Join me in an open-minded exploration of spirituality!

I’m starting a new online discussion group, to ask the great religious questions and consider every religion’s answers, and I want to invite you to join me! We’ll read excerpts (starting small and juxtaposed) from all the great religious texts, including the Torah, Bible, Qur’an, Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist texts, Baha’i texts, and Wiccan texts. We will approach this study as philosophers who believe that there’s hidden wisdom in the depths of religion, with a mind open to any answer and assumption and ramification, but accepting nothing without inspection.

Some of the questions I want to ask are:

• What happens when we die?
• Are we a part of God, the whole of God, or greater than the gods?
• Is escape through enlightenment possible or desirable?
• What is the relationship between the Good Life and the Moral Life?
• Which matters: the ends, means, or intents?
• How many layers of misperception lie between us and the gods?
• What role do prayer, worship, asceticism, and charity have in spiritual growth?

I also want to grapple with the scientific community’s answers to these questions. While I’ve grown dissatisfied with the answers that science is purported to give to spiritual questions, I do not want to reject any of science. The domains which science can address are limited by design, and ultimately I do not believe it can explain subjective awareness or respond to the Army General’s dilemma. At the same time, science provides whole new opportunities for spiritual quandary, such as the multiple universes of quantum mechanics and the unknowabilities of Godel and Heisenberg. Concerning science, I want to ask, “What are space, time, and causation?”, “What is free will?”, and “How much personal delusion is involved in the universe we perceive?”

The goal of this study group is to move beyond prescribed answers. I want to join Jainism and Buddhism– the no-action and no-thought sides of the enlightenment coin. I want to resurrect gnosticism and Spinoza, and apply the modern advances from drugs, psychology, and multiculturalism. I want to combine the diametrically opposed western and eastern understanding to self, growth, and spiritual discipline into a new kind of schizophrenic whole.

The Hindu gurus say that you’re ready to start understanding spirituality at age 50, and it takes about 84 thousand lifetimes. But if there’s any western arrogance I share, it’s that nothing needs to take longer than a lifetime, and the time to start is always now.

Recently I’ve been working for a friend of mine, developing some audio software for pda-phones. She’s looking for someone to continue working on it now that I don’t have the time. Are you underemployed and know midi, andio synthesis, and iPhone programming?

The particular task she needs is a fairly high-fidelity, but fast midi sequencing library (just the audio synthesis part) for the iPhone. Unlike other phones, iPhones don’t come with one built-in. She would pay, of course, but about half of the money contingent on the success of the app she’s building.

If you’re interested, contact me.

Only time and the internet will decide what the ’00s are to be known for, but governal growth is likely to be on the list. From the Department of Homeland Security to the bailout, the federal government acquired during the last decade previously unfathomable new powers.

In a world where over half of the largest 100 economies are corporations, liberals tend to be optimistic about bigger government. Individual states will bend over backwards for big business, but the federal government is still there to mandate civil rights, bring lawsuits on the negligent, and create an EPA or a Food and Drug administration every now and again.

But when does the consolidation of power go too far? Jeffery Sachs’s column in Scientific American for this month is all about Obama’s politics of making policy. Basically, he argues that Obama has made progress at the expense of public participation and transparency. All major policies have come out of lobby-infested back rooms, with as little detail available to the public as possible.

A Dutch relative of Flame’s said, “You can’t have too much democracy” (by which he actually meant that California, where he’s been living, did have too much). He wanted power in the government to be in the hands of the knowledgeable, not of the popular.

And yet, mechanisms that put competent people into power can exist, and be healthy or corrupt, in either a democracy or a meritocracy. The flaw of the meritocracy is that it’s a closed system: those in power build not only the rungs of power that others climb, but also the doors. No “government system”– whether social democracy, communism, or what have you–stands alone: culture, institutions, and media all play overdetermined and determining roles. For democracy to work, it needs to be founded in an educated populace, but if it has it, it can maintain itself against ever new abuses.

Obama is playing a game of means and ends, at an unknown expense. The IPCC made it clear that we needed to either reverse environmental trends this year or face cataclysmic climate change. Instead, Obama decided that recessions are a good time to beat up Afghans. Meanwhile, the money influences that Obama is courting with his approach are going to be backed into whatever laws get passed.

I’d like to believe that some progress by any means is better than none, but it’s probably not true. The core of democracy, progressivism, and humanism is the empowerment of all people. Obama’s policy progress is aiding by disenfranchising. It assumes that we will not be inspired by radical proposals, that we cannot appreciate the reasoning behind compromises, and that it would be a mistake to try to educate us. Ultimately, it further saps the one biggest resource upon which the continued functioning of our government is based: public knowledge.

The consciousness is like an army general, strategizing in his tent. The tent may be full of reports, maps, and decorations, or it may be almost empty, depending on the temperament and training of the general. Surrounding the tent is an enormous army (this is the body), with hundreds of captains and divisions, spies, double-agents, suppliers, and mercenaries. An endless stream of advisors and generals enter and exit through the tent door, but the general must remain at his command post.

The advisors bring all manner of reports: the lay of the land, the approach of another army, diplomatic progress, internal insurrections. By surrounding himself with competent advisors, the general builds an understanding of the world and battles outside his tent. Unfortunately, the advisors have never seen any of the activities on which they’re reporting. The job of the advisors is to abstract and collate reports given to them by their own advisors, and reframe the information in a way that the general can understand. That invariably requires excluding important information, based on the advisor’s own understanding of a world they have never seen.

The Army General conceit conforms to scientific observations. Our bodies are composed of thousands of species, and yet our model of the body consists mostly of one. The brain systems that interpret hearing and sight consist of dozens of stages of interpretation (each with millions of cells), before reaching anything that could be called the conscious brain. The case of phantom limbs should make us wonder what exactly we’re scratching.

Armies present themselves as clean hierarchies with clear boundaries, but like any huge system, it’s very much a matter of perspective. The clear boundaries around your army (your body) are just part of your model. When I communicate to you, my message filters down to divisions of scouts. If you receive it, it probably means that at some point, some of my scouts was also yours. We can communicate because we share parts of our armies.

What happens when we die? I used to think that our subjective subject was reabsorbed into the great subjective subject of the universe, like waves residing into the ocean. Our “me” would disappear, but only because it was formed largely of boundaries keeping us separate. The army general conceit, however, suggests that our separation from the One is much more deeply rooted.

When you die, the walls of your tent don’t fall down, because you’re surrounding by tents extending in all directions. At death, your advisors inform you that the battle is over, the war lost. They stop bringing reports to your tent. But you still can’t leave– there’s nowhere to go. You can wait forever, trying to re-envision your army, but it has acquired a new perspective and is no longer yours to command. Eventually, I think, you sit down and start writing reports. You pretend to be a scout, construct observations of long lost landscapes and pass the fabrications to anyone who will take them. And the moment they do, you new army has begun.

By now, the Droid phone is firmly entrenched in my life. I use it to check email when I should be talking to people and to read Scientific American after Flame has gone to sleep. I put my card-based life-todo system online and use it through the phone, and tied it into the phone’s calendar system. It’s my phone, camera, music player, and alarm clock. I use it to tell me where the closest bagel place is, and what constellation jupiter is in tonight. I’ve started talking to it too, because the speech recognition seems almost flawless.

The scary part is how integrated it is with everything at Google. I can add a new number to my phone, and it will fill in their name, email, a chat link, google map link, and whether they prefer boxers or briefs. It makes me wonder just how much of a constant companion that corporation is. My main email is @gmail, my main chat is google talk, I track my finances on Google docs, the Droid’s calendar system is just a UI wrapper on google calendar, and I’ve started doing work documentation on google wave. The Travelers Network simultaneously advertises on google, and includes google ads on it.

I took the LSAT last Saturday, and we used Google’s slick navigation system to find our hour-long way there and back. A few times, the signs told us differently than Google, and Google always turned out to be right. The Droid’s orientation sensors are so good that I can use the phone like binoculars to look at a version of the sky where everything is labeled. I find myself using my eyes less and less and Google more and more.

And that’s just the beginning. The Atlantic has a now-famous article Is Google Making Us Stupid? about how Googling rewires our brains. We remember less, read more horizontally, pay attention more briefly. And every day, Google becomes bigger, and plays a more definitive role in our actions. Some day, about three 530 million years ago, single celled bacteria realized that they had become pawns in a game controlled by the multi-cellulars. Now our day has come: our lives play out as mere biological aides and ironically the links that chain us to our new role are our cells.

My phone situation is getting out of hand!

Initially, the friend I’m working for thought we’d develop our app next on the iPhone, so she lent me her iPod Touché. I worked on it for a day, and then she decided that the Symbian phone market was better, and bought me the new Nokia 5800.

After some minor rivalry, all the phones seemed to get along like a big happy family.

Before long, though, the Droid asserted its dominance and declared itself emperor of the phones.

I didn’t think anything of it until they began to organize raids and started taking the weakest of the laptops hostage.

Now the whole flat under their control, and Flame and I are forced to wear little patches with the humanist symbol, and we can only leave under intense surveillance. Rumor has it that the macs are planning a revolt, but it may be too late for us. To be continued!

I think I’ve found religion. For years, I thought that it was impossible for a codified religion to express my spirituality and my beliefs about the cosmos. Flame and I started visiting different religious services, but more as an exercise in comparative diversity than a hope for a new home. We’d also started holding our own Full Moon services, where we sing and pray and study together, and I did New Moon services where I prayed and studied alone. Two nights ago was the New Moon, and I took a little booklet with me, Essence of World Religions, composed by a friend of a Jain friend of mine, and studied the first section: Hinduism.

It turns out that I am a Hinduist! I completely grok their belief in a pervasive God which is the universe and also is us, but also of their multitude of gods and openness to all spiritualities, and their concepts of Karma and reincarnation and the unendingness of existence and the illusion of the world. I particularly approve of their four-fold approach to nirvana, by any or all of yoga and meditation, love and devotion, selfless service, and knowledge and wisdom.

What I do not understand is why we want to escape Maya and samsara, the illusion of the world and the cycle of reincarnation.

We have each in fact gone through considerable effort to create Maya, and for very good reasons:

• To Keep us Entertained: We will exist forever. Let’s have something to do.
• For Aesthetics: Because simplicity mixed with complexity is more beautiful than simplicity alone.
• As a Moral Playground We want a world, so we can do good and be confronted with moral dilemmas.
• To Explore the boundaries of our own minds and learn from others.

Maya is the natural overflowing of the potential we have as God, and while it alienates us from God and each other, it also makes it possible to use that potential. Specifically, each of the reasons that we created Maya matches up with an approach to nirvana: the practices of the world keep us entertained, and practice in spirituality is called yoga; the beauties of the world open our eyes and minds to love; the moral conflicts of the world give us opportunities to do good; and learning and exploration are the roads to knowledge and wisdom.

That is, we created Maya in order to forever seek enlightenment. Let’s focus on the process and not the product, and forget about trying to get rid of the best game ever invented.

In Washington, DC, the only thing that talks is money, and it talks loudly. Did you hear about Genentech ghost-writing 20 democrats’ and 22 replublicans’ comments in the congressional record? We have to turn off their megaphones, now!

Cancel Your Health Care

These are dangerous times, and until we win this thing, we need to stop giving the insurance companies $400 a month. I have. Insurance companies spent $478.5 million last year just lobbying the federal government (so, $1.1 million per congressman), not including campaign contributions, state lobbying, and public misinformation campaigns. That was money paid them to improve health care. Try getting your employer to set aside your health insurance money in a savings account, should you need it.

Donate for Heath Reform

If you want to express your desire for a public option, you have to do it with a check. I favor MoveOn.org, after their fantastic public option commercial, but I’m open to anyone who knows how to use money loudly. Just do it now.

If need be, I could even make a pro-public option health care pool, and you all can give me your $400 a month. I’ll put 3% into lobbying, like the insurance companies (so, like $150 per year per person), and the rest can be saved and returned when this thing blows over, or given to those who need it.

“I am Ready & Willing to offer my Services to any Nation or People under heave who are Desirous of Liberty & Equality”

I now have a Droid, Google/Motorola/Verizon’s new PDA. First, it’s an excellent device– powerful and slick, lots of space, 5 MP camera, a touch-screen and a slide-out keyboard. To me though, it’s all pretty pointless. I don’t need it to organize any aspect of my life, I don’t want any more pervasive connectivity a cell and a laptop give me, and I don’t like playing with computers. I wouldn’t have gotten it if I hadn’t needed it for this project.

I have 11 more days during which I can return it. But it is sweet-edge technology, and now I have all this knowledge of how to code the thing– why not use it?

But I need your help! I’m looking for fun projects that can either (1) recoup some of this $70 a month I’m spending, or (2) help PDAers live greener. To that end, I have some ideas:

Greener, Every Day Calendar

This would be a free “page-a-day” style calendar, juxtaposing pretty pictures (e.g. of climate change) with steps you can take to lessen/extend your impact. I hope to have connections to tons of non-profits soon through Democracy In Action, and they might have a lot to contribute.

It will be both personalized and built on community-contributions. Anyone will be able to submit additional day-pages on the website, and at the bottom of each day will be rating buttons (“up-thumb” and “down-thumb”), which both inform your preferences and affect the likelihood of those pages for other people. Also, there will be a “I’m doing it!” button next to the thumb buttons, which both lets users see their strength in numbers, and allows some pages to be “follow-ups” on other pages (e.g., one page might suggest “Move to Washington, DC”, and if you do it, then you’ll get another one that says “Work for Democracy In Action”).

Open Artificial Intelligence

You can get a little chat A.I. that you can interact with, and teach, and watch it learn, and grow, and interact with your phone. I helped build a huge text-based A.I. for Virsona, and now I’m working on open-sourcing pieces of it. It can get responses from a dozen sources and learn in multiple ways, it understands grammar, emotion, the relationships between words, implied concepts and conversation trends. And now it’s built on a plugin design, where anyone can add new intelligence, new knowledge, and new ways of interacting. There would be free and paid-for versions of this.

Virtual Painter

Turn your PDA into a virtual paint-brush, and view your pieces of art through its lens. You can paint anything– a wall, a piece of furniture, a tree– by selecting a color and sweeping the PDA like a brush. Any time you look through the PDA’s camera, you can see your work of art. I might even make the paintings shareable, so that anyone who passes by the bus-stop that you graffitied can see it. A demo would be available for free, with a limited amount of paint.

I’m pretty excited about working on any of these, but I’m open to anything you’ve always wanted on your phone.

Do you like to travel, but hate looking for the best tickets? Download the Community Flight Finder and let your computer do the work for you!

Here’s what I wrote in the Read Me:

Welcome to FFlight, the Free Community Flight Finder.

FFlight is for people who love travelling, just about anywhere.  The
scenario it's designed for is common:

  A) You want to take a round-trip trip some time in a several-week or
     several-month span, but you don't have specific dates (for
     example, you want to go any time during the winter).

  B) You could go to a wide range of places, and you might be willing
     to leave from several different airports, depending on what's
     cheapest.

  C) The most important factor in choosing flights is getting a good
     deal for where you're going.  For example, you might go to Europe
     if you can find a flight for less than $400, but if you found a
     flight for under $700 to Asia, you would be interested in that.

  D) You don't want to spend hours searching for different tickets,
     but you'd love it if your computer would search for you.

FFlight checks the prices of flights from your airports to 2000
others, at various dates within your range, and it shares those deals
with other users so everyone can take advantage of them.

The main screen shows the best round-trip fares that fit your search
parameters.  It ranks all flights by the metric "cents-per-mile" to
help you find the best deals.

FFlight takes time to work, just like you would doing it yourself.
It's best to run it overnight (even over a few nights) to find the
best deals.

FFlight is open source software, licensed under the GNU General Public
License, Version 3.  You can get the latest source code from
http://svn.travelersnetwork.org/public/ffly/trunk/

This version has a number of new features, including selectable destinations, remembered search parameters, a tool to search for airport codes, community announcements (say, for updates), and a background search that checks old prices.

It’s still only available for windows, so if you’re a mac user who wants to use it, tell me when you’d like to fly and I’ll have it search for you.

The best deals now include $490 r/t to Russia, $683 r/t to India, $686 r/t to China, $820 r/t to Thailand, $880 r/t to Indonesia, and $936 r/t to Australia.

Download it, and see you elsewhere!