and our experience of the world around us. The paradox for Plato was that the real world does not contain perfect representatives – no line is absolutely straight, and no horse manifests all the ideal characteristics of horses (fast and powerful, for example). Convinced that the world originated from a source of absolute good, Plato therefore held that the idea of a perfect line or perfect horse was the original, with the physical examples as imperfect manifestations.

To the scientific thinker, this assertion fails to satisfy because it does not specify a mechanism for the manifestation, and therefore cannot be disproved. The solution proposed by scriptural literalists is that the ideals did exist when the Holy will created the world, and were accessible for our appreciation during the inhabitation of Eden. It was through our selfishness and disobedience that the connection with the divine source was sundered. Not only human nature was corrupted in the Fall, but all of Creation.

Reacting against Plato’s idealism, Aristotle advanced the program of Empiricism. From our observation of the world around us, we intuitively recognize similarity between things. We might choose to call some things “dogs.” There is no ideal dog, but all dogs share certain characteristics. Through the mechanism of the syllogism, we can therefore transmit a great deal of understanding by simply designating the type of something. The most famous syllogism is “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” In general form, we might write “All A are B. If C is an instance of A, then C is B.”

Aristotle employed this program to a comprehensive classification of the world around him. The power of classification becomes most obvious in the physical sciences, where saying “an electron is massive and charged” allows us to apply mathematical deduction to predict its behavior. But classification is also conditional: Linnaeus, the inventor of the phylogenic scheme for categorization of living creatures, recognized only plants and animals. Modern biochemistry has demanded the addition of three new phyla, with the consequence that things once considered to be “plants” have been reclassified as “fungi,” which recognizes that all along they actually lacked some of the characteristics of “plants.”

Aristotle recognized that all ideas are abstractions, and so that when applied to a specific instance, information is lost. This should be unsettling – it means that the world is populated by exceptions to our ideas. This is consequential: If a member of a tribe asks you to care for his dog, how do you know which among the dogs is his pet ‘Akela’?

Ultimately, the pragmatic successors to Aristotle re-introduced the concept of moral good to deal with this problem. What is important is whether ideas have practical utility. This has both good and bad consequences: Darwin’s theory of natural selection was used to justify ethnic prejudice in Nazi Germany and in certain parts of America. Against that, we have housing codes that ensure that disasters do not displace entire populations, such as occurred after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco or the great urban fires of the 19th century.

So let us now return to the larger umbrella: I hold that philosophy is the study of the operation of the intellect, which manifests as the capacity to synthesize mental states. Among the sources of mental states, I listed sensation, emotion, thoughts and spirits. Where are ideas in this categorization? They seemed to be related to thoughts, but thoughts can also be random associations without plausible manifestations, such as – Kia Soul advertising not-with-standing – “my hamster is break-dancing.”

As might be expected, the exclusion of ideas from the list of mental states is not an oversight.

I have asserted elsewhere that Idealism reflects an affinity in its adherents for soul-relation. This manifests most powerfully to the mystic as a gift of energy that suffuses moral good with joy. This is the experience that I believe informed Plato’s affiliation of ideas with “The Good.”

Where I depart from Plato is in the belief that all ideas originate from The Good, only to be expressed in corrupt form in the world around us. To me, this is the terrible deficiency of scriptural literalism. It denies us agency in moral progress in the world. In The Soul Comes First, I take this head-on, using paleontology and evolutionary biology to demonstrate that the seven days of creation and the trumpets in Revelation actually correspond to a process of uplift from primitive forms of life towards an intelligent integration that will heal the spiritual wound of selfishness.

The role offered to humanity in this process is to sort through our thoughts to identify those that empower the expression of moral good. This is “the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” and the serpent’s characterization of the Fall in Genesis is a political posture that seeks to delay the perfection of our discernment.

In re-interpreting scripture through the lens of science, I show obvious affinity for Aristotle’s empiricism. Where I depart from his formulation is in the belief that ideas are merely abstractions of experience. Thoughts are those abstractions.

In the model of physics I have offered, I understand the human mind as the interaction of soul with the empirical world through the interface of the brain. In that interaction, our thoughts are temporary modifications of our soul. An idea is a thought reinforced by multiple successful episodes that instills energy that causes the thought to bloom into the world of spirit. An important consequence of this penetration is that the thought becomes accessible to other thinkers. In other words, Plato’s Ideas do not originate from The Good, but rise into the realm of spirit most readily when they serve a moral purpose, increasing the life-time of their subscribers, and therefore gathering ever greater energy through continued application to the survival of living things.

In terms of the framework I have established, with stimulation and combination as the two types of intellectual synthesis: ideas arise from the intellect’s capacity to stimulate thoughts from sensation, and then to combine thought and spirit. Ideas do not originate from The Good, but the strength of an idea is ultimately determined by the degree to which it allows us to improve our moral discernment. When mature discernment is realized in a personality such as Jesus of Nazareth, The Good that seeks to facilitate our healing actually touches the material world, shattering all of our categorizations with consequences unimaginable to the empiricist.

I hope that in this formulation that faith and science recognize the shape of a reconciliation that can organize collaboration that will speed the development of moral discernment, fundamentally changing our relationship with reality, and liberating Life in general from our vicious cycle of angry and ineffectual claims to authority defended by reference to incompatible and ultimately meaningless standards of “truth.”

fascia

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Mary Margaret’s installation down at Pomona College was amazing. I arrived a little late for the reception, and wandered around the rooms wondering which contained her work. When I entered the last room and encountered “fascia” as the exhibit title, I immediately thought of the beginner’s class offered at Full Contact Improv late last year. In it, we were taught how to project our intention without forcing its manifestation. The trick is to move the skin until the fascia – the connective fibers that tie our body parts together – reaches its elastic limit and begins to tug on the bone. If you get to that point, your partner isn’t willing to come with you, and alternatives need to be found.

My intuition was confirmed when I found a brief summary of the exhibits. What did surprise me was the complexity of the conception. Mary Margaret uses words like “ontological.” With a clearer understanding of the installation’s evocative goal, I returned to the room for deeper immersion.

As I didn’t take photos, I’ll start with an analogy. It was like walking into a 3-D Picasso executed with the energy of Jackson Pollack (if Pollack had been a woman). The materials appear to be sailcloth tinted and spattered with diluted acrylic. The panels – some forty or fifty of them, principally pale blue or hues of red and yellow – are cut into irregular shapes and sewn together with black thread. The central mass, roughly eight feet in diameter, depicts recognizable body parts in a jumble of cut-outs and overlays. From there the construction spreads pseudopods that fall flat on the floor and arc overhead to form ample tunnels. A large panel on the right, perhaps ten by ten, is evocative of pathology cultures, but cut through by a pale blue channel that descends on the right into a hand. Finally, two chest-sized pods hang in the air, with a third pod blocking the middle of the floor.

The black thread manifests a variety of methods for tying the panels together. Some pieces appear to have been sewn together with a machine, and indeed some panels are pleated subtly with this method. Others are held together with large, irregularly spaced hand stitching. Finally, in some places the panels do not join at all, but are pulled together across holes as large as eight inches across. Here the thread aligns to suggest a direction of tension – though spare strands, yet relaxed, may loop through the taut fibers.

The entire mass is suspended from anchors on the ceiling with transparent nylon thread. The nylon is extravagant in its allocation, the free ends hanging in long spirals that refract and reflect light. In the center of the display a nylon spool is captured in one of the larger weaves of black thread – a hint that we should consider this element as a part of the artist’s expression.

In her pamphlet, Mary Margaret offers this motivation:

Western culture often views connection as something that is made, but I think it is more appropriate to view connection as something that is manifest. I have often found that attempting to accomplish connection actually gets in the way of allowing the connection that already exists to flow through our bodies.

The artist has provided a rich set of interpretative elements to guide our consideration of this theme. The three-dimensional structure involves us physically in interaction with the work. While we were invited to step on it, most tip-toed cautiously through and over. When considered closely, the lyrical style of the rendering caresses the eyes, mostly with warm tones that are cut incongruously by the blue panels. The pods have deep folds, hinting at seeds within. And then we have the thread, its two types and different modes of employ.

I found myself fascinated by the interplay between exterior and interior imagery. If we pay attention to the sensation of our bodies – the sensation that Mary Margaret asks us to consider, when we move our muscles and bones we also move our organs. Sometimes that’s a shifting, but in other cases it can manifest as a delayed settling.

The most profound urge to connection is the procreative urge, represented in the pods but also matter-of-factly in the jumble of limbs, where a man’s pale-blue legs, spread and crossed at the ankles, are capped by a stylized and erect phallus. And the panel by the back wall descends into a rent that spills a brownish-red flow onto the floor.

The looping pseudopods reminded me that no matter how we connect, the connection lingers, stretching across space and time, influencing us in ways that are often difficult to analyze.

And then we have the glistening nylon thread descending from the ceiling. I interpreted this from a religious perspective, but that is merely a layering on the universal experience of spiritual connection.

As I finished my ruminations, Mary Margaret returned to the room, and interrupted her pamphlet folding to thank me for coming and offer a gentle embrace. I didn’t stay for the performance studies – I had already projected my admiration into the room, and didn’t want to interfere with her expression. As described, the performance includes recorded reflections on the struggles her peers have experienced in seeking fulfilling intimacy, as well as her own meditations. (When I asked about this, she said that it was a “little wonky”, but didn’t clarify.) It also includes movement, which she invites others to enter with her. I think that she would have enjoyed it if I had stayed, rolled up my sleeves, and helped her demonstrate how alive we become when we relate through dance. But it may also have blown everybody’s minds. Many of the students appeared overwhelmed to begin with.

I’ve always wondered why Mary Margaret uses so many syllables to announce herself to the world, and for some reason it makes me think of Mary and Martha, the two sisters in Luke. The first sits at Jesus’s feet as he preaches, while the second rushes about complaining that the house preparations have been left to her. Jesus admonishes Martha, pointing out that Mary has chosen the better part. But in considering this display I wonder whether the Lord wouldn’t have done better to suggest that if they integrated their two tendencies, they could do powerful good in helping people to organize and heal their souls.

Which is probably the best insight to offer in concluding my exploration of the work of a brilliant, generous, gentle and courageous spirit as she seeks to birth her purpose into the world.

Path of Least Resistance

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My friend Meng Chen, atheist and purveyor of Daoist philosophy, is the only person that I am aware of wrestling seriously with the writing out at everdeepening.org. After reading The Soul Comes First, he began working his way through the New Testament during his slack hours at work. He was pretty scandalized by it – all the blood and suffering. What elicited umbrage in him, however, was the obscurity of the parables. The Parable of the Unjust Servant [Luke 1:12] was particularly offensive. In this, an embezzler is called before his manager, and made aware that he will be fired the next day. To curry favor with prospective employers, the servant trades their indebtedness for a fraction of the amount owed. When apprised of this the next day, the manager praises the resourcefulness of the servant, although warning that the servant’s concern for things of this world will cost him eternal riches.

Now this seems to communicate a terrible precedent. But it is of a type with many of the parables. Jesus sets up a recognizable human situation (such as the decadent son), elaborates depraved behavior (the son squandering his inheritance), and then contradicts all of our expectations for human justice by an award of forgiveness (the father dressing the repentant son in his own robe). The brilliance of the method is to situate the hearer in dilemmas that they understand, dilemmas that they may confront every day. From there, he is led into the most despicable of choices – choices that are probably close to his own heart and mind, but that are easy to condemn. And then the paradox: condemnation is not delivered, but forgiveness and celebration. Obviously, the master and father are not people we would recognize. Rather, they are God, the God of Genesis that similarly forgave Cain.

The virtue of parables is that they resonate differently in the minds of the hearer depending upon his specific concerns. Jesus may have offered the Parable of the Unjust Servant to his disciples, and a meaningful message is to be found for them. But among those disciples would also have been the Temple spies, and in their ears this story would have had a different focus. For was not the priesthood God’s accounting firm? Did they not accept money for sin sacrifice in the temple? To them, Jesus was suggesting “Forgive the debts you have recorded. Doubly: cast aside the profits you gather in the settlement of sin. The Father will admire and reward your generosity.”

In this teaching, we hear the incredible mercy of Jesus reaching out even to those that he knows will destroy him. He recognizes their frailty in the face of the enormous burden they are required to carry, made more difficult in their age by the power of the state that allowed mere men to behave as though they were gods.

In terms recognized in the modern era, the nature of this danger was first made explicit to me when reading A General Theory of Love (Lewis, Amini and Landon). Written by three psychotherapists, the book begins with a survey of the nature of human psychological experience – our relationships, neurophysiology and neurochemistry. Then at the end of chapter three, the authors take the trolley off the tracks. They state (I paraphrase): “We will now describe the psychotherapeutic process. In therapy, the therapist enters into the experience of trauma with the patient, and as the moment is reached, suggests to them: ‘Not that way. Go this way instead.’ In this intimacy, the success of the treatment is entirely dependent upon the moral clarity and courage of the therapist. If either of them fails, the therapist becomes trapped in the patient’s trauma.”

Here at WordPress, I have encountered a number of therapists that decry the Diagnostic Standards Manual and its emphasis on pharmacology. They perceive that our society is failing its most sensitive members, those that empathize with suffering but lack the power to change the circumstances that cause it. Much of their behavior is an attempt to anaesthetize or redirect their suffering. But many therapists in training are not prepared to confront such psychic agony. They are trained to a mechanical model of mind, learning theory and practice in sterile lecture-hall settings, and so are unprepared to confront agony when they encounter it. Their response is to withdraw and write a prescription that suppresses the outward signs of trauma.

In effect, this is the same response taken by the temple priests: rather than dealing with the trauma of sin, they transferred the cost to other beings – innocent animals sacrificed in atonement. The goal was to keep the people pure. What Jesus came to point out was that this did not solve the problem of sin – it merely shifted it away temporarily, allowing it to gather to assault the sacred community again and again and again. The only way to solve the problem of sin was for the strong to shoulder the burden for the weak.

The Garden of Eden describes a community that obtained that strength through direct relation with God. When we chose to partake of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we lost that protection. Our religions and social sciences are institutions created in our search as a species for methods to organize resources sufficient to overcome the psychological trauma of the violent processes of Darwinian evolution. That strength was not inherent in us. It had to be created in us through our own effort.

Prior to the modern era, it was on the Rabbis and Priests and Gurus that responsibility was settled for delivering on all of God’s magnificent promises. We know them “Every tear will be wiped. Every fear will be banished.” How could we expect our religious leaders to possess such means, when if they did the era of paradise would be manifested in an instant? And so they broke – and continue to break – under the weight of their burden.

And so here I am to announce: that is not justice. It is no person’s place to stand in evidence of love in our hearts. No person can wash away the wounds of trauma, for they all seek refuge in God from their own trauma. Each person must find their healing in the open chambers of their own heart, with God.

The history of religious tolerance was marked by revolutions against the hypocrisy of religious authority. But that in itself is hypocrisy: no man stands between you and God, only your own fear that love is insufficient to deliver healing. Paradise enters the world when we stop shifting our burdens onto those we establish as idols, whether in temples or churches, and surrender ourselves to God’s ministry.

Jesus did not write a Gospel because no words can describe that feeling: the feeling of infinite compassion and mercy encountered in the heart that receives God. When it is felt, we cease to rail against our idols. Rather, we offer “Thank-you for your service. I am sorry that I placed my burdens on you. Let me give you rest and ease, as I have found rest and ease in Christ.”

And for those with ears to hear: This is how you will know him when he returns. Your hearts will shout with joy.

Balke, Principal of Uncertainty

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After seven-and-a-half years of working with ancient technology at my current employer, I began putting my resume around in February. The process has been discouraging. I was truly excited about a start-up in San Francisco that was looking to help self-generators maximize the return on their excess electricity, but the HR manager wasn’t interested in organizing a plane flight up from Los Angeles. The hiring manager broke off contact with “Let me know when you’ve got yourself relocated to San Francisco.” I’ve also looked for opportunities in the motion control industry, applying to half-a-dozen positions. I didn’t even get a call back.

The real action is in Java and cloud services, but when I began to work on updating my skills in these areas, I came down really sick in the beginning of March with symptoms that hung on until just this week. Not wanting to be taking interviews while sick, I put the job search on hold. But it might be deeper than that. My brother is also looking for work, and calls me occasionally to share experience. The last time I found myself saying “I don’t know, Ben. I think that I’m getting messages from the world that I’ve been investing my energy in the wrong places.”

With some extra time on my hands, I decided to take up the charge placed on me by John Zande, who insisted that I should try to drum up support for my ideas on fundamental physics. His recommendation was to focus on the Templeton Foundation and its awardees. So I went out to the Foundation’s site and discovered the Fundamental Questions Institute. The mission of the institute seems sympathetic to my goals, but when I contacted the academics that dominate its board, their responses were “I can’t participate in this.” I didn’t even see any hits on my New Physics page.

I understand the reticence of these men: they probably deal with a lot of cranks. But I led my invitations with a list of serious deficiencies in the standard model that should have demonstrated that I am a serious commentator. You would have thought that they would have at least been curious. Of course, I can invest in developing a presence out on their forums, hoping to establish myself in their community, but the conversation seems to be dominated by philosophers rather than physicists, and – dammit – I’ve got a full-time job already.

As this was unfolding, I met with a life coach named Jamie Wozny down in the little garden next to the contributors’ steps at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Still wobbly with my illness, I chased her down standing next to the parking elevator facing a sign that said “Tired of Waiting?” Feeling frustrated with life, I just let it all hang out, telling her a lot of things that I’ve never shared with anyone else, culminating with the laughing observation “You know, the angels love me. If people don’t want me here, why shouldn’t I just wander off to be with them?”

Jamie’s advice was to get myself registered as a minister (thank-you, Universal Life Church), purchase some insurance, and hang up my shingle as a minister at Weebly or one of the other free web-site hosting services. “Your tribe will find you,” she assured me. Remembering the excitement I felt when I designed my t-shirt, the “Love Returns” theme came to mind. I spent my spare time over the next two weeks learning HTML5 animation syntax to build an introductory page, and outlining the content for the rest of the site. Today, I’ll be heading down to a workshop run by Jamie and her partner in Santa Monica where they rent out space in a healer’s studio. That might be a good place to hang up my shingle. While it’s a little distant from home, it’s close to the community centered in Culver City that I’ve been dancing with over the last ten years.

I got another push in this direction from Ataseia, co-organizer of LA Ecstatic Dance, when I told him that I was probably going to be relocating in the near future. He looked at me seriously and said “That’s going to be a real loss to our community.” It was the tone that gave me pause. Robin and he have always made a point of thanking me for my presence, but I had always assumed that was just because I come to all the events.Nobody had ever explicitly recognized the energy and love that I share on the dance floor, except the rare participant that comes up to tell me “thank-you” (and those that do I usually never see again). But at last week’s event, the staff went out of their way to honor my presence among them.

So I’ve been trying to shift my perspective regarding that community, wondering how to introduce myself as a commentator on science and theology with the goal of encouraging people to interact with me. It’s not easy – one of the few people to have read Ma told me that there were very few authors that could write the gamut from the intimately personal, expanding into broad social concerns and beyond to the eternal. There is just so much to say. And so maybe the right way to start is with “I love you all. I express that love through dance and touch, but it’s rooted deeply in my understanding of science and theology. I think that it’s time to share that understanding with the world. If you’d like to hear what I have to say, or know of a forum that would be receptive, let’s talk.”

Then on Thursday morning I came out to check the site stats and discovered that I had almost two hundred hits overnight. When I checked my e-mail, I found a note from Jeffrey Nash that he had printed out all of the essays listed in my “New Physics” and “Faith” pages. We’ve been chatting about quantum mechanics and the basis of spiritually at his Awakening Process sessions and before the Improv Jam on Sundays. He tracks a number of researchers, and wanted to meet with me to discuss my ideas. When that was delayed due to upcoming travel, he said that he would print out some of my writing and read it to prime the conversation. His obvious enthusiasm is deeply flattering. Jeff is a profound healing presence for the people that gather around him.

Among those are a number of young ladies that have strong and expressive bodies. I’ve generated some confusion among them, which I finally addressed while cuddling after an exhausting duet. The woman began to ask probing questions, and I found myself saying “Well, one of the things that an older man can do for a young lady is to encourage her to recognize just how precious she is.” After we broke up, I danced with a few more people, but having already spent three hours on the floor at Ecstatic Dance, I began to cramp up and creak in the knees. Looking to pack up and go, I wandering to the back of the room and found Sophie, a recent addition to the community, beckoning to me from the edge of the “squishy hug-fest” that forms towards the end of the dance. It turns out that she’s working on her Ph.D. in Jungian psychology. As the squishy mass rolled off, we stayed behind, she eventually allowing me to pillow my head on her belly, and talked about psychology and spirituality until the Jam rolled up at 9 PM. As we stood, she asked me about my Ph.D., and laughingly admitted that she didn’t know anything about particle physics. As I offered to explain it to her sometime, I realized that maybe I’d found another community of receptive people.

So here’s a summary of my life over the last two months:

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