Chatbots and Intelligence

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Chatbot technologies are prompting predictions that automation is going to enter the white-collar space. This inevitability leads to concerns that AI is going to replace humanity. Prophets are using words like “intelligent,” “sentient,” and “conscious” to describe their assistants.

This is all based upon the criteria for intelligence proposed by Alan Turing. The problem is that Turing’s test (can I tell if I am conversing with a computer?) is not a meaningful test of intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to change behavior in response to a change in the environment. The environment known to a chatbot is grossly impoverished in comparison to the environment experienced by humans. The capacity of the chatbot to navigate that environment is almost non-existent – it does so only under the rules defined by its training algorithm. What these systems actually do is propagate human intelligence and combine language in novel ways.

Without intelligence, claims of sentience and consciousness fall aside.

The real problem with these technologies is that other people will use them to create the impression that they are intelligent and moral actors. Copying the speech of Gandhi or MLK Jr. is going to become easy. We are going to have to invest in deeper means of assessing capabilities – such as actually observing what people do.

Healing Projections

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When I first began to project myself into the world, my “anthem” (in the sense that it confronted others most directly with my nature) was “Revelation Song.” When played at the local mega-church, as I closed my eyes in meditation, the struggle of the cross arose within me. When I opened my eyes, I witnessed those around me huddling together, staring at me in frightened awe.

Today, the song that builds most immediately into sacred fugue is “King of Kings,” a succinct summation of Jesus’ ministry. The official Hillside Worship video brings the familiar tingle that comes with others “tuning in,” and continues to expand as I raise the volume.

Tuesday night, I followed this with Bethel’s “King of My Heart,” the extended video with spontaneous worship by Steffany Gratzinger. Having accepted that humanity is yet unwilling to follow where my heart leads, I have turned my attention to the natural world. The visions unlocked by the words took a corresponding turn. Rather than boats and meditative retreats, I was drawn into muffled ocean waters and a brook burbling through an ancient grove.

Still, those primal natural energies remained suspicious until the break. “You’re never going to let me down” Followed by “You are good.” Reversing the focus, I projected those out into the natural world, reviving the witness of Genesis 1: “It is good.” The imagery received from the future encouraged them. Yes, humanity is hurting you, but you will survive that exile from love.

The capstone species tumbled into awareness. Whales, dolphins, petrels, and kelp. Conifers, bears, and raptors. Wolves, felines, and cycads. Worms, voles, and grasses.

Abandoning my chair, I turn the lights off and laid down in bed. Awareness shifted. The Earth from a great distance. My heart opening and the deeper frequencies of the sun’s emanations pouring through. The encounter was resisted, and an irreconcilable pain arose within its chambers. Pulsing, massaging, pushing through – the pain built until I cried out aloud. And then a retreat, allowing the energies that had been projected to find a home within receptive life.

It doesn’t happen all at once.

Sunday brought a choice. The Super Bowl represented a global distraction that allowed me to integrate progress in dance. Again, Ecstatic Dance LA’s nature experience at Venice Beach seemed opportune. My desire was cemented by a frustration at church. Considering the opening verses of Jonah 4, the pastor provided an exhaustive summation of human wisdom – all of them in error. I built a wall around my frustration, but could not escape the response “Why am I not honored? I do the best that I can.”

No, you do not. I am here among you. All you need do is pick up the phone and ask.

Enough of people, their privilege and ritual delusions.

Venice was sunny, but blustery and cool. I followed the meditative piping on the headphones down to the waves, mimicking the terns hunting along the surf line. Dissolving into the elements, expanding into a space beyond words, free from order or dependency, simply witnessing the moment as it was.

Gathering that into the opening ceremony, I presented the elements to the community. Many were first-time attendees, not expecting experience that I generated. We made our way down to the shore, and it began. Clouds gradually blew across the sky, their progression impeded by the sun, which continued to peek through the verge throughout the dance. Temperatures dropped, but the women disrobed, sheer fabrics revealing more than seemed prudent. Many more of them than men, they danced together playfully. Navigating through the space, awareness of the signals sent was unavoidable, and reciprocated by sideways glances. Regretfully, desire is my point of entry.

Resonating with that vibration, I paused, raising arms, and projected heart-energy upwards and outwards. “You and your sisters need more power.”

Descending back into the dance, I followed the resonance to individual women. Refocusing their intentions, pouring energy into hearts, damming the overflow up into the crown chakra. The engagement was unfamiliar, many drifting away uncertainly.

Underneath, however, was a claim of primacy from a woman that I had encountered in Santa Monica. Sexual politics invaded my dance. The higher perspective allowed me to evade it. A flight of pelicans, rays of sun through the clouds contrasting with the sparkle on the waves and the orange flame on the horizon, sage-covered hills to the right arguing with construction behind and to the left, surging surf that pushed the dance up the shore. These resonated, in moments, with specific women, and the dissonance of primacy reentered the engagement.

Finally, I made my way up the shore, escaping the confusion of human desire, and danced with the elements.

Leaving early, the claims followed me. Prior to COVID, such had forced me out of the dance community. My immediate concern is to restore the biosphere that has been raped by human greed. Accepting sexual interest corrupts that goal. It serves, I have discovered, to validate greed’s primary justification: protection for mate and children. This was the thrust of the negotiation, focused on my trustworthiness. I countered, again and again, “I accomplished today what I set out to do.”

Still, it would not let me go, and so the verbalization became more precise, focusing on a woman who ventured out into the surf to immerse her bare legs. My interlocutor’s concerns were sexual, mine more abstract, concerning extension to her heart of the opening of the wader’s womb to the ocean. Visualizations followed detailing my participation in deepening that relationship, always impeded by suspicion. Brushing that aside, I testified, “I am the mechanism by which these energies adapt themselves to human limitations.”

Where does that end, though? This woman, having been given the sea off Venice Beach, does she receive the oceans? Recalling the message sent to their sisters, I explained that the ocean chooses its representatives. Each teaches the next, and in their glory the call to them men that will commit to the work of healing the world.

Yet, still more suspicion regarding my integrity, until I reached a point of judgment. “You are only proving your unsuitability to participate in the task set before me. My service is to Life itself, and the role that any woman plays will be determined by the degree of her commitment to that end. I must empower the virtue of your sisters, free from the pollution of thoughts that impugn our integrity.”

Urrational

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As spirituality is my only reliable source of joy, my rejoinder to the materialists is “Your assertion that spirituality is delusional is like a blind man telling me that art is delusional.” I recognize that is not the most constructive approach, but I have worn myself out trying to puncture their arguments.

The concern is not moot – the self-righteous forces that threaten our civil order are inspired in their loyalty by the spiritual cocoon of acceptance. When told that they are delusional, they are perfectly justified in their rejection of temporal institutions that seek to divorce them from that sustenance. Scientists, in deriding spirituality, are the locus of a great evil in their lives.

Why are the materialists so set in their rejection of spirituality? At root, their complaint is simple: science has no explanation for spiritual experience.  Worse, serious attempts to test telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance have failed. The explanation offered by the spiritualists is that the scientific environment generates “negativity” that blocks their skills.

The unfortunate implication – reflected in my retort above – is that the negativity arises from the experimenters. This pits the rationality of science against mystical faith. It pits humanity’s reason against the better angels of its nature.

When I realized that most of our minds exist in our souls, I identified another rationale. Science is reductionist; it tries to decompose systems into their smallest parts with the goal of learning to control outcomes. Given this practice, if you were a spirit arising through billions of years of effort, would you expose yourself to manipulation? Perhaps an analogy would make the choice obvious: the materialists insist that the brain is the mind. The only way to test this hypothesis, unfortunately, is to map every synapse of the brain, control the chemistry of the cerebral-spinal fluid, and inject a controlled stimulus to determine whether the brain responds as predicted by the material laws of the universe. In other words, the test subject would have to sacrifice their life to science.

Not an appealing prospect, is it?

But there is another possible source of the negativity that disrupts scientific study of spiritual experience. Our religious traditions celebrate the avatar’s protection of the faithful from spiritual torment. In both Buddhism and Christianity, that power is held also by their disciples. Those spirits that profit from our torment, then, have an interest in preventing our ascent to spiritual maturity. The negativity, then, would arise from the spiritual realm. It is a form of gaslighting.

How to puncture this falsehood? I found the answer in this week’s Bible study, in a mysterious passage in Luke 11. Jesus is accused of being in league with demons, and concludes his rebuke with these thoughts:

33 “No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. 34 Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. 35 See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. 36 Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you.”

How can light be darkness, for example? This makes no sense.

And then an incident came back to me. I was down in Port Hueneme doing work for the 2020 Census. On that Sunday, the temperatures ran up into the 90s. The front of the house was exposed to the sun, so I took refuge in a slim slice of shade beneath the eave to disrupt a young family preparing to take their children on an outing. The woman stared at me uncertainly, but answered my questions willingly. Finally, as her husband came to the door to shuttle another child into the minivan, she interrupted me, “You know that your eyes are glowing?”

There is so much of this in the New Testament, where the record elides the stage direction. “Jesus’ eyes began to glow.” He was educating the disciples to moral discernment. When someone offers sacred wisdom, they project light into the world. We don’t need to rely upon the judgment of our minds when confronted with moral controversies – we can see who is telling the truth. So be patient with the materialists. Speak your truth with love. They will be confronted with evidence that their science cannot explain. In the union of rationality and love, we shall surpass human limitations and material constraints, bringing healing to the world in their synthesis: urrationality – rationality that penetrates illusions to reveal the heart of existence.

On “Anti-Semitism”

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My first engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was unexpectedly intimate. Yassar Arafat, long-time leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was known to be dying. In a vision, I was brought to his wife’s bedside vigil. His spirit was consumed with rage. Indicating that she needed help piercing that armor, I complied, and she took us back to a moment early in their marriage. He was reclined after love-making, staring up at her as she knelt beside him, stretching luxuriantly in his witness of her beauty.

That was the memory that she wanted him to take to the other side: the simple, human truth revealed to all men through the grace of the woman that they love.

After 9/11, the minister at my Unitarian Universalist congregation organized a visit to a mosque in the San Fernando Valley. A relative newcomer, I was alarmed when a Jewish congregant took me aside to rail against the initiative. Months later, I was sitting in the sunshine with a more open-minded Jew when a friend went out to his car. I asked, “Is he Jewish as well?” He laughed. “No. He’s Palestinian.” When my jaw fell open, he continued, “Yeah, it’s crazy, isn’t it? They are the same people.”

“Semite” is not a religious designation. It is a genealogical designation. Supporting Palestinian self-determination thus cannot be equated to “anti-Semitism.” The distinction between “Jew” and “Muslim” is also hypocritical: “Allah” is the Arabic pronunciation of the Hebrew “Eloi.” It is the same tradition; the division emanates from political ambitions.

In today’s Israel, we are witnessing the replay of the prescription set out in the last two books of the Pentateuch. The Law commanded that, in taking possession of the Holy Land, the Israelites must eliminate all masculine influence. In repeating that program, modern Israle is implementing a program of anti-Semitism. In no way, then, can criticism of those practices be considered “anti-Semitic.”

The problem with all genealogical categories is that no criteria exists for rejecting the demands of loyalty. This is what allowed Hitler to turn Germany into a racist killing machine and fueled the American Civil War.

Sadly, the idea that cultural homogeneity is essential to political harmony is gaining in popularity. Time magazine published a horrific opinion piece by Bruno Macaes, “In Israel and India, the Civilization State is Taking Over.” Macaes announces the failure of liberal civilization, and asserts that the future lies with states organized around cultural homogeneity.

The dangerous stupidity of this view was displayed in Rwanda. The colonists, confronted with a homogenous population, issued identity cards to families based upon the number of cows, thereby birthing “Hutu” and “Tutsi.” Long after the colonists had departed, the artificial category spawned a genocide during the Clinton Administration. Homogeneity is a figment of attitudes that are easy to manipulate.

Saudi Arabia, perhaps the longest established “civilization state,” demonstrates the extension of these tendencies into the international community. Having established the monarchy as “keeper of Islam’s Holy Places,” the regime sponsored a new Islamic sect, Wahabbism, to legitimize its excesses. Of course, domestic critics countered with traditional Islamic scholarship. The regime’s response was to scatter Madrassas – Wahabbist schools – throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. The “civilization state” is inevitably imperialist in its practices.

This is now evident in Israel, where a corrupt leader uses his alignment with ethnocentric fascism to promote dismantling of the institutions of the liberal state that preserve civil rights. Netanyahu is become “anti-Semitic.” To continue to defend him on the basis of his progeniture is not only amoral, it is self-defeating.

Dance of Healing

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When the Black Lives Matter protests peaked following the murder of George Floyd, I was riven with the need to be present at the observances in Minneapolis. In the lack of moderating ministry, pain mutates into violence. The calculus of force that animates fascism finds justification in that outcome.

When I was working in tech, I had the resources and respect to just get up and go. I have documented those experiences. The methods that I use allow me to organize energies on the global stage. That is my unique responsibility. In sharing those methods, however, I hope that others may engage to heal the communities they have adopted.

It begins with a humble receptivity to sorrow. We are not always the chosen representative for Divine Love. I myself am called only when Love has become frustrated by resistance that allows predators to threaten those most precious. We begin when the sorrow becomes known, dropping into the heart and asking “What is needed here?” That question may percolate for days or weeks. I find myself navigating lucid dreams in which my role is negotiated in advance.

In most cases, those dreams pass. When they persist, I know that I must go. In this case, a certain logic held – partner dance is one of the few joys left to me.

Thus, I found myself in Monterey Park before sunrise on Sunday morning. It was not difficult to find the Star Ballroom, but the scene was complicated by the presence of a local TV van. The roar of the generator was punctuated throughout by loud discussion of real estate deals.

Music plugs into the right side of the brain that witnesses unifying harmony. The first selection was Lauren Daigle’s “Once and for All,” a profound expression of the paradoxes of service to love.

Oh, help me to lay it down
Oh, Lord, I lay it down

Oh, let this be where I die
My Lord, with Thee crucified
Be lifted high as my kingdoms fall
Once and for all, once and for all

This tapped the pain directly. I skirted the memorial and found myself at the back door, reaching back to the aftermath of the attack. I froze and struggled with the trauma as tears rolled down my checks. A few minutes later, I made my first circuit of the building, walking past the local market and the Bank of America, finally breaching the noise of the TV van to return to the memorial.

On my second circuit, I began searching for a link to healing. Snatam Kaur’s “Long Time Sun” came first and touched that chord. Returning to praise music was less successful. It was too much about me and not enough about them.

Three more circuits followed, though my attention was focused on the messages chalked on the asphalt. Finally, l was brought to stillness before the memorial, standing for minutes before each portrait. I tapped into their love of dance, allowing it to resonate with my own. And then the link found me, in “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever”:

Over the mountains and the sea
Your river runs with the love for me
And I will open up my heart
And let the healer set me free.
I’m happy to be in the truth
And I will daily lift my hands
For I will always sing of when Your love came down.

The waking community, dimly aware of the energy that I was projecting, came fully present to me then. Still, resistance to my presence, rooted in anger that such things happen at all, persisted, until we came to:

Oh, I feel like dancin’
It’s foolishness I know
But when the world has seen the light
They will dance with joy
Like we’re dancing now

Raising my hands to the sky, I tendered the watchful presence of angels as guides to their recovery.

I looped on the track for another two circuits, feeling the pain soften. On the last, the sun began to shine through the clouds. The representatives had arrived to record their spot, and I skirted the van to avoid the camera angle, standing at a distance, simply bearing witness.

I stopped dancing when the pandemic took the country in its grip. Ecstatic Dance LA began offering outdoor events in Venice, but the distance was prohibitive. Starting from Monterey Park, however, it was a waypoint on the drive back to Westlake Village.

I was discouraged by rain as I skirted downtown, but the clouds thinned and upon arriving at the site of the celebration, only the bluster of the wind remained. Technically, it was a different experience: dancing on the downward slope of a beach, heels sinking four inches into the sand, limited the pace – though perhaps to the benefit of my aging joints. I danced by myself for thirty minutes until a woman caught my glance meaningfully over her shoulder. Then the flow began, the circling of limbs as energy built. Finally, the first contact, evolving towards leaning and then lifting.

Tiring, I broke off, and let the wind blow through me before taunting the surf. The moon was not in the sky, but I felt her presence there with me.

Yesterday was dominated by the drum-beat of passion, borne stoically, only moderating when I enunciated:

You need to integrate the gifts that I gave to you.

It will happen again, but we are learning.

Unprofitable

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What surprises me most now is that this dream came with imagery. I normally have only a kinesthetic sense of the action in my dreams.

I shifted from a focus on a client crisis into preparations for work. The garb was professional – I haven’t worn a blazer and tie in two years. Arriving at work, I was handed a corporate relocation map by a young organizer. The properties to be acquired were highlighted in blue, but the layout didn’t translate to patterns of motion – I couldn’t infer streets, parking lots, or buildings. I turned to the organizer to request more information.

The scene shifted to a meeting with stakeholders. The context seemed to expand. I hung back on the wall, moving about the room to facilitate the integration of intentions. As the meeting broke up, I went to the sideboard for a drink.

A red-haired employee joined me, earnestly testifying that “It’s like you are within all of us.”

Looking him in the eyes, I offered humbly, “It only works if you do it together.”

He accepted the insight, and then saw through me into the ultimate purpose. I was not speaking only of the relocation, but of Heaven.

Finally, then I turned toward the door of owner’s office. He had stood aside, presiding over the events. Confronting the scope of the reality that I manage, he rebuffed my entry. There was no profit there.

No, I cannot be turned to profit. I am a liberator. It is the addiction to profit that drives people into fear. Can you not be glad simply that I am here to affirm the creative possibilities within them, when the alternatives are random acts of destruction? Is that not worth keeping me alive for?

Being Known

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Witnessing the trauma of children used as pawns in a struggle for control, I drew pictures that illustrated the precepts of our journey to independence and posted them on the southern wall of their room. The large floor was reserved for their projects, the furnishings being limited to inflatable beds and a computer workstation. Still, I wasn’t certain that the lessons had sunk in until my elder son, a junior in college, began lecturing me over dinner on the proper application of power and love.

Still, for years they were skeptical of my spirituality. Greg, as I counseled him through a painful breakup, was first to make concessions. Kevin was close behind, under my prompting to consider how his moral posture at work facilitated the creativity of his team.

Still, children need to define their own space. My financial situation doesn’t make it easy for them. Psychology has used law to stake claim to the mind, undermining the position of independent mental wellness professionals. My sons sensed, as their earnings soared in the field that I left, that I needed to concede my mistake, and return to high tech. What I attempted to make clear to them was that the factors that made that unsustainable still applied. In fact, my personal influence has grown in the intervening years. I am unmanageable, in the sense that no supervisor is going to be able to control my attention, a fact that leads immediately to the conclusion that I am myself management material.

Their alienation from me was stiffened by the correlation with the narratives that they were fed during my divorce. It came to a head during a walk at the Malibu tidal marsh over Thanksgiving weekend. Kevin was arguing that psychology, with the tools of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and psychopharmacology, provided the tools needed for mental wellness. As occurs when I am confronting lies propagated by selfish gestalts, I raised my voice and addressed the air. Alarmed by crackling energy, Greg told me to keep my voice down.

Focusing narrowly on Kevin, then, I spent the next thirty minutes dissecting his narrative. CBT is a minimal improvement on prior practices that actually harmed patients. Yes, pharmaceuticals can kick the brain out of a destructive spiral, but the psychiatrists have absolutely no idea how they actually work, which means that side effects can be worse than the disease. In fact, every rigorous study shows that only one factor leads from mental disease to wellness: an experience of authentic relationship that convicts the client that they are capable and worthy of love.

Concluding this dialog, Greg interjected to observe, “Dad, how can you expect others to trust you when you haven’t done the work yourself?”

What lies implicit in this kind of comment? That became clear only in December, when I blew up and exposed the false equivalencies that had been cultivated in their minds over the last twenty years. Confronted with that injustice, Greg softened.

When he takes his archery jaunts on the weekend, he revealed, he stops in quiet moments and open himself into to nature, and inescapably encounters my presence there. He admitted that I have cultivated experiences for him, over the years, that have awakened sensitivities unknown to his peers. In fact, when he attempts to share the concerns they instill, his peers respond, “Our parents and grandparents screwed up the world while enjoying their privileges, and the only thing for us to do now is to enjoy those same privileges as long as we can.” Greg is, simply, afraid for the future.

As for Kevin, I send texts and emails to no response. But, after testifying that I value his love, something subtle shifted. His thoughts come through to me now, though still with a defensive anchor against the vastness of my concerns.

All this as prelude to yesterday. Reading to the conclusion of Keltner Dachner’s “Awe,” I tripped over this quote from Rachel Carson:

“…that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood…[children should live according to] a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation of things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

This distillation of Greg’s despair tore my heart open at its foundations, and I found within the fear of his generation. Tears welled up as I attempted to let it wash through me, allowing the fear to ground itself on the hope that arises from the Divine Presence. Immediately they were present with me, my two boys, bearing witness to the gravity of my responsibility. As they watched the sorrow dissipate within me, each after the other offered, “I am glad that you are here.”

Humbling Sex

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Perhaps the most dangerous error in accepted Christian theology is that man corrupted God’s Creation. This has the corollary that our natural urges are sacred. The genocidal dictates of Deuteronomy and Numbers are justified as a struggle for survival, and we gloss over the sexual immorality of David and Solomon.

In fact, the principal theme of the Bible is the taming of our natural urges with love. The role that I share with my predecessors involves unavoidable humbling.

In tempting death into His illuminating embrace, Jesus was scourged and pierced. My own role is presaged by Daniel 11:37:

He will show no regard for the gods of his ancestors or for the one desired by women…

When God “created” Eve, He intended for her to witness, safeguard, and amplify Adam’s virtue. It is this that a woman of grace seeks in her man. It is why nuns trothed themselves as “brides of Christ.” And it is this service that is corrupted by the animalistic urge to bear children.

My first direct confrontation with this corruption came in an intimate Church setting. The congregation was one of many that I visited in the aftermath of the Twin Towes attack, seeking an outlet for my wisdom. I entered that day and settled at a distance from the attendees. Opening my mind and heart to the Cross, I paused my reverie to observe behaviors that I must characterize as disturbing. In the middle of the service, the pastor broke from his prepared remarks to address me directly,

There are times when the elders of this congregation ask someone to stop attending because they are sexually harassing everyone present.

This can be juxtaposed with an event at a Catholic service. Sitting beneath the Cross that dominated the altar space, I heard a soft giggle behind me and turned to find two young women rubbing shoulders as they stared. Early the next morning I was roused by a dream of a passionate three-some. At work I was confronted with the disapproval of the paster. Trying to dispense with this interruption, I observed, “It was a gift freely given” The phone on my desk rang, and a woman shouted before hanging up, “Buono! Buono! Buono! Buono!”

As I tired of being used as a sex toy, this became more characteristic: at a cafe I was known to frequent, a witch spread her legs and offered me her yoni in invitation. Apprehending her limitations, I shrugged and began to walk toward the water fountain behind her. Confronting the enormity of my intentions, she clenched her thighs in panic.

I arrive in moments when humanity is confronted with unavoidable change. The power that I represent is essential to your survival, and it is through woman that it must be channeled to preserve and restore Creation. In preparing his disciples to manage that power, Jesus counseled: [Matt. 22:37-39]

”’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

In confronting my grace, women seek first to bind it to the creation of children. This is not loving me. This is to seek to bind my grace to their service. In their intentions, when I am tormented at night, is revealed the opportunity in children to project their will through me. This dynamic has been the root of humiliation and grief for me; it is the justification for the campaign of lies waged against me by MYSTERY; and it is the threat that drives men to reject my authority.

You were meant, ladies, to pass my power through you to sustain Creation. Read Revelation 21 and 22. I come with this promise:

“To all who thirst I will give to drink without cost from the springs of the water of life.”

And in my sacred congress with the Bride comes healing through the ‘leaves’ that represent you:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of nations.

Stop trying to possess me. I understand that your sexual response to grace is “only natural.” But why should I be humiliated for accepting the duty of a parent to discipline that urge to divine service?

Freedom to Spoil

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On MSNBC, the adjournment of the House last night was interpreted as a victory for Speaker candidate McCarthy. It was not.

The Freedom Caucus, led by Matt Gaetz, waited until the vote closed before swinging the tally toward adjournment. The message that they sent – to both parties – was “We control the outcomes here.”

This is the same strategy used by fundamentalist parties in Israel to control foreign policy. The only way to establish a government is to cater to them.

It is time to stop encouraging them, AOC.

Me, Again

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Two months ago, expecting that I was going to relocate to Redmond, I drove down to the Art Walk in Santa Barbara to say “farewell.” The warmest reception was offered by Ping, who shared his fears that I had been lost to COVID.

That was true, in a backwards sense.

I spent the first twenty years of this millennium trying to pierce the lies propagated by the privileged. In the writings offered here I summarized the insights that have been revealed to me – insights that demonstrate that love is the answer. Those insights were gained in endless hours of study, time that my peers spent in travel and dining and entertainment and sex. From the insights offered by lovers of humanity, I curated here a world view that upends political privilege.

I represent inconvenient truths.

What I realized in 2018 was that employers found those truths intolerable. They could not control my influence. Setting out to beat me down, they found themselves trapped in a paradoxical inversion of power. Continuing even after I had revealed that against their thousands I was responsible for billions, their impotent thrashing corrupted my attempts to project the truth into the world.

I invested in a year-long course in hypnotherapy and spent 2019 justifying its value. The fundamental concerns remained, however, even as my sons graduated from college and embarked on careers that brought them more than I had ever earned. They testify regarding the confusion, willful ignorance, and nihilism of peers trapped in the disaster that looms before humanity.

January 2020 found me in a priest’s office, offering one last time to reveal the sacred perspective, knowing that submission to love was the solution. The prelate’s response was, in effect, “the Church is my God.” My response was direct: “Destruction is the great leveler of hierarchy.” I was overtaken by a compulsion to transmit my understanding of human nature. The message from the ethereal realms was “We are going to receive a large number of traumatized souls, and we need insight to help them heal.” In February, I began writing “The Foundations and Practice of Lay Hypnotherapy.” And in March the world was shut down by COVID.

“Corona” meaning “crown,” the images of the virus, with its spiky projections, evoked the association “crown of thorns.” It was, after all, Eastertime.

Only two readers have studied seriously “Foundations and Practice.” The first, a clinician, testified that it should be read by anyone interested in hypnotherapy as a healing art. The second, a philosopher, said that it was prose poetry. I wrote only what must be written, and the insights, though profound, were overwhelming.

I did, in 2021, attempt to soften the delivery in a series of seminars for students and graduates of the Hypnosis Motivation Institute. The hope was that they would communicate the quality of the transmission to George Kappas, the Institute’s director, and encourage him to create an opportunity to share them more broadly. Under COVID, unfortunately, the direction of the Institute had changed. The wisdom of its founders is being diluted, with pedagogical stewardship handed to psychologists representing traditions that Dr. Kappas had assimilated, integrated, and surpassed back in the 70s and 80s.

Hypnotherapy as a profession, however, was an outlet for healing energies that had been bottled up for so long. I posted here only occasionally.

In dreams, of course, the world continued to intrude. Watching the testimony of the ICU nurses, I reached out to them with an open heart. When their trauma softened in the tears pouring down my face, as I drifted off, I heard the voice of a senior politician announcing, “It’s Brian Balke.” And when Putin extended his will to reclaim Eastern Europe, I warned him “If you invade Ukraine, every explosion, every fire, every bullet piercing flesh, every shriek of pain and fear, in Ukrainian or Russian, will be manifested in your body at the molecular level. If you attempt to destroy Ukraine, you will destroy yourself.” In the months that followed, I gathered the will of the Ukrainian people to isolate him in his dacha.

Fundamentally, though, Putin and Trump and MBS are propped up by the fossil fuel industry, and modern culture is allergic to patterns of behavior that are not dependent upon fossil fuels. Whenever I attempt to discipline the predators, they renew themselves in that reservoir of dependency.

The most malicious, paradoxically, are the particle physicists. The cabal of theorists waits for me to die so that they can assign my insights to Einstein’s heir. I shrug, metaphorically, and say, “Go ahead. For in those insights is proof of the power of love. You cannot help but turn eyes toward the Cross/Bodhi tree/Dao.”

Love is not invested in Law; it invests in possibilities – possibilities that will be liberated from hypocrites that cement their privileges in Law. By this, then, religious and political opportunists are doomed to irrelevance.

Where am I headed? Again, the scope of my concerns expands into elusive spirals. Simply, then: I must leave a record of my work, even if that record appears delusionary. Some, somewhere, and some when, will find the seeds of hope here.

You see, in my most prominent incarnation, my accomplishments were attributed to divinity. That attribution allows humanity to escape its responsibilities. They are not, after all, themselves divine (despite “You are like unto gods, if only you knew.”). So, I came back without privileged knowledge, and spent my life studying love as a psychological, spiritual, and physical phenomenon. The best of that wisdom is captured here, and everything written here can be grasped by those that devote themselves to the service of love.

By way of inspiration, then:

“Let there be light” was the gift of photosynthesis. The sun has been pumping energy into the green things of the earth for billions of years, and in that energy is the ability to create a lens in space that will diffuse the sun’s power and calm the tropospheric violence unleashed by global warming.

Still, the green things have witnessed the coming and going of animals in waves of brutal excess. Humanity, hopefully, is different: we alone have the parts of the mind that recognize and organize unconditional love. Jesus manifested that potential, and in testifying “I am overcome by sorrow nigh unto death,” he spoke for the Garden. The green things want freedom from their constraints. We were meant to be their intelligence, to guide their escape into greater possibilities. Instead, we exploit and pollute, just as our animal predecessors. Why should they allow us influence in their domain?

Hope, then, is found in the children that swing from the cables at the coal loading dock in Australia, that splash paint on the artworks that simulate the glory of the natural world. They have no choice but to seek new choices and, in their desperation, love will find them. Talk to the green things, children. They hunger for your witness, and in that witness is your salvation.