Feeling the power of the Lord

There is an external supply of organizational power and coping "energy" available to us, every day, that is way more than we come into the day with. I think too many people today are trying to drive on their starter engines, and running down their batteries, aside from not having much power for hills.

A standard "gasoline powered" car has two entirely different engine systems. One uses gasoline to store energy and has pistons and spark-plugs and can produce more power than 100 horses, sometimes much more. It can move the car 400 miles or more, and then needs to be "refilled" (at $3 a gallon).




The other engine system uses a "battery" to store energy, has a small electric motor, and can produce enough power to "turn over" the big engine and power the spark plugs and run the fuel pump long enough that the BIG engine "starts", at least on warm days when we didn't leave the interior lights on all night.

Then, a side job of the big engine, as it is running, is to recharge the small engine's battery for "next time."

Even jet planes that can cross the ocean generally use some guy with a small engine to come up and plug in to start up their huge turbine engines, that you can hear revving up to speed on electricity and then finally "catching" with a roar as the jet fuel takes over the job.

It actually is possible, at least on a car with manual transmission, to "drive on the starter engine", although it is really hard on that engine. If you're stuck on the railroad tracks in such a car, and you have time, you could put the car in first gear and just turn the key and the starter engine would move the car 30 feet or so before it would run out of power. Don't try it because it will probably require you get a new starter engine, and getting out of the car and running is usually faster and much safer, although it requires getting a new car.

Here's the problem, though. As a metaphor, today, people seem to have forgotten that there is a BIG engine in their cars, and everyone is trying to "drive on the starter engine" all day. Science, unhelpfully, teaches that you don't need a BIG engine to explain why a car can move. (It doesn't address whether such motion explains everything in society, and kind of punts on that question for now, until there is way more computing power)

But, we do see people running out of energy half way through their day. Call it "depression" or "Yuppie flu" or "chronic fatigue syndrome", and "treat" it with ever larger amounts of prescription drugs and caffeine, but it seems to be getting worse, nationally, at an alarming rate. It takes more an more people to "run" an organization, or nation, which produces less and less, even if it runs the people to exhaustion and discards them and gets a constant stream of new people as a business model.

That's what you get if you drive on the starter engine, or try to run you life on your own brain and body and mind. Some motion, then it runs out, and it's really hard on the car.

The alternative is captured in the slogan to the orphanage Boys Town, namely,

He's not heavy father, he's my brother!

There is an alternative power supply here, provided free, fully wireless, available to anyone who subscribes to it. There is a BIG engine you can tap into. That engine does not get tired before the end of the day. Even listening to the song of the same name boosts your energy.

The metaphysical religion model says, in my words, that the purpose of our own energy and free will is to be good starter engines, and every day get ourselves realigned with God and "plug into" the power of God's love to motivate, guide, and empower our actions all day.

The result, if done correctly, is to end up the day tired in some ways, but flush with overflowing success and filled with more energy than at the start of the day.

We're leaves of the tree, and our energy needs to be used to twist and turn ourselves in prayer until we capture the external sunlight fully, which will cause things to happen, energy to appear as if it came "out of the light", recharging us and powering the tree, as well as the flow systems the tree has to make us bigger and healthier and stronger.

If we notice we are running low on energy, the wrong thing to do is to curl into a tight roll and try to "conserve" what we have. That will never work.

Yet those who wait for the LORD Will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They will walk and not become weary.
(NAS Bible, Isaiah 40:31).

The tragedy of our day is that science is so busy trying to prove that God doesn't exist that it has few resources left over that can be turned to looking at why some people manage to get plugged into this power source and spend their days inspired, and how the rest of us can tap into that.

I think their problem is that they are looking for "the power within" and, well, it's not inside the box, it's outside the box. And, it's not there all the time, but requires a rather nuanced alignment and entrainment action on the part of our "receiver" so we pick up the energy beam and respond to it in a phase-lock loop. It's kind of like the submarine communication systems that starts with a low-power broad beam laser looking for a satellite, and when it finds it suddenly focuses the laser on an intense pulse mode exactly at the target so none is lose to the sides.

If you take it into the lab, there is no wire, no loop, no energy being transferred, nothing to see here. The problem is the "taking it into the lab" step. But if you go out and look at some people in action, inspired by the Spirit, you can only gasp in awe.

What we need help with is the alignment step, this "prayer" thing and "submission" thing doesn't always work very well, and we "fall off" the wagon.

I replaced the starter engine of my car today
Uploaded by Michiel2005 on Flickr.
Small Block (Engine) Originally uploaded by Lost America
Battery by by Planet Tyler
Jumpstart by by Old Shoe Woman
Worn out by by Avid Maxfan
Leaves by Shakespearesmonkey
Friendly Friday (bird) Uploaded by Ollie_girl
Little help from my friends uploaded by frankie.farkle

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

If we reframe an intractible "technical" problem as a "spiritual" problem, it can reveal a hidden solution.

Here's an example. I worked in a lab once where we had special glass vials we needed to do our tests. The supplier was back-ordered over 3 months and we ran out and were stopped cold. So, this was clearly a "technical problem." Then I found out that there were crates of these vials 40 feet away in the next lab down the hallway. But, we weren't allowed to use those, because that researcher had a long-standing gripe with out lab's boss over some incident 10 years prior, and they weren't on talking terms.

The point is, solving the underlying spiritual problem of lack of reconciliation of these two researchers was an alternative way to get our lab functioning again.

This is not an isolated case. In fact, when you think about it, there are many "techical" and "economic" problems in our own lives that would go away if we addressed some interpersonal spiritual issues that are in the way. I hate to think of what fraction of corporate and national resources are spent trying to make it possible for us to avoid facing our broken personal relationships and dysfunctional organizations.

What brought this to mind this morning was an article in the New York Times on new $400 antennas that increase your cell phone's reception.

Coaxing More Bars Out of That Cellphone
New York Times
March 1, 2007

Garbled conversations and dropped calls are the bane of cellphone users — not to mention the dead zones where calls cannot go through to begin with. But some recent products are designed to overcome these annoyances, improve cellular reception, and, in some cases, even extend coverage....

So, probably, if everyone spent an additional $400, we could get better reception. That would be the "technical solution."

Take a minute before rushing on and consider what a "spiritual solution" would be. Hint - it would involve cooperation instead of fragmentation between people, with each person trying to reinvent the wheel on their own.

Here's another clue. Glance at my prior post
One laptop per child - grid computing for the poor.

The New York Times covered this yesterday (november 30,2006) in an article "For $150, Third world laptop stirs a Big Debate" by John Markoff. Compare to "Microsoft would put Poor Online by Cellphone", also by John Markoff, Jan 30, 2006.

According to Markoff's article yesterday "Five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — have made tentative commitments to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production in Taiwan expected to begin by mid-2007." Much of the rest of the article deals with pricing, technology, and competing views about the impact of this computer on education.

That misses the most important aspect of this, in my mind, which Markoff mentions near the end of the piece:

One factor setting the project apart from earlier efforts to create inexpensive computers for education is the inclusion of a wireless network capability in each machine.

The project leaders say they will employ a variety of methods for connecting to the Internet, depending on local conditions. In some countries, like Libya, satellite downlinks will be used. In others, like Nigeria, the existing cellular data network will provide connections, and in some places specially designed long-range Wi-Fi antennas will extend the wireless Internet to rural areas.

When students take their computers home after school, each machine will stay connected wirelessly to its neighbors in a self-assembling “mesh” at ranges up to a third of a mile. In the process each computer can potentially become an Internet repeater, allowing the Internet to flow out into communities that have not previously had access to it.

The distinction between "computers" and "cell phones" has become almost irrelevant these days, so what does this suggest.

It suggests that a different way of connecting cell-phones to the national grid would be to have them able to self-assemble a communications grid, in real-time, borrowing a little spare capacity from any other phone or computer in the neighborhood.

In other words, I don't really need my phone to be in line-of-sight to a cell-phone tower if the phones cooperate and silently set up their own relay chain behind the scenes. My phone can talk to my upstairs neighbor, which talks to the phone 2 floors above that, all the way to the top of the building, where someone's phone can talk to another distant building's phones which in turn are in line of sight of the cell-phone tower on the other side of the mountain. Voila, I have a path for my call.

We don't need new $400 antennas for each cell phone - we only need the existing cell phones to talk to each other.

Aside from finding a clear path, the phones could also automatically deliver much more power. This is the sort of thing that radio astronomers use, to connect 20 different radio antenna "dishes" across the world into a single virtual antenna that can be "virtually" pointed directly at the target, delivering thousands of times the effective power because it all goes the right direction instead of off into space.

The downside is that different phones and phone systems and even people would have to be willing to let "their" phone participate as part of a larger social grid. The upside is that this would work even in some Katrina type disaster, and auto-assemble a pathway from the existing phones to a cell-tower or satellite that could relay calls out of the disaster area.

The changes are essentially all in software and procedures. Probably this could be done with existing phones today, if we, collectively, decided that's what we wanted to do.

Without a single new cell-phone tower, or a single dollar being spent for new hardware or phones, everyone in the country could get 100 times better service.

There are no "technical" reasons we couldn't do that.
There are only "spiritual" reasons we put up with that make us dysfunctional.

This kind of problem is very widespread, especially in the USA today, where cooperation and collaboration seem to have gone the way of the phonograph in many places. We're all working overtime, way more hours than any other country, trying to make the payments on purely technical solutions that we mistakenly think we need to solve our issues.

Quoting my earlier post, looking at the chaos caused by lack of communications following Katrina in New Orleans,

By W. David Stephenson International Conference on Complex Systems June 26, 2006

So we know that emergent behavior is possible even under the trying circumstances of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

... Equally important but less understood by decision makers, unlike landline phones or the broadcast media, these devices are themselves increasing networked, self-organizing, and self-healing. In many cases, such as mesh networks that were originally developed for the military in battlefield conditions and now are being used by civilians, the networks don't require any kind of external networking: simply turn them on and the network self organizes.

I am convinced that such a networked homeland security strategy is feasible today, using existing technology and requiring much less time to create and deploy than some of the costly, dedicated emergency communications systems government is creating. Equally important, by facilitating those three qualities needed in a crisis: flexibility, robustness, and self-organizing, it could transform the general public from hopeless victims, waiting for aid that may never come, into self-reliant components of the overall response. To paraphrase Dr. King, which will it be, chaos, or community? [emphasis added]

On a larger scale, communications is just one problem we saw in New Orleans. Tens of thousands of cars left the city with one passenger, while a hundred thousand people were stranded without transportation. Food and water were hoarded not shared.

One explicit principle of the Baha'i faith is where this line of thinking ends up, and it's a lesson
that Michigan and the USA need to pay attention to. The economic downturns can be viewed
as "technical" problems, yes, but that hides the much closer, much cheaper solutions, that don't
require new technology.

PRINCIPLES OF THE BAHÁ'Í FAITH

#10 -
A spiritual solution to the economic problem.



I'm reminded of the monkey traps used in some countries. A cocoanut has a hole cut into the side, just large enough for a monkey's paw to fit into it. Then the cocoanut is chained to the ground, and some delicious nuts put inside it. Then we wait. The monkey comes along, smells the nuts, reaches in, grabs a handful, and then can't get it's overstuffed hand back out the hole. At that point people can just walk over and drop a net on the monkey, who will refuse to let go of the nuts that are "so close."

Americans have this fixation on having to fix everything with individual solutions - everyone has to have their own car, their own house, their own everything -- and even the phones or computer lines, if not being used, can't be shared with others for a whole variety of invented "legal" reasons.

There's a lesson here. In our case, it's not some guy with a net coming after us, it's the entire economy going south on us, loss of jobs, etc. Within each company, there's a collapse of innovation, all to protect this competitive concept and a myth of rugged individualism, that probably was never true. Like our SUV's that dress like they're going off-road, but never do, we have these attitudes that dress like we don't need anyone else to survive, but we do.

If we admitted that, and went from there, most of the rest of these problems could be solved. It's like everyone is trying to be the most fanatastic word or note in the universe, and forgetting that great books and great music need lots of different words and notes to work.

We need each other. We don't need more technology to make up for our lack of friends. We need to help each other learn how to make friends again. It seems to be a lost art for at least one in five people in the USA today. We should fix that, then see how much "depression" is left.