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Quantum Entanglement

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John Markoff at the New York Times has been heralding an experiment at Delft as disproving Einstein’s view of the universe. While I have my own issues with Einstein, I am not as impressed with the Delft demonstration as Markoff and others appear to be.

The quantum world is incredibly mysterious to us – we cannot observe its inner workings directly, but only observe its side-effects. This means that we can’t make statements about the behavior of any one system of particles, but only about many systems in aggregate.

Let me give a classical example. When we toss a coin in the air, we know that there is a fifty percent chance that it will land “heads up.” If we could measure the coin’s position and rate of spinning and also knew precisely the properties of the floor that it would land on, as it was in flight we could calculate precisely which way it would land. But we can’t do that, so we believe that there is an element of “chance” in the outcome. In the terminology of quantum mechanics, we might say that the coin in flight is in a “quantum” state: 50% heads up and 50% heads down.

Now let’s say that we put two people in a room and asked them to toss a coin. Since we can’t observe the thoughts in their mind, we might consider them to be in an “entangled” state. We know that if we ask one the answer, we’ll receive the same answer from the other We then separate them by miles and ask the first one what the result of the toss was. If she says “heads,” we know instantaneously that the second person will also say “heads.” So we might say that the state of the pair has “collapsed” to “heads” instantaneously, and we know what answer will be given by the second person.

But the information didn’t travel instantaneously from one to the other. The two people from the room knew all along what the answer was.

If this is actually the nature of quantum entanglement of very small particles such as electrons (the subject of the experiment in Delft), why do scientists become so confused about the process of information transfer?

That chance in coin tossing actually reflects the randomness of the tossing process: the position of the coin on our thumb, the effort of our muscles, the condition of the floor: only with great practice could we ensure that all of these were identical on each toss. If that investment in discipline were made, we could actually control the outcome of the toss, achieving heads 100% of the time.

Now let’s say that, unbeknownst to us, the coin tossers are actually trained in this skill. How would we find out? We couldn’t find out from one experiment. Even after a second experiment, there’s still a one-in-four chance that a random toss would achieve “heads” in both cases. No, we’d have to run many experiments, and decide how improbable the outcome would have to be before we accepted that something was wrong with our theory of coin tossing.

In other words, the confusion comes in because the philosophy of quantum mechanics confuses the problem of proving the correctness of the theory with the actual behavior of the particles that produce any specific outcome. In our coin-tossing case, the quantum theory holds that we’ll get heads 50% of the time. But to prove that, we have to do many, many experiments.

Let’s extend this to the problem of Schroedinger’s cat: a cat is in a box with a vial of poison gas and a radioactive isotope. When the isotope decays (at some random time), a detector triggers a hammer to smash the vial. In the “accepted” philosophy of quantum mechanics, the state of the isotope evolves over time, being partially decayed. This means that the state of the cat is also partially dead. When we open the box, its “wave function” collapses to one state or the other.

We can clarify this confusion with a thought experiment: In our coin tossing example, let’s say that we put coins in boxes and had children run around the room to shake them up, randomizing their state. In quantum mechanical terms, we would say that the state of any one coin was “50% heads.” When we look in a box, the state of that coin is determined: it’s wave function collapses to either heads or tails. It is only by observing all of the coins, however, that we can determine whether the children actually were successful in randomizing the state of the coins.

By analogy with this, we can only prove Schrodinger’s theorem about the “deadness” of cats by performing many experiments. At any instant, however, each cat in its box is either alive or dead. It is unfortunate that we’d have to kill very many of them to determine whether the theory of radioactive decay was correct.

So I side with Einstein: I don’t see any mysterious “action at a distance” in the experiment at Delft, and I certainly don’t see it as proof that information can travel faster than the speed of light.

My own proposition is very different: it is that the dark energy that permeates space and constrains the speed of light can have holes opened in it by the action of our spirit. Once it is removed, the barriers of time and distance fall. When such bonds are created through fear, the subject of the fear seeks to escape them, and the strength of the bond dissipates. When the bonds are created in love, the entanglement persists by mutual consent, and grows inexorably in strength and power, eventually sweeping all else before it.

What kind of confirmation could the physicists at Delft provide of this? I’m not certain, but it would be an experiment in which the electrons were separated, and a manipulation of one was reflected in the other. In our coin-toss experiment, it would be if the two people in the room were separated before the coin toss, and the second knew instantly what the result was of the toss performed by the other. From the video they made, I don’t think that’s what is happening at Delft.

This post in memoriam of Professor Eugene Commins who taught my upper-division course in Quantum Mechanics at UC Berkeley in 1981, and who benefited during his doctoral studies at Princeton from conversations with Einstein.

Rebuking Rebuke

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Response to a post on the Archangel Michael by IB:

I have this wisdom from Jakob Boehme taped across the top of my monitor at work:

If you ask why the Spirit of Love cannot be displeased, cannot be disappointed, cannot complain, accuse, resent or murmur, it is because the Spirit of Love desires nothing but itself.

Mi-ke-el translates roughly as “seeker of the godly.” I would guess that in most cases the fear felt by others was fear of self-knowledge – of their distance and isolation from God. Even worse, perhaps that the seeker Michael would penetrate the fortress of personality that guards what little of God remains in us, and thus bring about the loss even of that portion.

The ultimate rebuke of love is for the sinner to become aware of how badly they have hurt themselves. It is to gently show them what they could be if only they surrendered self-love and accepted the gift of love that is tendered from the Divine Source. So when I see someone pointing a finger of condemnation, I always look at their faces and body language. Are they hurting themselves with their rebuke? If so, I tend to question their motives.

I see this as being very much of a piece with your post yesterday. Well done.

Presenting Ourselves

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When Parashakti runs her Dance of Liberation workshops down at LA Ecstatic Dance, she begins by facilitating the pairing of spirit buddies. While my first experience with her was pretty intense, more recently I’ve been working in service to others. That means that I am chosen, more often than choosing, when she finally says: “Look around and find a spirit buddy, someone close to you. Once you’ve found them, describe your intention for this dance.”

So I pivoted slowly and found myself hooked on the eyes of the really pretty woman, standing tall enough to almost cover my chin. Another gentleman tried to step between us, but she raised her hand to gesture to me.

I’ve never heard such a strongly worded statement of intention. It went on for nearly ten seconds as she spoke about preparing herself in this year to let love flow through her and into the world around her. I brought it to a close by holding my hands over her shoulders and then lowering them until they hovered over her chest, encouraging my angels to fill her heart to the brim. “Thank-you,” she murmured.

“That’s my intention.” Parashakti then told us to stand back-to-back. Feeling that I wasn’t quite connecting with my partner, I tilted my head back until it contacted her crown. She nestled in a little more closely.

I had been right behind her as we danced a circle earlier in the ritual, and had noticed her hands moving as though warding the space around her head. Asthe blindfolds went on, that image came back to me, and after the closing circle thirty minutes later, I told her that I had received something to share with her.

She was the object of a lot of masculine attention during the open dance, and I half expected her to avoid me. But forty minutes in she took a break for water, and gazed pointedly at me. I guided her into a corner, leaning in close to block the pressure of the music, and began, “Our culture projects a lot of ideas that negate a woman.”

“What?”

Not sure whether she was just buying time to process what I had said, I repeated myself. “When you were dancing next to me before the ritual, I noticed you doing a lot of work with your hands around your head, as though you were warding things away.” Stretching my right hand to touch the heavens, “We tend to look to each other for validation, but there is a source of eternal truth.” Hesitantly, I moved my hand closer to her crown, gauging her reaction. “I was offered a message from them: they want you to know that they are reaching out to you.” She just gazed at me, frozen. “When I went through this process, I had to surrender my thoughts and let my heart guide me.” I reached out with my left hand, palm upwards, and envisioned cupping her heart in it. “I had to let my heart energy rise until it merged with my mind.” Raising my left hand until it was just under her chin, I concluded “The heart guides the head, and the head protects the heart.”

I was shirtless and slimy with sweat, so she embraced the air around me, murmuring “Thank-you, thank-you so much,” fleeing and returning two or three times before returning to the floor.

She continued to be popular on the floor, mostly among the younger men that I can now only join briefly in frenzy. I worked the room in my usual manner, spreading joy and tenderness where it was accepted, but really wearing down at the end. As the afternoon drew to a close, I sat on the floor to down dinner, watching as she was intercepted by man after man. Getting up to change clothes for Contact Improv, I came back to sort through my backpack and offer my gratitude to Ataseia. She passed by and I caught her eye. “One more thing.”

She didn’t hesitate. “What you said earlier explained a lot to me about myself as a woman.”

Thinking of her confidence on the dance floor, “Yes, I could see that. But the challenge is hanging on to it. We have to stay focused on them. They have their own purpose, and if we fail in our devotion, they tend to wander away.”

She leaned into the frame of the closed doors, hands clasped before her. That wasn’t what she expected. But her lips offered a gentle bow of curiosity.

“You projected a great deal of positive energy into the room today, but when you began to dance with a man, it turned inwards. I could see you winding inwards, and the source of that energy was left adrift.”

She stopped to reflect, and voiced her agreement.

“If we want to hang on to them, we can’t do that. We have to present ourselves, and wait for the other person to open to us in turn. It’s not a winding into, it’s an expanding through.” She looked uncertain, so I reached out to cup understanding in my right hand, brushing it gently across her.

“I’m not sure that I understand.”

I stepped back. “I present myself. All of myself. And if you respond, I come closer, not directly, but slowly spiraling as my angels introduce themselves to your angels. It’s not always pleasant – some things really don’t belong together. But that’s what we do here. You danced with a lot of people today, as did I. We gently join our personalities, and then the magic happens. We go out into the world and draw upon our shared wisdom and energy.

“But we shouldn’t make too much of that. We need to stay devoted to ourselves, waiting for that encounter to which all of us announces ‘yes!'”

She raised her hand tentatively to demonstrate her understanding. Her eyes narrowed as my entourage resisted her, and I caught them sending “Not without our permission.”

We embrace twice, and she departed with a wistful “Maybe I’ll see you next time.”

“I look forward to it.”

Inner Purge

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I apologize to those who find that this is “too much information.” I am more aware of my spiritual process than most, and part of the purpose of this blog is to help others understand the nature of personality. One of our biggest challenges is figuring out how to get our parts to work together, and encouraging discordant elements to seek opportunities elsewhere.

After the sudden departure of the embedded systems supervisor in November, after winter break the team arrived back at work to learn that the senior hardware designer had accepted a position elsewhere. The last two weeks have been a scramble, and I’ve been pretty brutal about testing others in assessing whether I believe that the company can survive.

Strangely, that process has been accompanied by a deep-rooted sense of joy. It has no specific source that I can identify.

So I had plenty to process last night, and found it hard to nod off. I had activated Microsoft Solitaire early this week, and got involved in trying to catch up on the daily challenges. I’m used to the Sudoku challenges which I often polish off in under ten minutes. Solitaire has an element of chance to it, and I found myself simply unable to complete some of the more difficult puzzles. I’m sure it’s possible, and I indulged myself in playing the same challenges again and again. Giving up around 11:30, I settled in to sleep.

As a man, I have found that the greatest temptation of unconditional love is (as I have alleged elsewhere) to have women offer you many opportunities to bind love to the world. Of course, it’s not that simple. Most of them want to bind that love to them personally, maybe extending to the children that will enter the world through them. I keep on sending out to them “Yes, thank-you, but what about all this?” I conclude with a projection of personality that makes them aware of just how deeply and broadly love is embedded in the world.

But we all dream, of course, and so I wake up in the middle of most nights to throbbing arousal. Until recently, a specific woman was always presented as the focus of desire. Early on they were media personalities linked to my deep past, but more recently there has been a kaleidoscope of ladies that I encounter at dance celebrations, yoga and in coffee shops, many of whom I haven’t even engaged in conversation.

I’ve been slowly boring through that facade, and recently encountered the admiration of a woman without form. She tried to hide from me, but I pinned her down and got a good look into her before turning my attention elsewhere.

Last night’s encounter was something similar. A powerful arousal without focus, just the sense of a feminine personality. I tried to pin it down to push it away, thinking about being able to function at work today, but it was too diffuse. Frustrated, I engaged in the mechanical process of release.

Then they began to arrive, woman after woman, as though the goal was to find someone to attach this passion to, a material manifestation that would be sympathetic to the goals of the originator. I simply pushed them all away, one by one.

As I laid in my bed afterwards, a powerful sense of unease entered me. I had a vision of another room, decorated with bright colors. I focused more and more intently, and then something emerged from the center of my chest – a sickening brown vapor that disappeared reluctantly into the ground.

The vision disappeared, and I was left with a powerful sense of energy along the parasympathetic nodes that line the spine. It was accompanied by a great warmth in the muscles lying over my shoulder blades. And I thought:

I’m getting my wings back.

Yoga Limits

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The constraints of my professional life have driven me to yoga twice. Both times, I was suffering from back pain that constrained my ability to sustain my focus while sitting at my desk. I recognized that the problem was tight hamstrings and a weak core, but I channeled my need for exercise into jogging, which didn’t address either condition.

The first practice was held in the meeting room of a spirituality bookstore. The instructor was an Indian lady, and I was the only man that showed up consistently. As I got stronger in the practice, I eventually found myself with thirteen women hitched to my wagon. At the time, I didn’t have the energy to manage the load, so I quit.

I was able to stay away for a few years, and then I discovered the Bikram yoga studio in Agoura Hills. I have to admit that it’s been a struggle for the owners as much as it has been for me. I am a tall string bean with a large chest.

The relative narrowness of my frame results in transmission of stress into the stabilizing muscles in the hips and lower back that are supported by bones that provide limited leverage. This means that muscle balance is absolutely essential not only to achieve postures, but to avoid overuse injuries. As I strive for that balance, I’ve been developing muscle groups that had always taken a free ride in the past, which means that I become exhausted doing postures that are often placed in the “warm up” or “recovery” category.

After four years I’m finally able reliably to stay in the 105 degree room for the full ninety minutes. While the owners were often frustrated by my bailing out in the middle of class, some of the instructors are impressed by my persistence. Several have observed that the practice is not designed for my body type.

The attraction to me is a feature that many find intolerable – the dreary repetition of the practice. The Bikram formula is a series of twenty-six postures that the instructors describe with a rote dialog. Fortunately, the more difficult postures are progressive. This means that we aren’t expected to achieve full expression, and so I have the latitude to focus on trying to figure out how to get my muscles to work together. It’s a process that has caused my to look in the mirror on occasion and burst out in laughter in the middle of class.

This opportunity to focus on my physical self has been critical to my peace of mind over the last four years. While not typical, I have dreams in which people show up seeking help to keep societies and ecosystems glued together. There’s not much I can do except to offer them the sanctuary of my heart as a place of restoration. It’s frustrating and grievous to me.

So I should have intervened early today when the instructor continued reading his story during the srivasanas that punctuate the exercises of the floor series. Although I realized that it was interfering with my ability to focus on aerobic recovery, I was fascinated by the enthusiasm that filled the room, . The diversion provided some relief from the normal thoughts – people struggling with the urge to escape the room.

The story contrasted the experience of two caterpillars. The humble yellow caterpillar (which I’ll call ‘she’) encounters a grey caterpillar spinning a cocoon. While uncertain about the possibility of becoming a butterfly, the yellow caterpillar finally chooses to try, and discovers comfort in the realization that spinning a cocoon is a natural skill.

The second, striped caterpillar (which I’ll call ‘he’) has chosen to climb a pillar of caterpillars, symbolizing the struggle for social success. As he nears the top, stepping on those below, he is finally unable to penetrate the clinging mass, and becomes trapped. He looks out and sees a field littered with caterpillar pillars, and realizes that his struggle is meaningless – with so many pillars, attaining the pinnacle of one signifies nothing.

As he weighs his options, the yellow butterfly arrives to rescue him. She attempts to pull him out of the pillar, but he draws back, and sees this terrible sorrow in her eyes.

It was at that point that I walked out, the class laughing at my explanation. I laid down on the couch in the lobby, crying “Oh, God!”

I live this every day, and it’s not that simple. They don’t just refuse assistance.

They pull off your wings and drive nails through your hands and feet.

One of the students told me, as I was passing him after class on the way out the door, that “I had missed a good story.” Really? I don’t come to yoga for a spiritual fill-up, or for entertainment. That’s supposed to happen at church or the movies. I come to focus on keeping my body strong enough to bear the burdens that I carry. If I can’t focus on that, then I’m going to have to quit again.

Being Atypical

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I met a new friend today who blogs as Anonymously Autistic. She writes honestly and openly about the challenges of adapting to the world of conventional interaction. I have had my own struggles in this regard. After listening to Amythest Schaber’s testimony of a life spent learning to love herself, the following experiences came to mind. I don’t know if they will resonate with those that are autistic, but I offer them in that hope.

When I went through the darkest part of my life, I went through six jobs in eight years. Job six was a bail-out from my scientific peers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It required me to move away from my sons, which was difficult for me.

The interview was not attended by one of the program principals, who was away on travel. He actually drove down Interstate Five to my house (rather than flying) to converse with me. He said something unusual at the time – he said that I have “presence,” comparing me to the great singers that he had worked with as a member of the San Francisco choir. It was the first time anyone had been that direct with me.

The team I had joined worked with a community of information security specialists in the federal government. When the director brought her team out for a program review, we gathered at a winery so that they could meet me (I had not completed my security clearance, and so was not part of the review). When we had been introduced, we collected around the table and my friend, noticing the reactions of the team, suggested “One of the characteristics of autistic people is that they have trouble with personal boundaries.”

Both characterizations surprised the hell out of me. I have since recalled the young lady in college that, after our introduction, held on to my hand and laughed, “You are incredibly dense.” When I protested, she clarified, “No, not stupid, just – DENSE.” In fact, I didn’t encounter somebody that could roil my waters until after I was forty.

Amythest talks about dancing with her hands, and I think that I know what she is talking about. When I was in junior high school, at the dances I would enter into a trance-like state, dancing with an energy that the other students found hilarious if not disturbing. I have since learned to manage that focus. The way that I characterize it, to those that ask me how I dance as well as I do, is that my Higher Self is looking down on me. I actually don’t know what the heck I am doing, and could not possibly reproduce it later. But afterwards people go out of their way to tell me that I am a great dancer.

The point that I am working towards is that when I became aware of how much spiritual energy I was managing (that “density” mentioned by the coed), I spent a couple of years trying to organize it. I began to have burning pains in my sides (often reported by those with shingles) and burning at the base of my skull. When I focused on those side-effects, I realized that I was trying to channel spiritual energy through physical constructs that were simply incapable of handling the load. It was like trying to run 30 Amps of current through a wire rated for 20 Amps. In that instant, I simply shifted the flow out of my brain, and began to work directly with the spiritual structures that generated it.

Amethyst talks about the enormous depth of the love that she feels. My experience causes me to wonder if she isn’t an angel trying to squeeze herself into a representation that people can relate to. Part of that includes forcing her to engage them in the normal way. If she’s in any way like me, however, that’s just not going to work. There’s too much energy in her soul, and it overwhelms her physical apparatus. She needs to find things like ecosystems and cultural moires to channel it into.

Looking Ahead

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It’s such a beautiful experience, moving through a crowd of gentle people, and then getting hooked on life, stretching out a hand and feeling the pulse of the Amazon, caressing the Andes and then making the leap from Tierra del Fuego to Cape Hope, gently cupping the Congo and pausing before merging into the thrum of Ethiopia. Stuck there, I reached across with the other hand and felt the rainforests of Southeast Asia, roamed over the Russian tundra, and then slowly squeezing inward around the pustule that is the Middle East, soaking it with the healing energy of life and love.

And later she said, hesitantly “It seems that it’s going to get worse.”

“I’m afraid that is what I see, too.”

With the air of one surrendering innocence, she hazarded “But it’s not going to affect people like us.”

I had to look away, trying to find a formulation that did not take air out of the joy she was sharing with me. “Well, in order to bring healing, we have to make a diagnosis. That means getting close enough to feel their pain.”

It’s the last hurrah of selfishness. It knows it, and so figures there’s nothing to lose.

As Matt Maher promises in “Hold Us Together”:

It’s waiting for you knocking at your door
In the moment of truth when your heart hits the floor

And you’re on your knees

And love will hold us together
Make us a shelter to weather the storm
And I’ll be my brother’s keeper
So the whole world will know that we’re not alone

Father, Finally

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My father is in the final stages of his journey here. For the last month, he has been surrendering to the prostate cancer that is invading his bones. His principal fear has been of being a burden to my mother, and so he has methodically tried to further the process. The degradation of his sense of taste is facilitating his resolve. It is clear that his extremities are being consumed in the effort to maintain the operation of his heart, lungs and brain.

I could mourn the loss of his brilliant intellect, but that intellect was a mixed blessing to his intimates. It was a very powerful tool that supported convictions that could lead to harsh judgments. What I am finding instead is that as he weakens and submits to confusion, for the first time in my life I am able to proffer simple acts of tenderness. Stroking his head, rubbing his chest over his heart, holding his hand: these have been rewarded by looks of wonder.

I was caught up, for much of my life, in my father’s ambitions for programming. On the title bar, the “Programming” link offers entries that introduce his philosophy of design. It is my own formulation: my father adopted obscure terminology to ensure precision of meaning, and believed that practice under his tutelage was essential to competence. In fact, inspired by Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game”, his vision of a training center was a monastery. Having grown up with Diagrammatic Programming, when I joined him in the family business in 1995, I rapidly began to innovate. He found this intolerable, and when I finally had the opportunity to articulate my logic to him, his retort was “Well, it’s clear that if you talk long enough, Brian, you could convince people of anything.”

My mother dreaded our conversations. Even as recently as a few months ago, she would retreat into her office when I came by to visit him. I recognized the dynamic that evolved between us, but also saw that the problem was far more complex than just our personal history. During a transfer to the residents of ownership of the mobile home park property, my father fought a tremendous legal and spiritual battle with the lawyers seeking to maximize the developer’s profits at the cost of displacing old friends. My father eventually shared that the lead lawyer was ticketed on a DC10 that crashed when the cabin door popped open in flight, but chose at the last minute not to board. (Yes, a textbook case of misdirected anger.) I had my own struggle with the family law community that cultivated fear on the 7th floor of the Van Nuys court house. After one conversation with my father, I heard the thoughts of one of them admitting of me, “He’s far stronger than we’ve given him credit for.” Eventually I used my father to send a message back: “I’ve done what I’ve done in order that it couldn’t be said that people weren’t given a chance to do the right thing.”

In spite of his spiritual capacities, my father always pooh-poohed my own experiences. I received several clues as to his motivations over the years. Having suffered the traumatic losses of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., he observed once that “All the good people get killed.” Although he was bailed out of the financial consequences of his own ambitions by an inheritance from a distant aunt, he worried about my financial insecurity, and may have considered wasteful my itinerant attendance at churches throughout the Conejo Valley.

But there was a deeper aspect to the problem that became clear only in 2008 when I went out to the Netherlands on a business trip. As I stepped to the visa counter in Amsterdam, I caught the thought “Well, [the Americans] are finally producing real people.” I immediately entered a warm and open relationship with the engineers we had come to visit, and a couple of nights into the trip, I woke up to them poking around in my mind. They found my father, and showed me behind him the tomb of an ancient Germanic king, still struggling to retain control of his line.

My father never had a father. Grandfather Balke left my grandmother, at the time a professional ballet dancer and later an anesthesiologist, after my father was born. From my father’s response to my physical affection, I came to see that the lack of a father was the wound that his antagonists, both ancient and modern, used to attempt to control him and his children.

That realization brought me back to a day when, returning to work after lunch, I waited at a stop light outside the executive suites rented by my brother. The usual argument over priorities was raging in my head. Suddenly, a wave of energy moved through my mind from left to right. Both the stop light and the radio in my car went dead at the same instant, and a woman’s voice announced firmly “His job is to prove to people that love works.”

My father worried about his lack of success, voicing his concern that he didn’t know what it was about him that brought failure where others less talented had achieved success. On Sunday he let me tell him this: “There’s so much good in you, Dad, but the world is full of things that see good and pile dirt all over it. It’s really hard to love somebody without leaving an opening back the other way. One of the great frustrations in my life has been that every time I tried to reciprocate your caring was that you shut me out, as though there was something frightening inside of you that you wanted to protect me from. I’m sorry if I became angry with you at times.

“There are some things about loving that a man can learn only from a father. Next time, find a good father, Dad. It will be a wonderful life.”

Faith “Makes No Sense”

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Another attempt to heal the wound of scientific materialism that condemns spirituality and so undermines faith in unconditional love:

Christianity is not about having faith in general. Christianity is about a specific faith: a faith in the presence of unconditional love that emanates from the divine source. While I have concluded from my own analysis of the scientific evidence that the existence of souls is not thereby contradicted (being that current physical theory actually contradicts itself), and even come thereby to the conclusion that this reality was designed so that love works, that is not the basis of simple Christian faith. The proposition that compels most Christians is that faith connects us to a source of psychological strength.

The most common phrase in the Bible is a variant of “fear not.” If you haven’t studied neurophysiology, fear is antagonistic to reason. The rule-based system of laws in the Old Testament was authorized by God after the story of the Flood, where he basically said “I’m tired of managing you squabbling children. It’s time for you to try to manage yourselves.” That exercise in rule-making was a demonstration of the limits of reason. Jesus came along to point this out, confronting the hypocrisy of those that used the rules to separate the people from God, and taught them “OK, you’ve learned how to reason. Now it’s time to [focus on] love.”

Looking at this program of development and the state of affairs in the world, I’d hope that you’ll be better able to recognize those Christians who write here in an attempt to facilitate the same development in those that still struggle with fear and moral confusion. Yes there are those that use “faith” (as they define it) as a way of browbeating others, [but] Christianity contains elements within itself that motivates believers to heal that wrong. IB and I are among them, and you should recognize and respect the intellectual and moral resource that we represent.

Faith and Intellect

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The atheist’s complaint against religion is frequently rooted in charges of anti-intellectualism. This is evident in Nicholas Baker’s article in this quarter’s Skeptic (Volk. 20 No. 4), Christianity’s Negative Impact on Modern American Education.

I must admit to being befuddled by these charges. Upon encountering atheists decrying intellectual incoherence in the faithful, I often invite the critic to come out and respond to the writings under the New Physics page of this blog. I have also offered the material to scientists through various forums. So far, I have received no response.

A colleague at work invited me down to the atheist Sunday Service in Santa Monica. In the event, a couple of sarcastic remarks regarding faith rankled, but for the most part I found a group of well-meaning people that seemed to have no interest in their spirituality. I confirmed this with my friend later, saying that I didn’t think that I would fit in to the community. When I offered that my experience was that my very presence forced people to confront their spirituality, he confirmed my decision.

It is the anti-spirituality of atheism that concerns me most. Until it is recognized, I am afraid that it is going to be impossible to reconcile the two communities.

An anti-spiritual emphasis is not entirely unique to atheism – I had a Kabbalist tell me that men were not to enter spiritual experience until they were forty. The violence outbursts of nationalism that rocked the world in the 20th century may be symptomatic: where once European politics was dominated by the egos of kings, public education may have facilitated the formation of gestalts that were driven by the masculine urge to power. Jung’s work on the collective unconscious may have been an attempt to understand the dynamics, and he writes in his biography of looking up at the mountains before World War II and seeing a tide of blood pouring over them. I sometimes suspect that, in the aftermath of the war, psychologists settled on denial of spiritual experience as a necessary practice of quarantine to prevent future epidemics. I have encountered some that say they diagnose schizophrenia only if the voices create fear in the patient. And when I sought counseling to deal with family-related stress, once the therapist determined that I was stable, she began asking me questions about reincarnation and process theology, with a focus on understanding why so many of us are immature spirits.

Unfortunately, any policy of denial creates a context of conspiracy that feeds a revolutionary counter-reaction. I believe that this is probably the basis of the anti-intellectualism that Mr. Baker confronts.

The illustration for Mr. Baker’s article shows Jesus whispering a test answer into the ear of a struggling student. This is a point made explicitly in the article: “When it comes to academic achievement, helping a student solve a math problem, using math and the student’s actual brain, displays better family values than does teaching the student to distrust intellect while pleading for an answer to fall from the sky.”

Mr. Baker’s attitude is rooted in the conflation of the brain and mind. While I did not force my children to read the Bible, I struggled against this prejudice with making them aware of the nature of intellect. As I perceive the operation of my mind, the brain is not a logic circuit, it is an interface that ideas use to become invested in the world, and an anchor that they use to create new forms of association. Ideas are spiritual constructs. As possessors of brains, we are their dance partners.

The most painful part of parenting my children through the prejudice of scientific materialism was when my younger son, struggling with his studies, attempted to engage me in discussion only to have his older brother come downstairs and tell him how wrong he was. For years I had attempted to open Greg’s mind to the world of ideas that Kevin had gained access to as an infant. Before Kevin’s intervention, I had felt the door finally opening, and it broke my heart to have him slam it shut. I dealt with the matter pretty harshly, telling him “If you don’t stop abusing your brother, I am not putting a single cent into your college education.” In later conversation, I told Kevin that “ideas are strongest when they are shared.”

This is known among mature scientists. Edward Teller’s office at LLNL had pictures of all the great scientists of his era, and I could feel their personalities reaching out through them. In another incident, I saw a divorced father at dinner with his son, the beautiful mother, and the wealthy man she had married. The son had asked a technical question, which the father answered after a pause. The child challenged him “How do you know that?” To which the father could only answer “I was informed.”

Personally, I had the experience in high school AP Biology of working in a classroom of collaborative students. During the AP exam, I became stuck on a couple of questions and found the answers arriving during final review. The teacher reported that to her surprise – given the brilliance of students in prior years – we had achieved the highest average score on the test in all her years of teaching. And in discussing morality at work, I have shared that when I reach a road block, I frequently open my mind and  an answer comes to me. At times that has been as explicit as having a person’s voice come into my head and say “Do it this way…”

Baker does not articulate this experience, and given his reaction to Christian values, I think that he may not be conscious of the operation of his own mind. If he was, he would understand the preconditions for sustaining such exchanges. It requires surrender of the ego (something that nature often forces upon scientists) and a genuine concern for others. This is the teaching we find in the Bible. In denigrating the value of the book’s moral teaching, Baker and his colleagues are undermining the attempts by Christian parents to open the door to the gestalt of civilized ideas known to the faithful as “The Holy Spirit.” That is no small matter.

Until they arrive at an alternative technology, Baker and others might do well to be more gentle with their public pronouncements. The emotion they attach to their crusade is going to make it extremely difficult for them to reconcile themselves to Christ when those investigations force them to confront his existence.