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Judgment in Self-Defense

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In Matthew 7:1-2, Jesus offers:

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

The challenge of living this guidance is that people cause us pain. That may be as small as saying an unkind word to us, or as severe as murdering one that we love. Do we not have the right to decide that those that hurt us should be placed apart? Do we not have the right to protect ourselves?

This quandary reflects an understanding of “judgment” as part of a legal process. We take the evidence of our experience and then organize our lives to avoid harm. The futility of this strategy was summarized by Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Just because we push evil away from us doesn’t make it go away. It either shifts its focus to others, or bides its time until it has the strength to assault us again. This applies even beyond the grave: in a secular sense, punishing an offender heightens the stakes of wrong-doing, and so pushes the criminal to take ever greater risks. Spiritually, destruction of the body doesn’t destroy the spirit, which must return again and again until it finds a personality strong enough to heal it.

Jesus, as the healer of last resort for broken personalities, understood this with a terrible immediacy. He could feel the trapped goodness in the people that were judged by the Canaanite culture. Whether speaking to the adulteress or the thief on the cross, Jesus knew that they had been conditioned to the most vengeful judgment of all: the self-judgment that they were beyond redemption.

It is this spiritual consequence of judgment that I think Jesus is focusing on in this teaching. He speaks of other-judgment as like a “plank” or a “beam” in the eye of the one that judges. It is to say: “As we all sin, if you believe that your fellow sinner cannot be saved, then you also believe that you cannot be saved.”

Jesus is speaking from the knowledge that God can heal any wound in those that are willing to receive the gift. This is what he affirms again and again after healing transpires in his presence: “Your faith has healed you.”

What is most painful to me is reading the scripture of Matthew in light of the fact that Jesus did not write a gospel. He understood how the law had been manipulated by the priesthood to divide the people from God. In this case, those among us that have reason to fear direct contact with God use Jesus’ words to argue “You do not have the right to judge me.” They use the power of our minds to hold us in sway as they tear out of our hearts the love that we receive from God.

It is such that Jesus refers to when he calls those that judge “hypocrites.” One way of interpreting his inducement [Matt. 7:5]:

first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

is that the hypocrite will discover himself to be the speck in his brother’s eye! But just below Jesus also counsels [Matt. 7:6]:

Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.

So he clearly believes that those the love honestly must protect themselves. So how are we to do that?

First, we should not judge, because in judging those that attempt to tear apart our hearts we are affirming that they cannot go to God for what they need. They do have that power, and we need to let that responsibility rest with them.

Secondly, we should recognize that nothing that Jesus taught requires us to surrender our hearts to those that harm us. But we have a part to play there. We should not engage in argument of judgment because it diverts our attention from our heart, leaving it wide open to plunder.

Finally, then, we should love ourselves. When the plunderer comes into our hearts, we need simply to say: “No, that is mine. I will not relinquish it to you.” If we stop acting as their drip feed for God’s love, they’ll eventually conclude that they have to go to the source themselves, or allow their souls to wither and die.

This law of natural consequences is far more powerful and permanent than any punishment that we could organize.

The Struggle

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These thoughts began to form this Sunday during services at the University Catholic Center down in Westwood.

May all those that surrender their light in service to dispelling the darkness be gathered by welcoming arms into the healing heart of Christ.

And from that sacred nexus that joins all open hearts, may the one lost realize the opportunity, in that place outside of time, to reach out to those that grieve for their loss – to whisper into our hearts words of comfort and encouragement in every moment that offers an opportunity to renew our strength and courage, and so to guide us toward healing.

And may we that grieve not build a wall of resentment against God, who suffers in sorrow alongside us, but remain open to the voices of those we have lost, and so discover that we are not abandoned – that our loved ones, while no longer physically present, are still with us in spirit.

Finally, may we all remember that our sorrow, if we but seize it as an opportunity to continue the work of healing begun by Christ, is but a momentary experience on a journey that leads to an eternity of love.

Evolving Dementia

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My mother spent most of her life supporting families dealing with cancer, but now Alzheimer’s is becoming a comparable epidemic. In 2012, estimates held that nearly 5.4 million Americans had the disease in some stage. The neurological characteristics of the disease include formation of protein plaques in the cranial fluid, which start to develop as much as thirty years before the onset of dementia. In the final stages of the disease, proteins in the neurons themselves begin to tangle, killing the cells and leading inexorably to loss of muscle control and death.

My mother had recorded a Nova special on the efforts of drug companies to develop treatment for the disease. The resources dedicated to the research are impressive – the special focused on three companies running drug trials costing up to $1 billion. The treatments attempt to mobilize the immune system to harvest and break down the proteins that form plaques. Early treatments caused dangerous swelling of the brain. The current generation of treatments avoid that side-effect, but while the special heralded that breakthroughs were possible, to the scientist, the justification for that hope appears incomplete.

The researchers do not hope to reverse the progress of the disease, but hold forth the possibility that treatments may slow the formation of plaques. This hope is inspired by three-year studies that demonstrated that early-stage patients showed 30% less cognitive degradation than observed in patients that did not receive the drug. But Alzheimer’s evolves over decades, and we have no way of knowing whether long-term treatment won’t result in complications that rival the disease itself. Nor, without expensive radiographic imaging of everyone’s brain around the age of thirty, do we have any way of knowing currently who requires the treatment.

Obviously, if we understood why the plaques form in the first place, we might be able to prevent the disease entirely. Given the expense of the research, however, it is obvious that some commercial profit must be generated to keep the work alive. As with diabetes and cancer, long-term drug treatments will generate that revenue.

But can it ever lead us to a cause?

One of the criteria for canonization is proof of a miracle. In the case of Pope John Paul II, one of those demonstrations was the miraculous healing of a nun with Parkinson’s disease, another degenerative nerve condition. Scientists hold that such demonstrations are simple fraud or chance correlation with spontaneous recovery. But if we take spirituality seriously, we might expect that the development of human intellect would create stresses in our physiology that it was never designed to sustain.

As I understand our intellect, the brain is an interface to the world of ideas. In sharing ideas, we build power in them. This power is not held by any one individual, but held in what Jung called humanity’s “collective unconscious.” No other creature had ever created this kind of repository, and so we would not have inherited from our animal predecessors any mechanisms that would protect our brain from direct exposure to such energies.

Consider, then, what might happen if we taught our children that thinking occurs in the brain. Every intense intellectual exercise would intuitively manifest as an attempt to take control of ideas, to force them into the interior of our brains where we can manipulate them most directly. But each thinker that wrestles with ideas struggles against the intentions of other thinkers, creating dissonance and stress in the tissues of the brain. Might this not result in damage to that delicate organ, an organ that never evolved to deal with such strain?

In my own case, when I began to take charge of my mind back in 2002, I had to struggle against corrupt residents. The strain expressed itself physically in my brain as pressure, sensations of heat, and in the most extreme occasion, sounds of the cranial bone cracking. The events that most frightened me, however, involved a sensation of burning in the nerves along my ribs that I found similar to the symptoms of shingles in its early stages. When I realized this, I turned inwards, considering the structure of my mind, and traced the problem to an over-heated section of my brain in the back of my skull. Realizing that my mind was passing energy through tissues not designed to process it, I tried to shift the flow outwards, into the soul that blooms all around me. I felt of shifting of spiritual structures, and over the next few days, the symptoms disappeared.

My belief, therefore, is that even if we figure out how to stave off the onset of Alzheimer’s using drug therapy, our medical science, with its focus on proteins and genomes, will never touch the root cause of our evolving epidemic of dementia. Our subconscious struggle for the control of ideas will simply intensify, and manifest in other forms of disease. No, it is the idea that the brain is the mind that is at fault. Only when we begin teaching people how to manage the part of their mind that resides in the soul will we be able to prevent dementia.

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.”

Translucence

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I applied for a job out in Monrovia last week. My intuition is that an interview will not be forthcoming, but the opportunity caused me to realize that Pasadena is a center of activity that resonates well with the forces that attract my attention. Not only are JPL and CalTech premier technology centers, the latter hosts the Skeptics Society, a community of relatively free-thinking people. Just down the freeway in Claremont we have a divinity school, public policy college and Harvey Mudd. Sierra Madre hosts Reasons to Believe, a group of Christian apologists led by the Hugh Ross, who is nearing retirement. Finally, I’d be able to join the contact improve community, work out at the Bikram studio, and hike in the San Gabriel mountains.

But in my reflections on the general milieu, a specific personality came to the fore. It was a part of the experience at last year’s Skeptics Conference that I didn’t reveal at the time.

In reading intellectual history, we almost always find that liberal communities have as their nucleus a forum in which self-assured and beautiful women can meet brilliant men. That was readily apparent to me at the conference, although I found myself a little embarrassed by the age differential between the men and the ladies. Not being an anomaly in that regard, I focused on the ideas that were presented.

But as I was wandering from the conference hall to the snack table, an alabaster woman in a cerulean silk shift caught my attention. The combination was striking in itself, but as she turned away from me, the plunging back of her dress revealed a pink welt where her lower ribs had pressed against her seat. I was completely beguiled by this evidence of her physical vulnerability, and allowed myself to enjoy deeply the desire to protect her.

She froze and turned to glance at me out of the corner of her eye, lips parted gently in surprise, then took refuge with her friends. But as the conversations wound down and the attendees wandered back to the hall, I found her standing in my way, ten feet apart from a little semi-circle of her friends, and had to resist the impulse to escort her back to her seat.

I have my own evidence of vulnerability, deep scars on my face from eczema that did not clear until I was in my late twenties. My father suffered similarly in his youth, and his uncle treated him with x-rays, probably contributing to the skin cancer that left him disfigured at the end of his life. My own case evolved into deep abscesses, left untreated until my mother was approached by a counselor in high school. This left me terribly humble in the presence of women in college, exacerbated by my awareness that when I found a young lady trying to draw her boyfriend’s attention to me, I would be beset by hatred that caused the pimples to burn.

All of my life, I have caught unguarded glances from my intimates that reveal just how disfigured I appear in direct sunlight, and many people have advised me to have my skin smoothed. But I have never bothered, because I almost always found that the pity was replaced by an apologetic smile. The smile seemed to be accompanied by a recognition that it was my heart and mind that were precious to them, and that my outward appearance was only so jarring because of the contrast with what they encountered within.

The evening with the Skeptics Society ended with a performance by a Ukrainian band led by brilliant pianist. I sat in the front row on the left side where I could see his hands on the keys, and was surprised to discover that nobody else sat in the row with me. Rather, the crowd, greatly reduced from the day’s attendance, was scattered around the hall. The pianist was an instigator, though, and commanded us all to get up and dance. Michael Schermer’s wife caught sight of me cutting the rug in my socks, and came over to bump hips with me. But across the center row, I caught sight of the alabaster woman again, clapping her hands and bouncing gently on her heels.

For the last number, we were called onto the stage itself. I found myself dancing toward the piano. The performer laid himself atop the lid and played backwards on the keys while I raised my encircled hands over his heart, guiding energy into him. He finally staggered away, stopping next to his brother, the lead guitarist, pointing at me and shaking his head in wonder. As the number wound down, I turned to go, the calm center of a stunned gathering, and found the young lady offering me her admiration and desire.

I have tried to communicate this before: women are designed to bind personality to matter, and deep in their hearts there is nothing they desire more than to do that in partnership with love. But her wonder reflects a common feminine reality: men want to project their greed into them. As a society, we have conditioned them to accept that, and so as a form of protection they dis-integrate themselves. The sacred vessel of the womb is divided from their heart and mind. My deepest shame as a man originates in the sympathetic cry of my heart in the presence of women that have been so wounded. I try to put them back together again, and the response is often a desire to take me into them.

There used to be a saying about a man “moving heaven and earth” to safeguard a woman’s love. But the wounds on my face are evidence of engagement in a deep spiritual conflict. More than once, I have had visions of offering a woman the earth to tend with me. They flee in sorrow, return it upon realizing they don’t know what to do with it, or surrender it to their more acquisitive sisters. Fortunately, its preferences are clear – while it took me decades to gather it the first time, in the last instance I regained it in a few hours.

Mary Margaret invited us out to Pomona College this evening for her senior art exhibit, and I decided to make a day of it out in Pasadena at the Huntington. As I drove down the 101, I was again in the presence of the lady in blue, and found myself revisiting that scene outside the conference hall. Stepping in front of her, I stooped to whisper “You understand that your skin is suffused with the light that seeks to come into the world through you?” The wonder in her eyes allowed me to encourage her “I can unlock that for you, but you have to understand that it’s too much for your body to contain. You have to let it out into the world – into the trees, the little creatures of the air and field, the very air, the clouds and sun themselves. Do you understand?” She nodded, and I stepped behind her and placed my hand over heart.

To feel her expand in radiant fluorescence that was celebrated by all the world around her.

Nothing is Sacred

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Because of the facial hair, I at first didn’t recognize Richard. He plopped down an eclectic pile of esoterica and headed off to the café counter. Glancing at the titles, I had to admit that my curiosity was piqued. So when he sat down I struck up a conversation.

His authoritative tone brought recollection. As is common with those possessing encyclopedic knowledge, the conversation caromed across mystical frameworks: Knights Templar, the Qaballah, Chakras, Theosophy, and ninja traditions were highlighted in a nearly impenetrable mash-up of terminology.

As he leafed through his books, he stopped at the Masonic eye of the pyramid. I offered, “I’ve met one of those.”

“What, the cap on the pyramid?”

“It’s not a cap. See, it’s not a three-dimensional object. It’s a triangle.” I paused for that to sink in. “It’s a representation of a personality embedded in two dimensions.”

“Two dimensions? Really. What did you do with it?”

I shrugged. “It asked me for help.”

Attempting to reassert control, he then dove into a history of encounters with Uriel, the angel of wisdom. As he began to skip across theological boundaries, I reined him back in.

“So given that offering of power, what purpose have you chosen?”

“Purpose?”

“Yes. When we enter into the spiritual flow, we encounter many messages. Not all of them are intended for us. In the time of Jesus, there were many self-proclaimed Messiahs. Today, we have Rev. Moon. I have found that pursuit of a chosen purpose helps me to filter the messages.”

“Oh. I guess that I haven’t done that.” Then he slipped into a cynical analysis of idolatry.

“So what makes something sacred?” I interrupted.

“That’s the point. Nothing is sacred.”

“Well, let me offer this perspective: a sacred experience links the past to the future through a conduit of love. They can only be established through the genuine exchange of love, because if selfishness arises on either end, the connection is blocked. So to the cynic the saint’s bone is just a bone, while the faithful find it to have great mystical power. The bone is not necessary to the connection, but can facilitate it.”

He broke off at that point, as my brother Ben sauntered up. Somehow, though, I don’t think that he was done with the conversation.

Reductio ad Consterno

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In the Darwinian sense, humanity’s greatest asset is its intellect. The expressions of human intellect are so unique in the animal kingdom that it is not possible to understand its character and limitations by study of other creatures. Furthermore, the creative power of intellect is such that for many of us the natural world is no longer part of our experience. This is true even in the Third World, where most land once wild is now cultivated (where it has not been rendered arid), and the predators that dominated those ecosystems may be slaughtered to produce aphrodisiacs for the Chinese market.

And so man is the most self-involved of all creatures.

In the animal kingdom, evolutionary advantage is a simple proposal: a creature either lives or dies. In human societies, however, methods such as agriculture demanded attention to politics. Freed from the daily concerns of physical survival against the natural tyrannies (hunger, disease, the elements and predation), the danger is that our fellows will organize to seize our goods, break up our families, and take our lives. To a large degree, our survival depends upon inventing reasons for them to not do these things, and indoctrinating them to live according to those constraints.

The easiest way to accomplish this is the path of illusion – to invent entertainments that consumers believe will bring them benefits greater than the price of entry. The trick of tyranny, of course, is to replace the suckers just at the moment that they start demanding more than they contribute. That makes primitive societies terribly unstable.

The alternate path is the path of reason, which is properly understood to be philosophy, or the study of the operation of the intellect. As urban societies arose, three great cultures gave rise to distinct philosophical traditions: China produced Confucianism, India gave birth to the Veda (and its outgrowth, Buddhism) and the Occident sired Hellenism.

Despite their differences, these three threads of philosophical thought share similar concerns. Given that the intellect exists, what does it operate on? What are its virtues and pathologies? How do we strengthen the former and heal the latter?

Those explorations were formalized and documented in societies that were all making the transition to urban culture. This meant, on the one hand, that their ideas were made stronger through competition with the ideas of other thinkers. But many of the early philosophers also stood in opposition to the moral decay (one of the pathologies of intellect) that festers in urban societies. They celebrated a life in harmony with nature – nature that in its forms and behaviors expresses the most durable truths.

The Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle neatly encapsulate the tensions that arise in the study of the intellect. Socrates was a man of leisure in ancient Athens who set out to discover truth, and rapidly learned that his questioning attitude revealed the emptiness of what others heralded as wisdom. Socrates broke the spell of illusion, and was sentenced to death for his troubles.

Socrates’ student Plato realized that the forms of nature were too diverse and imperfect to yield to rigorous categorization and analysis. What differentiates a fox from a dog from a wolf? Where is there any perfectly straight line in nature? Plato and his followers therefore celebrated the abstractions of the mind – or ideas – which were perfect and infinitely malleable, and therefore could be synthesized. Eventually, Plato came to believe that ideas had an independent existence, and were actually the originals from which arose natural phenomenon.

Observing that ideas in of themselves were of no practical use, Plato’s student Aristotle asserted that it was from the study of nature that ideas arise. The concept of “dog” arises naturally in the mind of those that interact with dogs, as a kind of convenient short-hand (a “categorization”) for the similarities of our sensory experiences when interacting with real dogs. Aristotle did not stop there, however, but built a formal logic that could be used to assess the internal consistency of our sets of categories, and applied it to categorization of the natural world around him.

One way of reconciling Plato and Aristotle is to observe that ideas allow us to improve the forms of nature. While perhaps a perfectly straight line cannot be created, rulers are really useful devices, helping us to build sturdy homes, roads and aqueducts. And an understanding of the characteristics of dogs and their variability allows us to benefit greatly from their companionship and hunting skill, while preventing us from trying to get them to serves as mules.

But there was another thread in this conversation in the ancient world, a thread that many modern philosophers tend to deprecate. Plato celebrated ideas not only for their malleability, but also because he was convinced that the mind participated in forms of experience that were not tangible to the physical senses. This was evident in Socrates’ statements just before taking his hemlock, in which he consoled his followers with the assurance that he was simply laying down his physical form to take up conversation with the great thinkers of the past. It is also evident in the rites of passage in pre-urban cultures, which often include a merging with animal or divine consciousness – mergings that have no obvious physical manifestation but that can be sensed by the wise.

This thread is exposed most directly in Indian philosophy. Trying to find a solid basis for managing the natural world, Indian philosophers rapidly realized that we do not have direct experience of nature – everything is mediated by our senses. Diving into a study of the senses, they encountered the vagaries of the mind: two people observing the same phenomenon emphasize different things. A beautiful woman may be an object of desire to one man, but “mother” to another. Plumbing the depths of how we form intentions, the Indian philosophers consistently encountered, beneath all of our corrupting interests, an eternal presence of universal love. As mystics withdrawing from the world of things to celebrate that presence, often reduced to penury, they became irrelevant. Prompted by the longing of love to be revealed in service to all people, the mystics began to study to problems of their peers, which were almost always practical. And so the cycle was renewed in the study of nature.

In the West, the turning of this cultural wheel was impeded by the rise of Christianity and Islam, both of which celebrate prophets and propagate rituals that purport to guide the faithful into the presence of the love celebrated by the Indian mystics.

The key word here is “purport.” Because relationship with the divine is discerned reliably only by the wise, religion falls all-too-easily into the pattern of illusion. This is not only a fault in the leaders of religions. who find it all too easy to turn their authority to material benefit (witness the success today of those peddling prosperity theology). Many adherents are also seeking charity, and not always from legitimate need. Blocked by self-seeking, they often fail to attain any meaningful mystical union.

What saddens me about modern academic philosophy is that it has succumbed almost entirely to Aristotelean materialism. It ignores or trivializes the Platonic experience of soul relation. It therefore surrenders fully half of the power of the human intellect, and in particular the half that allows us to tap into the energies that give strength to compassion and charity.

While they may appear narcissistic, my writings here are an attempt to give courage to those that recognize this great want in our hearts. In attempting to surrender myself as a servant to love, I have had many great and joyful experiences. But it is not of me that the greatness arises. From me arises only the hungering to feel joy, and the hope that it will not be denied me.

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:

PingPongBall

Ever Expanding

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On Sunday afternoon from 4 to 6, I’ve been attending Jeff Nash’s Awakening Process workshops at the Love Dome down in Venice. I had been going to the Friday evening sessions that included dance expression in the second hour, but as I’m down in Santa Monica on Sunday nights for the LA Full-Contact Improv Jam, I decided to save myself the stress of a second trip.

The Sunday afternoon sessions are intimate, with typically three or four participants. We normally begin with a brief discussion of theory, focusing on a particular life issue raised by one of the attendees. The foundations of the process are simple: we’re here to learn to relate to one another. Pain is best thought of as a signal that guides healing energy. When we relax into the flow of that energy, our bodies do a far better job of healing themselves than any conscious process can emulate.

Releasing the stress of the week, we typically begin to collapse to the floor after a half an hour, lying on mats and pillows. Jeff comes by with essential oils, asking what I’m feeling. He doesn’t guide, simply asking for clarification, and when the feeling is clearly defined, whether there is a memory attached to the feeling. When I express stress, Jeff reminds me to focus on my exhale, which allows me to release.

The evolution of the experience has been deeply beneficial. It began with some tension, as Jeff was raised 7th Day Adventist, and his assessment of Christianity reflected the dogmatism of that sect. Once we got that out of the way, he is really in tune with what I have going on inside of me, concluding his visits with the observation that I should be looking for a trigger for my emotions and sensations from a time “early in this life,” followed after a brief pause with, “or in a past life.”

The efficacy of his guidance became palpable two weeks ago. I have been struggling with tightness in my left obliques, and when I focused more deeply on the problem, traced it to something that seemed to be attached to the inside of my rib cage on the left side. Advised to let healing flow into the area, a distinct warmth came, and the tension dissolved.

Later in that same session, I became aware that my fingers were curled into my palms. I’ve had  this pointed out to me before, and as I focused on letting them open and extend, recognized that it came with a social predisposition to guard myself from casual intimacy. As I stood at staff meeting the next morning with my fingers spread and feeling myself rooted into the floor, one of my antagonists stared at me, sitting up to confront my presence before slumping in defeat.

That sense of rootedness carried over to my yoga practice. I realized that I was still bearing most of my weight on the right foot, and began methodically to balance weight identically on each foot. This has relieved me of the burden of fighting subtle weight imbalance, allowing me to relax into postures that once I strained to maintain.

Last Sunday this focus on balance carried on down to the mat. I opened my palms and forced the left side of my glutes to bear equal weight. I felt my arms lengthen, and my knuckles anchor deeply into the wood floor. I was filled with a great openness, and then a sudden urge to curl up into a ball. After relating to Jeff that “I need to fight that”, he offered that “You could let yourself curl up.” Instead, I relaxed more deeply, and felt myself expanding. For I moment I panicked, admitting that “There’s danger there,” but also a welcoming presence sending the thought “You’re not alone.” Jeff asked what I was feeling, and I could only offer “I’m in the world now.” Not quite satisfied, he asked “And what does that feel like?” Lacking meaningful words, I offered “Like a great circle closing.”

Later that night, I slid up next to him. Rubbing his back tenderly, I leaned into his shoulder and whispered, “I remember you.”

He had praised my virtue when others would not.

The Process

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A while back The Smithsonian had a Christmas issue that highlighted thirty people that matter. As part of my scatter-shot method for letting people know that I was in the world, I decided to send out Christmas cards to them every year for a few years. This was the message in one of them, and is my best attempt to explain what it will be like to live through the process that we are navigating.

The Eve

Standing in the twilight at the end of day,
Fears and wants surround us, searching our lost way.
Circle we the borders, shutting reality out,
Or open now our hearts, bringing rest to doubt?

EMBRACE the tortured land, the dark, abandoned waters,
Fauna’s angry sons, Flora’s timid daughters.
Conceiving in our minds patterns just and true,
Guide the subtle elements into balances anew.

This has been our calling, since consciousness begot.
The gates of time will open, racing through our thought.
The Eternal formed in instant, joining women and men:
Wisdom that was given, WE shall give again.

So rest your burdensome body. Dawn is evening turned!
Love moves with, in, through us: grace our destiny earns.

That word “grace” is often seen as something given to us by God, but here it suggests an end to our resistance to the love that is tendered to us. In other words, it means “lack of drama.”