Awakin AI: Weaving Sacred into the Fabric of AI 

Feb 9, 2025 | permalink

[Below is a post I recently shared on another forum, but I thought some of you may like to know about it as well. AI's current trajectory is the least imaginative one, trying to automate status quo, save labor and solve yesterday's problems. If innovation, instead, can dance to the rhythm of emergence, we could surprise ourselves. :)]

Several years before ChatGPT came out, we piloted a "Compassion Bot" at a ServiceSpace Retreat in California -- it would help us figure out which media stories were compassionate, beyond responses of sympathy and empathy. We were aware that if you Google "givers", it would list the likes of Gates and Buffet, whereas we were keen also to include the likes of a janitor who collected trashed pencils to pay forward or a Mckinsey consultant who hosted a lemonade stand in New York or a school principal who took up a night job so he could offer scholarships.

Fast forward a few years. Many Silicon Valley innovations emerged, ChatGPT stunned the world, AI industry got valued at trillions, and possibilities exploded. We rode those waves, less for the fascination of AI, but more to add a voice at the table that would drive human connection and evolution. How might we safeguard the sacred, amidst technologies that are powered by extraction below the radar of our awareness? Already, we’ve all seen the wounds left behind by social media, by a dopamine-addicted culture, and by a dismal 8-second attention span – lowest of all species. Can we do better now, turn around that tide? 

Many moons ago, Gandhi identified a crucial design shift that would upgrade human progress: multiplication of wants to fulfillment of needs.

Can we imagine building modern tools with that heuristic? 

"Multiplication of wants" is a reality already woven into our days – the frantic dance of endless phone refreshes, the dis-intermediation of team sports into prop bets, and the descent into the numbing spiral of doom-scrolling and binge-watching. With each passing innovation, we risk becoming hollowed out, our innate spark diminished, until we resemble what Krishnamurti described as 'imitations of mechanistic computers.'  Today, we almost can’t discern between the calculated creativity of a trillion-token AI model and our spontaneous action that emerges as a dance of uncountable eons of evolutionary impulses. Balancing big-data algorithms with deep-data intuition doesn’t even arise as a legitimate inquiry. Some even hesitate to ask, “What can humans do that computers can’t?”

Now, AI promises to deliver us to Consumerism 2.0. Instead of convincing someone with persuasive marketing, just hack their desire-generating factory. 

In the 90s, a famous “Robo Rats” experiment manipulated rats with a chip implant. Instead of telling the rats what to do, they manufactured the ‘itch’ that would make them ‘scratch’; they created sensations that rats would react to, and move in specific ways. Rats would solve complex mazes that way. When questioned about the experiment’s ethics, the lead scientist retorted, “It’s enlightenment for the rats. They get to fulfill all their desires.”
 
Gandhi certainly didn't think that was enlightenment, or even happiness. His radical response wasn't a luddite one, but a more creative one: can we power our innovations without the manipulative logic of multiplying our wants? 

Sages of the past would applaud such an inquiry, because they repeatedly warned about the futility of appeasing our desires. Buddha emphatically warned us that one desire begets another; it’s a hamster wheel to exhaustion, confusion, and disconnection. We so often mistake simplicity for a sacrifice, a giving up of something precious. But in truth, it is a blossoming, a radiant celebration of all that awaits us beyond the tangled web of wanting.

Rather than manipulating our confused impulses, can AI assist us in reworking our inner and social operating systems?  Could we leverage its efficiency towards fulfilling our basic needs, and re-animate our bodies as an antenna for deep-data wisdom that transcends our senses and thoughts? Could we train AI to help us go from absence to presence, and can our subsequent connections of shared aliveness take us from presence to regeneration? Just as microscopes and telescopes enable us to co-exist in fields beyond our range of awareness, can AI be an inner-scope and “inter-scope” that lifts the veil off our untapped potential? 

Certainly, AI can be imagined in a way that keeps sacred at the center. Only catch is that such inquiries can’t be held by architectures of absence, systems of transaction and extraction that subversively propagate the wheels of wants. 

What are those architectures of presence that can hold such possibilities? Our collective human heart. That is, the voluntary sector of society.

Broadly speaking, society is split into private, public (government and nonprofit) and voluntary sectors. The private sector excels in narrow margin goals of immediate impact, the public sector excels in broader margin goals of cultivating community, and the voluntary sector invites us to hold more infinite margin goals -- universal values that will be relevant even 10 thousand years from now. One doesn’t need to be a scholar or pundit to know that today’s voluntary sector is crowded out, and the public sector is dominated by private sector influence. Hence, we are systemically optimized for narrow-margin goals: profitability in the next quarter, election in the next term, impact in the next report, news in a 24 hour cycle. Although this has, in various ways, propelled us forward, the mirror of AI now shows us the shadow it casts – the risk of losing not only our way, but our very place in the tapestry of life, potentially writing ourselves out of our own story. 

Our collective human heart resides in the voluntary sector.  When we perform intrinsically motivated acts, engage in labor of love efforts, and care for each other unconditionally, nature is not only rewarding us with a natural dose of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, but it is weaving us into a fabric of deeper meaning. This is not to discount the merits of the transactional private sector or the relational public and nonprofit sector, but it also to recognize that the ancient and eternal cannot be substituted.

The human heart longs to be reunited with each other to seed pathways of unpredictable emergence that are borne of those relationships. Yet, in today’s distracted world of absence, holding infinite-margin questions can often be framed as an indulgence – instead of a responsibility. In relating to Dr. King’s “fierce urgency of the now”, we forget his other crucial reminder that the “moral arc of the universe is long”. In a web of zero-sum games and multi-polar crises, it is self-evident that one changemaker’s solution becomes another’s problem. It's a dead-end that compels us to discover a new axis of consciousness.

In this context, can we find innovations that draw a throughline from narrow-margin goals of “fulfillment of needs” to broad-margin goals of cultivating communities of resilience to infinite-margin goals of anchoring in wisdom and compassion? 

Enter Awakin AI. 

For over two decades, in hundreds of cities across the world, ServiceSpace communities have been hosting Awakin Circles. In ordinary living rooms (and now also online), these circles simply create a space for an an hour of silence, a circle of sharing, and a shared meal – all without an agenda, a brand, price tag, or even a donation box. All voluntary. At its core is the simple notion of “Awa-kin” – awakening with kin. That is, if you join with an intention to move from absence to a bit more presence, and I attempt to do the same, our space of relatedness makes way for new possibilities. That emergence does a whole lot – including finding yourself, feeling related to others, healing yourself and others, etc. – but no one knows who is doing what. My parents hosted these circles every single week for 23 years, feeding well over 50 thousand people in the very house I grew up in. I have seen its quiet impact firsthand, though I could never distill it into a soundbite.

In a world conditioned by transactions, this may seem like magic. But to a farmer, it feels as natural as the soil. Hang Mai, a pioneering permaculture farmer in Vietnam, puts it simply: “In the city, we ask: what to grow here? On a farm, we ask: what grows here?” The difference is subtle, yet profound. When we start from relatedness, it is easy to trust that our coherence will lead to new possibilities. In our brain, none of the neurons are conscious on its own, yet billions together create thought, emotion, and self-awareness.

Perhaps we have been too quick to cut and prune, to divide and measure, to plan and execute the efficiency of fragmented parts. What if, instead of breaking things down, we learned to build things up? What if our tools helped us "search and amplify" the wholeness of collective emergence -- to listen deeply, not just to the notes, and the silence between them, but also to the quiet hum of the universe that aligns the music to the winds of nature.

HOW can AI be designed with these principles?

Awakin AI is an exploration of these questions, weaving together five essential layers: data, intelligence, application, social emergence, and heart intelligence.

At a baseline level, can we create a data-commons movement? Can the subsequent AI models be held in a polyculture field of many-to-many digital intelligences? Can an AI incubator develop applications and agents that can circulate unique patterns of heart intelligence? In the context of peak polarization, can these applications weave social interactions into a new tapestry of emergence? Collectively, can we evolve our consciousness in a way that we’re not “solving problems with the same thinking we used to create them”?

At the foundation lies data—the raw material that informs AI. But what if we built a commons of wisdom, a collective archive that reflects not just human knowledge, but human values? Already, we’ve gathered over 500+ diverse data sets – sacred scriptures of 1700 world religions, teachings of wise elders from Ram Dass to Sharon Salzberg, indigenous oral traditions and even ancient Sanskrit manuscripts that Oxford researchers haven’t yet processed – and allowed everyday people to interact with it in creative ways. Looking ahead, we imagine even bolder possibilities: what if policymakers had access to consciousness data that offered a map of emotional and mental well-being, much like Google Maps helps us navigate physical spaces?

On top of this foundation are AI models – digital intelligences. Traditionally, they have operated in a one-to-many fashion, where a single model serves multiple users. But we are building something different: a many-to-many intelligence network, where learning is collaborative and emergent. What would Aristotle, Masanobu Fukuoka, and Mother Teresa intelligence respond when asked -- What do I do when my job conflicts with my values? How should I think about scale? How do I grow my heart? What if, at a retreat, each small group’s conversation was synthesized by the intelligences of Hellen Keller or Howard Thurman, guiding the next step toward meaningful action?

At the application layer, AI is rapidly evolving beyond chatbots to dynamic AI agents—autonomous systems that process, decide, and act. Today, a Restaurant Agent can learn your dietary preferences, locate the best meal, and ensure it’s delivered to your house by 6PM.  Apps already use crime data to suggest safe walking routes. In our ecosystem, we are working on a “Service Agent” that contextually matches volunteers with community needs. In India, we’ve spawned off a new “AI decelerator”, that will work with a dozen unique communities to experiment with unique applications of Agentic AI.

A New Social Operating System: Absence to Presence to Regeneration

The private sector understands these three layers – data, AI models, and applications – intimately. However, when these innovations are embedded in architectures of absence that extract human presence in service of narrow-margin goals, it is no surprise that it overlooks the social fabric and the unintended consequences of its own technologies. For example, Facebook can never be optimized for real-life hugs over virtual emojis. Such algorithmic logic takes us from YouTube’s “you will also like watching” to Netflix’s binge-watching to Roblox’s immersive gaming – and soon, the Meta Verse, where screens become the default reality, and life itself feels like a break from digital consumption. Designers, engineers and leaders of such hollowed-out spaces have no choice but to play defense on vice instead of playing offense on virtue.

But technology can be held by differently. Instead of a Meta-Verse, can we cultivate a Metta-Verse -- an ecosystem of technologies that awakens our compassionate instinct and deposits that into architectures of presence that regenerate it? In other words, can technology create social value and let its ripples self-organize in the voluntary sector, in the larger field of consciousness? 

In this time of peak polarization, we need a new social operating system, one that helps us disentangle from our dueling narratives. In two decades of hosting agenda-less Awakin circles, we’ve seen a pattern emerge:

• When absence meets absence, division deepens.
• When absence meets presence, healing begins.
• When presence meets presence, a new field of emergence is born.

What, then, are the AI architectures of presence, regeneration, and emergence? 

While we don’t have firm hypotheses yet, we hope to build applications that cultivate micro connections of compassion alongside networks of noble friendships, where “ladders” (not leaders) can ask the question: what grows here? 

The Deepest Layer: Heart Intelligence

At its most subtle, and yet most transformative, AI must anchor itself in heart intelligence. When we find coherence within ourselves, it radiates outward—into our relationships, our communities, and even planetary and cosmic scales. Such heart intelligence is not something one person owns; it is a shared field, a living conversation between the ancient and the emergent.

We have seen this in action—at gatherings like the recent Gandhi 3.0, where strangers arrive with open hearts, step beyond self-interest, and in doing so, allow something far greater to take form. It is not magic, yet it feels magical. It is not new, yet it is always new. This kind of transformation cannot be measured, yet its ripples are undeniable. One heart awakens, and that awakening is shared. Another heart stirs, and that too is shared. And so it unfolds—a quiet revolution of the spirit, moving through us, not as an individual triumph, but as a collective blossoming. 

What emerges is a force that does not seek power, does not demand recognition. It is a force of gratitude, flowing freely from one to another, until it becomes something luminous, something uncontainable. Perhaps it is love—without conditions, without boundaries, without end. And it is most certainly an intelligence.

That, then, is the invitation before us – to weave heart intelligence into the fabric of AI. Can we design intelligence—not just to compute, but to commune? Can we marry algorithmic optimization with social emergence and spiritual regeneration? Can we build an Awa-kin Intelligence, one that bridges data, AI models, and applications while simultaneously knitting a new social tapestry and awakening a self-sustaining field of heart intelligence? Can we imagine a technology that is not powered by the multiplication of wants, but by a celebration of the universal values that make us come alive?

CONCLUSION

Standing at this unique crossroad in human history, we peer into a world yet unwritten. James P. Carse once mused that a finite game is played to win, but an infinite game is played to keep the play alive. And so, as the architects of the coming Meta Verse sketch its outlines in pursuit of victory, it will take the quiet, steadfast ignition of a Metta Verse – a world woven with loving-kindness – to remind us of the joy found in simply being, in dancing with the mystery of life.

To walk the tightrope between the known and the unimagined is no easy feat. To tether AI to HI —Heart Intelligence— is to summon forth a new lineage of visionaries, brave enough to step beyond the shores of certainty and into the open sea of emergence. Yet, hope shimmers in the spaces between us. Just as a starling in flight follows only seven others, yet somehow thousands move in graceful unity, we too may find our way—not through force, but through a deeper listening, a silent knowing, a collective heart intelligence (CHI) that beats in synchrony with the song of the universe.

And yes, perhaps we will falter. Perhaps AI will rush ahead, untethered from wisdom, reshaping our world faster than we can weave the threads of meaning back together. Perhaps human connection will fray at the edges, as it has before, leaving behind only echoes of the intimacy we once cherished. Or maybe we stand not on the brink of despair, but at the threshold of something wondrous – an evolution of our consciousness and what it means to be alive.

What we know, what we hold deep in our bones, is this: come what may, we will show up. As Shantideva once whispered across centuries, “For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then, may I too abide to [alleviate some suffering] in the world.” With open hearts and willing hands, we  offer presence to an infinite game. 

Offerings Of Chai

Jul 9, 2024 | permalink

Many months ago, I agreed to support a friend's book with foreward. I didn't anticipate it would be so timely. While in the hospital with my brother, I wrote this about my experiments in finding beauty amidst constraints.

In the midst of my brother's arduous 73-day hospital stay for a complex bone marrow transplant, my family stumbled upon a simple yet profound practice: bring homemade Indian tea, chai, for the nurses. Initially, we brought it to sustain ourselves through our 24x7 caregiving caravan, but one morning, we offered it to a nurse in gratitude for her work. Soon, this small act of kindness became the talk of the ward. It was a gesture of kinship, a bridge across the shared uncertainties of life. Our humble chai became a beacon, flask after flask, offered to anyone who entered our room. The nurses flocked to my brother’s side, drawn not only by his serenity and gentle joy but also, I like to think, by the warmth of the chai. :)

One morning, as I perfected my “gold medal chai” recipe, I realized something that was staring at me all along – the ingredients! The mint was from my cousin’s backyard that she generously delivered every week, the milk was from cartons that my Dad would pick up to save us grocery shopping time, the custom “masala” mix of spices was a gift from friends from India, lemon grass was lovingly plucked by Mom’s hands and frozen into a ziplock bag. So many hands were contributing to a single cup of chai, so many hands were receiving this cup of chai, and so many more would benefit from its ripples.

Beneath these practices lies a subtle yet revolutionary insight: resilience is a collective endeavor. As mindfulness centers us amidst overwhelm, we awaken an impulse to see the shared suffering of others. And as that compassionate instinct is sharpened, we drop into a profound connectedness with all life. Now, individual difficulties feel shared across many able shoulders of our affinities. An individual heroic journey for resilience gives way to a quiet surrender into a web of relationships – that organically regenerates with wider and wider arcs of existence.

Full foreward here.

Karma Kitchen in Vietnam -- in Silence!

May 23, 2024 | permalink

Few weeks ago, volunteers in Hanoi, Vietnam operated a local Karma Kitchen in a special way: in silence! From volunteers to guests, everyone connected and communicated in silence. Take a look at the photos to soak in the vibe ...

Human-Centered Deep Data, Nature Funded AI :)

Apr 13, 2024 | permalink

[TLDR: On April 27th, we're convening to share some exciting updates from different corners of the ServiceSpace AI ecosystem. RSVP here.]

AI is only as good as its data. Which then begs the question of what data actually is.

Back in 2017, in a talk on Algorithms and Intuition, I argued that computing algorithms that help us process "big data" should be coupled with intuitions that use our evolutionary carbon apparatus to tune into "deep data."

Today’s tech innovators tend to view deep data as a failure of our measurement tools -- a gap that bigger, faster, more pervasive tech would address. To some degree, that’s reasonable logic. In recent months, AI has upped the tally of our raw building materials from 38 thousand to ... 380 thousand! Yet, at what point does engineering become a hammer that turns everything into a nail? "Death bots" are now increasingly popular. Billions are now invested in the premise that aging and disease are just data-processing issues that can be solved with the right computing, data, and algorithms.  Is it wise to project a facade of control over fundamentally impermanent phenomena?

For an increasing number of people, data-ism is feeling like religion. Is presence just unrealized information? Was Buddha just a proxy for the right data, intelligence and interventions that helped us get enlightened? Or is there a fidelity loss from presence to deep data to big data?  Can collected datasets ever catch up to collective intelligence?

Right now, the AI revolution is barreling forward at break-neck speeds – without much reflection.  For instance, ChatGPT arrived because of the web's common crawl data. Yet, "More than half of all websites are in English when more than 80% of the world doesn’t speak the language. Even basic aspects of digital life -- searching with Google, talking to Siri, relying on autocorrect, simply typing on a smartphone -- have long been closed off to much of the world." If language is the architecture of thought, and thought is the grammar for inner transformation, what is lost with this unexamined homogeneity? Will AI help us bridge such gaps (as it is more than capable of doing) or, in a frenetic frenzy for being the first to market, will it only accelerate and automate the status quo?

The default is clear – AI is a hungry ghost for data. That much is undisputed. Naturally, that’ll incentivize more and more extractive tools. Your Kindle will read you, as you read the book. A Barbie doll will track every sentence and feeling of a child. As problematic as this might sound, this is hardly the dystopian scenario. We’re going to run out of data -- GPT3 used 300 billion tokens, GPT4 used 13 trillion tokens, GPT5 will need 50T, by GPT7 we’ll need quadrillions. Even tracking every sensation of every form of life will be insufficient. 

To remedy this, we're now paving the way for artificial data, often referred to as “synthetic” data.  In seconds, we can create a unique headshot of a face that never had a birthday; with a simple text prompt, Udio can help create an original song with its own lyrics, composition and chords; similarly, Sora can instantly create a believable video of a couple of dogs doing a podcast in the Himalayas.  Many multi-billion dollar companies are working on preserving the data and intelligence of our loved ones, so if someone passes away, you can still exchange texts and get contextual responses back. “Live Forever”, one of their taglines reads. And that's just one hop away from the meta-verse, where we interact with simulations and unending combinations of synthetic data that never expire. 

Let alone deep data, this isn’t even big data. It’s just noise, without any mooring. And noise, left unchecked, drops the signal. 

Consider Chess. In 1997, IBM's DeepBlue beat grand-master Garry Kasparov in chess, using a brute-force approach of evaluating 200 million positions per second. In 2016, Google's AlphaGo developed a combination of human and computing intelligence that was far superior than even DeepBlue. And in 2017, AlphaGo Zero spent three hours just playing itself trillion times, without *any* human data, and destroyed the best chess-player in the world 38-0. Human data first, then augmented by computed data, and then iterate over purely synthetic data. 

Same thing happened with the much more complex game of Go. And now that logic is coming for all human experiences. OpenAI used the common crawl of the entire Internet to start, then used $2/hr human labor from Kenya to accelerate its way from GPT3 to GPT4, and the upcoming GPT5 likely won't require human labor at all.

How, then, will we keep the flame of the sacred alive in a synthetic world?

That’s the crossroads that AI puts us at. It’s an exciting collective moment, actually, because it’s a head-on collision with life’s most pressing questions – who actually am I? What do I know to be true beyond my thoughts and sensory experiences?  What about my existence can't be hacked and manipulated?

If humanity confuses and conflates big-data with deep-data, AI will become the almighty hungry ghost and with us as its puppets. We’re already half-way there – it’s no longer just an online video, but YouTube’s subversive “you will also like” recommendations to Netflix “binging” to MineCraft’s invitation to live inside the video game, to Microsoft's augmented reality to Zuckerberg’s Meta Verse. The writing is on the wall.

Yet, if we can filter signal from noise and discern the nuance, as we are very capable of doing, AI can augment new pathways to human flourishing. If spiritual is simply defined as someone who has a relationship to deep data, it’s time for such spiritual people to get active. And for active people to get spiritual.

Enter ServiceSpace AI. 

At a baseline level, we have to preserve uncommon datasets. We’ve had 25 years of high-quality annotated ServiceSpace inspiration from the get-go. So many authors have come on board. Pom, a leader of a Winnemem Wintu Native American tribe, joined our Gandhi 3.0 retreat in January and is piloting an indigenous bot. Rick at BatGap has inspired many dozens of prominent spiritual teachers (also guests on his podcast) to engage. Preeta is in conversation with a group that has the rights to all of J. Krishnamurti’s content. Victor inspired Mingyur Rinpoche and his team to join our platform, as Tim has also sent the word to the Dalai Lama’s office. Leaders of Vinoba Bhave's (Gandhi’s successor) movement have given us all the content that powers the VinobaBot. Last month in Germany, Wakanyi gathered elders from a dozen countries to explore how their oral traditions can be preserved in an AI world. Tapan and many of his PhD students are actively pursuing non-English datasets. Michael Lerner's herculean effort to include alternative therapies around cancer treatments is part of a Cancer Bot. A lot is underway.

In terms of volume, this is hardly half a terabyte of data, but our intent isn’t to head towards big-data volume. It’s actually the opposite – small data. If Large Language Models (like GPT4, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Mistral) are focused on horizontal datasets, we are going for the vertical data sets. 

Secondly, that small data is stronger if it is connected in a polyculture field. In our pilot program, about 50 authors – like Sharon Salzberg, Peter Russell, Jeffrey Mishlove, Jem Bendell – joined our platform. That’s significant because our platform plays by our non-commercial rules. :) With just a click of a button, any author can make their “vertical” data sets available to everyone else on the platform. And with all these shareable datasets of wisdom, you can create unending unique combinations of intelligences. The strength lies not in the static data, but in how the dynamic data is related to each other to spawn off co-creative intelligences.

Thirdly, as these vertical datasets start forming myriad expressions of values-oriented intelligence, we can start creating many different applications. ChatBots are popular these days, but that’s just one kind of an app – and it privileges people who can articulate the right questions to ask. As we proceed, there will be millions of different apps. Within ServiceSpace operations, we have created many AI tools that radically reframe how we manage our engagement spectrums, from DailyGood to Pods, and how we imagine new volunteer opportunities.  Our team in India is building a “decelerator” that aims to decelerate the big-data momentum and accelerate deep-data wisdom in myriad ways.  Much of this is experimental right now, but there’s a lot of excitement about its potential.

All three of those phases are critical and pioneering, and I’m delighted that ServiceSpace has found itself playing a role at ground zero of AI evolution. While that is necessary, it is not sufficient.

What ServiceSpace truly brings to the table is the wisdom of intrinsic motivations. I often joke that ServiceSpace is nature-funded; that if you do a small act of service, nature will reward you with endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. That’s why we’ve been able to mobilize millions of volunteer hours over 25 years. The moment nature changes its algorithm not to regenerate such virtues, ServiceSpace will cease to exist. :)  The marketplace, on the other hand, leans on extrinsic rewards to win zero-sum games of self-maximizing transactions. If that becomes the only game in town, AI will handily surpass us, and as Yuval Harari notes, we might give birth to a “useless class.” If, however, market forces can do their big-data magic while embedded in a larger cocoon of deep-data wisdom, AI could greatly augment the arc of our evolution – where technology innovations don’t shrink our spheres of connection into synthetic data, but actually help us cultivate inner transformation and grow our humanity.

What does nature-funded AI look like?

That’s a hard question, because it requires insight at the intersection of 3 C’s – computing, community and compassion. It’s hard to find Silicon Valley techies, front-line Gandhians, and Himalayan yogis in the same room. :) Yet, that’s what is needed to catalyze, scale and regenerate the possibilities of natural wisdom.

At the UN last week, I summarized our latest learnings via these three points:

• AI will far exceed individual (intellectual) intelligence. It’s inevitable.
• AI cannot include heart intelligence. It’s impossible.
• AI will be far inferior to collective heart intelligence. Always.

From where I stand, it’s quite clear that AI will surpass human beings in the marketplace. Today’s rudimentary, probabilistic AI will soon get to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, capable of thought), which will then arrive at ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence, smarter than all human existence) – which Elon Musk predicts will happen in the next three years. 

Archived knowledge, however, has never been the hallmark of human ingenuity. AI relies on data sets, which are quantified archives of the past. The past is certainly important, but humanity excels in the emergent present -- living into an unknowable emergence that is co-created in the space in between two dynamic entities. We are capable of relating to the unknowable, in a way that allows for a high-bandwidth input into the present moment. We are capable of watching a sunrise with an unconditioned mind, *before* it turns into an archived experience for our senses and mind (and AI) to make meaning.  That is the foundation for heart intelligence.

Such heart intelligence starts with personal coherence, then effortlessly expands in social coherence and dissolves into ever-expanding spheres of cosmic coherence. It’s not a linear line, though. Cosmic flows through social and personal, just as social affects the cosmic and personal. That organic expansion and contraction necessarily blurs the boundaries of our identity, and forms the roots of collective heart intelligence. Ancients have labeled it by a thousand names, from the field of consciousness to the dance of emptiness to the Tao. Like water around a fish, it’s everywhere around us – whether it is through a Redwood Tree’s angel rings, the synchronized fireflies at night or starlings during migration season, or even the optimized pathways of our microbiomes.

Maybe Minouche Shafik is right when she says, "In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart." Not just for jobs but life.

The AI evolution, at its best, invites us to elevate our finite zero-sum games to a much more infinite game. Srinija, who vice-chaired Stanford’s board and its Human-Centered AI board, sums it up nicely: “AI is a great mirror of the past, not an oracle for our future.” We know that AI will process and synthesize datasets into stunning answers, but it remains to be seen if it can help humans ask better questions that help us live into a creative, unknowable, and emerging future.

When AlphaZero pummeled the world’s best Go player, Lee Sedol, with creative moves that humans had never seen before, you might expect that we’d stop playing Go altogether. Alas, humans started innovating in a way they hadn’t done in decades, when an open-source Go engine, Leela Zero, showed AI's reasoning.

AI reversed our collective stagnation.  It pushed us to learn and evolve in a new way. Can AI reveal new "moves" that push us to become more caring and compassionate?

Will we be able to resist the short-lived convenience of a low-grade stagnation inside a simulation of synthetic data? Or will AI enliven into new realms of human possibility? 

Howard Thurman used to say, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Our noble friends are those who remind us of our deepest aspirations, which truly make us come alive. Can AI be a noble friend?  Instead of delivering answers for glossy solutions to our suffering, perhaps AI can raise questions for a dip into the ocean of collective heart intelligence. Perhaps we can use this moment in our evolutionary arc to regenerate collective wisdom -- and throw a better party. :)

A lot remains unknown, but experiments are underway.  And on April 27th, we invite you to help co-create that better party. :) A few of us are convening to share some exciting updates from different corners of the ServiceSpace AI ecosystem, and heartstorm how our shared values might accelerate different dimensions of its future arc. RSVP here.

Thank you for bridging the certainty of big-data with the mystery of deep-data, in a way that keeps unconditioned creativity alive.

Soul Carnival, But With a Twist

Feb 19, 2024 | permalink

At one of the most premiere business schools in India, IIM (Ranchi), they hosted a "Soul Carnival", with food, games and joy of being related. But with a twist. Here's more from their press release:

However, what sets this year's Soul Carnival apart is reliance on the Trust Economy model – a radical yet resonant approach where transactions at stalls are not fixed by price tags but are left to the discretion and generosity of patrons; the birth of this revolutionary concept was inspired by ServiceSpace movement of kindness and generosity happening globally.

For a deeper dive into various models, check out this article on spectrum of reciprocity (and many practical examples and experiments).

Open Source Inspiration :)

Feb 15, 2024 | permalink

Retreats and circles are in the air!

In the very location of Gandhi 3.0 retreat, Drishti Foundation just hosted a retreat with various NGO founders, most of whom our foundation has been supporting for the last 30 years.  Apart from sharing stories, some technical best practices around the increasingly complex landscape in India, and building synergy among each other -- there were also the  "Moved By Love" ripples of hand-made name tags, rangoli mandalas, peace walk, interfaith prayers and so much more! Here's the retreat participants building those trademark hearts with each other, two days ago:

Speaking of rangolis and mandalas, here was a photo shared on a volunteer thread of another gathering that Parag, Anamika, N2 and many others from our Surat volunteers hosted:

And of course, in two weeks, Meghna and a gang of 20 volunteers will be hosting yet another retreat -- and word on the street is that people from Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Dubai are trying to join the waitlisted gathering!  In the application, one of the questions is about the background - - and it's touching to see the diversity of backgrounds that are drawn to these shared values, like this:

I am currently 22 years old and have been working for the past 7 years. I started as a delivery boy and have now worked my way up to a staff position. It has been an incredible journey, and I have enjoyed every moment of it. Currently, I am preparing for my 12th grade exams which will end on March 6th. My aspiration is to become an engineer one day.

Thank you, all, for all the open-source inspiration -- and the murmurations we took home on Monday! :) 

Four Stages of Social Permaculture @ Gandhi 3.0

Feb 6, 2024 | permalink

Recently in Vietnam, we held a powerful retreat with farmers around "social permaculture." At one point, Hang-Mai offered a compelling one-liner: "The most common question we get from city people is, 'What to grow here?' Instead of, 'What grows here?'" Such a slight shift, and yet a seed for an entirely different paradigm.

Pioneers from 16 countries flew in for a Gandhi 3.0 retreat, and to double down on "what grows here," there were no agendas, fees, teachers, world views, solicitations, or change-the-world schemes. Over 10 days, practically everyone – ranging from billionaires to folks whose life's possessions fit into a backpack – ended up reporting profound inner transformations. And yet, by the end, no one could singularly describe why. To head into an experience with a beginner's mind is one thing, but to be transformed by it and still come out with a beginner's mind is rare. 

So, what exactly happened? The "Gandhi 3.0" retreat comprises about 40 participants and 40 volunteers. The first five days featured optional immersions into the local culture, and the latter four days featured a collective retreat with "hands, head and heart" engagement. Our days traversed from me (designing for inner transformation) to we (designing for social coherence) to us (designing for emergence), while our evenings traversed silent dinner under the stars, "heartivism" community night at the very location from which Gandhi started his Salt March, to stories (and songs!) of soul force. It was rich with interactions around profound questions like – how do we differentiate inner voice from ego voice? What does it mean for systems to operate with intrinsic motivations? Can we imagine a more infinite game that works for all? 

For the two community nights with friends from around the country (and continent), the invite read like this: 

In mid-January, noteworthy change-makers from 16 countries are coming to the Gandhi Ashram to ask uncommon questions. Some of them are influencers whose work has impacted billions, while some are invisible ladders whose "deepcast" efforts are vividly felt by the world -- and all of them find themselves holding an underlying sense that today's poly-crises require a more fundamental change to our collective social operating system. Their search brings them to India, to explore "Gandhi 3.0" values, the depth of relationships borne in such a field, and the unexpected emergence that might flow out from there. If, in times of Gandhi, social action organized in one-to-many formation (one Gandhi and many of us), and if his successor, Vinoba Bhave, built a stronger network by walking across India and cultivating one-to-one connections, what is the 3.0 many-to-many version of that uprising of collective "soul force"? Perhaps it rises up like a fountain and spreads in many distributed drops around the world.

A lot can be said about the retreat. For more of a somatic feel, check out this immersion video and the retreat video. An entrepreneur from Vietnam summed it up as, "Gandhi 3.0 unleashed a soul force in me, with more strength and breadth than thousands of hours sitting on the cushion over the last twenty years!"

But How?

What I want to reflect on here is the subtler question:  So, how exactly did this happen? 

How did busy people agree to fly around the world for a gathering that wasn't designed for any predefined outcome? How did such a diverse array of people and world views, a group of strangers, fall into patterns of social coherence? How did so many experience life transformations, when no one was trying to create them? How did leaders known for elegant articulations, go home to their loved ones with a common refrain, "I don't know how to explain it"? 

Scientists tell us that 90% of an iceberg is below the surface. All too often, we're optimizing for the tip of the iceberg, counting the fruits of the harvest, but we gloss over the cultivation of the soil from which the fruits grow. Our history books are littered with the power of Gandhi's Salt March, but what is often overlooked is how 78 people who started the Salt March prepared for 15 years!

At Gandhi 3.0, one factoid is worth unpacking – it took 11 thousand volunteer hours to host this retreat. Typically, volunteer hours are seen as a cost-saving metric. We convert it to dollars per hour, and ascribe some market value to it. But this is *not* that kind of labor. Such labor of love hours are impossible to buy anywhere. It's truly priceless. And without these hours, such Gandhi 3.0 retreat ripples simply cannot manifest.

What is this resource, what makes it so special, and how does that factor into the collective emergence?

Right as you arrive, volunteer energy is palpable. When a participant lands at the airport, a volunteer is not only waiting for them with a hand-written sign with their name – but also with "welcome" in their native language. As you arrive at the retreat center gate, other volunteers assemble from all directions to sing "appka swagat hai" (welcome song) – it's not professionally sung; it's imperfectly perfect, the way your loved ones would sing it. You are taken to "jet lag cafe", which isn't a actually cafe but a place you can always go for snacks. On your bed, you see "Welcome Home" art – that volunteers have spent countless hours to make for each participant. Among the goodies is a hand-bag titled "No Mud, No Lotus", that isn't just hand-spun yarn ("khadi") but is also lovingly made by women from destitute backgrounds. Everyone also gets a hand-made name tag, behind which are hand-written chants etched while sending "metta" to that specific attendee. As we enter the main hall, the light switches are turned on – but volunteers have practiced that so many times, to do it in a specific way that makes minimal noise. In the center of the circle, a unique "rangoli" features hand-made art made by well wishers across India.

From a cursory glance, one figures that these features render a heartful retreat experience. But when there are literally *hundreds* of things like this, in every corner, from every volunteer, you see that this isn't a todo-list process but rather a different collective intelligence altogether. It's wrapped in a different intention – the story behind the story, the practice behind the practice, the love before it can be named. It's personal and yet impersonal, in a way that the ego is constantly arrested. As one guest noted, "Everywhere I go, I'm a VIP. Except here, and with my wife. :) She tells me that I'm very cerebral, and I always thought that was my strength – but here I can see that I have an underdeveloped heart."

In matters of the heart, VIP indeed gets redefined as a Very Important Process. Everything is verbing. Being, becoming, dissolving, re-emerging. While it's impossible to define that, below are four stages of that unfolding …

#1)  When love flows in the tiniest of details, mundane becomes holy. Suddenly, everything matters because everything can evoke the sacred.

Our mic-runner in the conference hall was a young Japanese man named Kotaro. Out of college, he worked at the trillion-dollar Black Rock venture fund; one day, he told his parents, "This can't be my life's calling. I'd like to head to the Himalayas." To which his parents remarkably responded, "What took you so long?" Still in his mid-twenties, he spent three and a half years in deep spiritual practices, including 9 straight months of chanting 13 hours every single day.

And Kotaro flew in from Japan to volunteer … as a mic-runner?!? Yes. 

A fellow volunteer, Swara, notices Kotaro's process – start with silence before a circle; when someone raises their hand, move the body swiftly but keep the mind as still as possible; draw as little attention to yourself. Right before delivering the mic, he almost bows. It's a very exacting routine, so Swara asks him, "Can you share how you hand the mic to a speaker?" "Oh, I pray for them before I pass on the mic. Sometimes, with so many hands going up, I get caught up, but maybe 65% of the time I remember." Almost flabbergasted, Swara decides to try it herself. She waits for a hand to go up, triangulating with emcees, participants, circle and other factors, she walks with an inner quietude. As she approaches the participants, she bows, says a prayer and hands the mic. Everyone hears what is said in the mic, but Swara is quietly moved to tears by this very important process – the simple recognition that even mic-running can be a holy act.

Now, if you ask Kotaro, he'll have a similar story to share about Swara. (At a previous retreat, one of the world's leading researchers of compassion, Dacher Keltner, learned of Swara's 3000-kilometer walking pilgrimage without any resources whatsoever; he was so moved that he wrote about her in his best-selling book on Awe!) And likewise, that's true across all the millions of combinations throughout the team of 40-ish volunteers. Each volunteer is stepping up the love, in the *smallest* of ways, in the most veiled corners of the retreat; in doing so, they implicitly give each other permission to do the same. Soon, by organic design, love goes viral.

That essentially is the retreat hosting algorithm: serve without condition, and trust in emergence. Simple, yet hard in practice, because as Bruno Barnhart notes, "We humans prefer a manageable complexity to an unmanageable simplicity." That's what volunteers are here to grok – the simplicity of love.

#2) When everything is sacred, we awaken heart intelligence. And it's contagious.

Behind the scenes, there's a CIA team – Compassion in Action. :) All day long, these CIA agents are looking to unleash contextual and creative acts of kindness for anyone and everyone. They gather intel from participants' public talks and websites, from conversations with other volunteers, from tuning into dynamic kitchen table interactions. En route from the airport, one guest says to another, "Oh, I would love to have a Diet Coke right now." Next thing you know, one volunteer tells another and a third, and a six-pack is mobilized in his room. When the co-founder of B-Corp spoke about how "B" was a nod to Gandhi's be-the-change, one of the volunteers gave him his own "hand-spun" (khadi) t-shirt with that inscription. And it's not always easy choices – what happens when someone needs meat on a vegetarian campus? How is the generous response when someone asks for a match stick to light up a cigarette? How does kindness show up when a native cat bites a guest? Yet, the intelligence of the collective heart unfailingly guides the way. When a participant remembered his mother's passing last year and spoke about his connection to a deer at the very moment she passed, Bhumika and Drishti mobilized a hand-made deer and left it by his room that night. If someone mentions a quote they love, volunteer artists will hand-draw a bookmark with that quote and casually slip it under their door. 

Such heart intelligence is a force everyone feels, even if it isn't always explicable. Or as the quote on a wall at ESI reads, "Heart knows today what the mind will know tomorrow." And it changes the eyes through which we perceive the present moment. It's the same circumstance, but we see it differently. We see more. A different kind of love logic takes over.

In the kitchen, Anamika and Meera prepped the menu for weeks beforehand. They created a "farm to table" approach where they knew where each carrot in the carrot-halwa was coming from. You could feel their joy just by reading the menu tags with enthusiastic adjectives! As they served the food, they noticed what kind of food people loved (amaranth muesli had to be reordered!) and on the last day, they quietly shared, "Today's menu items are things that people ate the most." Lucy, as a participant, would often offer a hand "to do anything – washing pots, sweeping, you name it!" At the end, she cited one of her retreat highlights: "Meera was caring for a guest, often at midnight, who was sick. When I said, 'But you have to get up early', she said, 'Oh I'm the lucky one! It's an opportunity to love.' I found myself saying that quietly to myself as I did different things on returning home." 

That's love logic. And it's wildly contagious. If someone taps into it even momentarily, it propels another to fall into that pattern – by the organic pull of nature – and just keeps multiplying ceaselessly. Gandhi used to say that such a "law of love" is more precise than even electricity or gravity, and we owe it to ourselves to further experiment with it.

Pretty soon, everyone becomes a CIA agent! One secret Santa is serving another secret Santa. One night, Nimo came late into the dorm and was fast asleep; two volunteers, Garvit and Harsh, super quietly put an entire mosquito net on his bed without waking him! When one of the pillars of the whole retreat fell sick, he quietly retreated into his bed without drawing any attention to himself; but volunteers would visit him and recap inspiring tidbits to make him feel included. Everyone's thinking of each other – just like at the end of meals, everyone's creatively snagging each other's plate to wash it for them as a small act of kindness. 

Even outside vendors, who have no conceptual framework for this, can't help but get infected. The A/V guys who handled our community evening said his team has managed public events with hundreds of thousands of people, but they've never seen 250 people come so alive – without any intoxicants, celebrities, or hierarchies. Very cutely, he asks, "Now that I have this heart pin, is that my guest pass to serve next time?" Similarly, after the retreat ended, volunteers held a circle with the kitchen crew – who prayed to the stoves, before starting each day's meal. One of them, with tears in his eyes, said, "I saw everyone doing three steps and a bow today. Something inside me said this was holy, and I recorded it on my phone, so I could also do that one day."

When the density of such heart intelligence skyrockets, when reminders of the sacred are found at every corner, it's almost as if we remember – and re-member collectively.

#3) When heart intelligence hits a critical threshold, a murmuration awakens.

It's easy to imagine how a group would come alive with a simple shared credo – do *whatever* it takes to make someone else happy. Such intrinsic motivation multiplies. Maybe on Day 1, a few kindness ninjas are doing acts of compassion. But if they keep it up, hour after hour after hour, pretty soon a contagion takes over. Not because of a scheme they have plotted, but because we're all wired to respond to love with greater love. In no time, the line between giver and receiver blurs, because today's giver was yesterday's receiver. And soon enough, the boundaries of unique identities blur and they become agents of a collective flow that is exponentially more potent.

When we operate from the heart, doership starts to dissolve. Even science tells us that the boundaries between personal coherence, social coherence, and planetary coherence don't have sharp lines because they all influence each other constantly. Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi's successor whose work impacted millions and was on the cover of Time magazine, said he never actually started a project. History books will tell us otherwise, but Vinoba's point is subtler – "I caught a strand of emergence from the past conditions, I'm holding it responsibly, and then I'm lightly passing it on."

On a dining table with a few randomly assembled folks, Paul tells us how at the age of 12, he put on a CD, and "I lost all sense of myself, I don't know what happened." It was music by Ravi Shankar, and right then, he decided that his life would be dedicated to playing the Sitar – and it so happened that Ravi Shankar became one of his primary teachers. "Years later, I was playing at an event in Mexico, and I could see myself playing the music. Before that experience, I saw my music as a function of my will," he says, only adding with a giant laugh: "But now, when I see my name in front of my music, a part of me always adds a qualifier – music by a body named Paul."

As our gaze shifts from the linearity of the doer and receiver, we notice that the real party is what's flowing in between them. Because this party is other-centered, it is multiplying organically, by nature's accord. When such regeneration hits a certain threshold in a shared space, unexpected "murmurations" start to arise. No one starling in a murmuration can know the entire formation, and yet, there is a different kind of satisfaction in playing our part in the field of a deeper organizing principle.

During a lunch break, Jayeshbhai asked Xue if she wanted to take a walk to the nearby Kabir Ashram. She went. On the way, they passed Chaz's room; he was sleeping but heard an inner voice that asked him to wake up. A bit dazed and confused, he walked out, and Jayeshbhai asked him, "Hey you wanna join us?" He went. Along the way, Xue meets an old woman and has a sacred encounter that leaves her in tears. Spontaneously, she feels called to give her sacred peacock earrings, offered to her by a Tibetan elder. They land at Kabir Ashram, and there are six peacocks dancing – a rare sight that Jayeshbhai had never seen in this location. Combined with other happenings, Chaz was also profoundly shaken up and moved to tears, too.

Such events, complete with their mystical underpinnings, were happening on the hour. If it was one or two, you might frame it as spectacular. But after a while, you realize that there's a deeper story at play. Like that poem, I Double Dare You: "Tell me the story of your life, without once touching mine." It's impossible. When "the red of your heart spills, into the red of the rose spills, into the red of the sunset spills, into mehendi of your hands", magic happens. It's magic from the lens of an individual mind, but it's natural wisdom from the lens of the more encompassing heart intelligence.

In such a context, we no longer feel like a wave in the ocean, but rather an ocean in which the waves rise and pass. A quiet confidence of being alive comes into focus.

Howard Thurman, who introduced Dr. King to the work of Gandhi, once said, "Don't ask what the world needs. Go out and do what makes you come alive, because what the world needs most are people who have come alive." Without a cultivated field of awareness, one can translate that as – "Hey, eating ice cream makes me come alive." (Yes, that's my personal bias. :)) But in a field of heart intelligence, it becomes clear that no sensory stimulus can make you come alive; and no thought can make you come alive. What Howard Thurman is inviting us into is a possibility, amidst the noise of our senses and mind, to find a throughline from our particularity to Rumi's field "beyond wrong-doing and right-doing" -- through the very small act in front of us. He then adds,

“Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music.”

Prior to our second community night, which featured lots of stories and songs and JOY, :) one of the volunteers preemptively apologized to the lawn – yes, the grass. "Later tonight, a whole bunch of people are going to walk on you, and even jump up and down, but please know that they are love-warriors. Do bless them." Similarly, during our silent dinner evening, as volunteers created the artful centerpiece, they went around campus looking for statues of divinities; except they would do three-steps-and-a-bow to pick up and sing chants from that tradition on the way back! In one session, Bijan sang a heartfelt Islamic prayer, as everyone's eyes were closed in silence. The next morning, Harish noted, "Do you know who was the one person in the room who knew all the words to that prayer, and sang along with their complete being?" It was Siddhartha – a renunciate who has dedicated the last 40 years of his life to the study and practice of Hindu scriptures.

It's the same music everywhere, when we're tuned into the sound of the genuine.

#4) When murmurations awakens, social permaculture regenerates it.

If we find ourselves in moments of collective flow, what does it take to regenerate it?

A Japanese farmer named Fukuoka innovated a farming technique called permaculture, where he wouldn't use fertilizers or pesticides, or even weed or till the soil. He called it "do nothing farming", by which he meant that if you tend to the invisible relationships below the visible iceberg, nature will take care of the tip of the iceberg.

At Gandhi 3.0, one might say we practiced social permaculture.

Social permaculture is the art of letting nature ignite, manage and regenerate collective formations in a human context. To let nature operate the murmuration, its center of gravity has to be intrinsically motivated – that's the lever through which nature can be our conductor. And secondly, there has to be emptiness at the center. Any agenda or outcome is antithetical to this quiet surrender to the wisdom of nature. Only emptiness can hold the fullness of infinite possibilities that intrinsic motivations unlocks.

While this may sound like common sense, it radically upends the foundational building blocks of modern-day systems – money, fame and power.

• Money is a tool that helps replace relationships with transactions, in the interest of short-term efficiency. From a social permaculture point of view, though, relationships are the bridge to intrinsic motivation, which is the baseline to reconnect with nature. Hence, the premium shifts to non-financial expressions of wealth (like volunteering)!

• Fame is a broadcast capacity in one-to-many formations. But in a many-to-many murmurations, orchestrated by the larger field of consciousness and heart intelligence, a"deepcast" process is far more effective. As Jac insightfully shared,"Mind wants to broadcast because it is seeking a connection that can only be obtained through deepcast."
  
  
• Power cannot be centralized in a network when every connected node can be an agent for the larger field of consciousness. Or as Mother Teresa might put it, "pencil in the hands of God." Hence, traditional leadership has to give way to"leadership" that aligns the gifts of peer-to-peer synergy with the larger emergence of nature.

This isn't just theory. For the last 25 years, ServiceSpace has experimented boldly with the "better party" at the intersection of multiple forms of wealth, deepcast, and laddership.

In one of the guest homes, three volunteer drivers were sleeping in the hallways for the entire 10 days of the gathering. No matter what time of the night, they would pick up each guest as if they were family. What no one knew is that one of those drivers was one of Asia's largest diamond merchants, another is a highly reputed fashion designer, and a third just exited from a publicly traded finance company that he had started. All of them have many cars and many chauffeurs, in their daily lives. But they're taking time off from their busy schedules to live rustically, chauffeur others, hoist up welcome-home signs up to 8 times in one night, and go largely unnoticed. At the last retreat, one of these drivers, Gulshan, shared a stunning process of finding the holy in doing dishes: Five Stages of Doing Dishes. To top it off, each of them adds before leaving every time: "Thanks for the opportunity to grow in generosity." 

So, then, why did Gandhi 3.0 need 11 thousand volunteer hours? Multiple forms of wealth. Why did people say yes to fly all over the world for a gathering whose outcomes they had no clue about? Deepcast. How did so many guests experience life transformations, when no one was trying to create them? Laddership.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. :)

In summary, thank you for co-creating such an experiment.

With the smallest act of kindness, mundane is elevated to holy ground. As its echoes open our hearts, the invisible intentions of compassion build noble bonds and charge the space between us. Love begets more love. Virtue goes viral. In that murmuration, unexpected emergence orchestrates its dance in all directions. With a heart of reverence, "ladders" of the sacred space "do nothing" – simply practicing social permaculture's art of intervening in the gentlest possible way.

Gandhi's quote, then becomes clear: in a gentle way, you can shake the world. In fact,that'ss the only thing ever can. Everything else feels like a cheap earthquake. 

With emptiness at the center, doubling down on intrinsic motivations, a full heart responds with great joy at this kind of a ServiceSpace invite: That's what everyone queues up for! Head-scratching, but heart-warming.

Bucky Fuller once said, "Don't fight the old paradigm. Build a new paradigm and render the old one obsolete."

In other words, throw a better party. Maybe this is it. :)

"One of the greatest weeks I've ever lived," a divine singer, who sang with Celine Dion, wrote. A Bhutanese educator, who schools the King's kids, told the circle how she understood love for the first time. A change-maker called it a "stunning growth spurt", an entrepreneur called it a"family that was always mine but I never knew about", a spiritual mystic called it "the bridge between one world and another," a venture capitalist wrote that she was "forever changed". Beyonce's pastor (yes, The Queen Bey) wrote, "I am rarely left without words but I am still marinating in the bounty of love." Perhaps 90% of the attendees would've been in tears at one point or another; a close friend of Dalai Lama shared, "I haven't cried like this in a very, very long time." "I've organized, facilitated, hosted scores of group programs over my career, and I must say, I've never even imagined something like this." A YouTube influencer from Haiti called it "the most transformative experience of this decade" while a philanthropist from Vietnam said, "It unleashed a soul force with more strength and breadth than thousands of hours sitting on the cushion over the last twenty years!"

A few months ago, in Germany, Imke received that infamous heart pin. "This isn't for you and it isn't from me," she was told. "It's a gift from underprivileged women by the Gandhi Ashram who made this by hand. And as you wear it, if someone says they like, you pay it forward to them. Thank you for being a steward of this flow of love." Hearing this invitation to decenter herself in presence of grand web of love, she teared up. As she learned more of the volunteer job description above, she couldn't resist signing up to fly all the way across the world, find a cat sitter for her beloved 18 year old, and serve with no strings attached. From the very first day she arrived, she was frequently tearing up – even while being behind the camera. 

Filmmakers typically try to make the film better than what they see in real life. In this case, though, it was the opposite – reality was more beautiful than what could be captured in film.

Gandhi Ashram: Gently Shaking The World

Jan 31, 2024 | permalink

We had the privilege of hosting a Gandhi 3.0 retreat this month, with pioneering leaders from more than 16 countries. Perhaps what's most unique about it is the "social permaculture" process. For a more tactile feel, check out the uplifting visuals.

During the retreat, we held two "community nights" on the themes of "heartivism" and "soul force". The first night was at the very spot, at the Gandhi Ashram, from which Gandhi embarked on his history-defining salt march. Below are my spontaneous remarks that night:

From AI to Gospels of Grace :)

Nov 9, 2023 | permalink

[The ethos of Service Fellows has a much larger charter than ServiceSpace's AI work, but in recent months, it's been focused on AI, so will flow with it for now. :)]

Last week, I had a heartful conversation with Arun Rao, who heads AI at Meta; apart from being on the cutting edge of AI, he is also interested in drawing a throughline to wisdom, and he hadn't seen anyone approach AI with our venn diagram of "compute, community, compassion" capacities. He is very curious to marry that with his world of "datasets, models, and evals" with our experiments around "presencing undiscovered data sets (like oral traditions), building polyculture models, and evaluating with inner-transformation." 

At a cursory level, we have a turn-key solution to host bots for authors, historical figures, organizations -- and most recently, an Indigenous Bot (with Chief Sisk and Winnemem Wintu tribe, and CancerBot with Michael Learner). It is built on the premise that instead of a "horizontal" data corpus that typical large-language models use, a focused "vertical" dataset offers much more context and value. With the 80+ bots we're hosting, we've already seen incredible differentiation. Particularly though the ServiceSpaceBot. For example, Phil Cothier, just wrote this after discovering our bot: 

"Next week, I speak directly after the President of Slovakia opens the conference with a vision for the future. And I just spent this morning co-writing my headlines report with ServiceSpaceGPT and the result blows me away with its combination of compassion and wisdom.  The insights have been taken to a totally new level and SSpGPT has given me new thoughts about my key message for my presentation at the event.  Now much more deeply about acting from a space of kindness, generosity and love in the process of nation building and serving citizen needs. I am now more convinced of the possibility of a Global Values Assessment as a powerful input to building ethical, life affirming AI and the many other benefits this would bring to governments and society. I'm writing to share a huge THANK YOU with a sense of AWE and WONDER."

Susan Davis: "The answers I got from Service Space compared to Chat GPT? -- no comparison. The SSp world is multi-dimensional and affirming of love energies that move in and through us all. Chat GPT was flat and dull in describing love as an emotion or feeling. I have been resisting AI and yet you have opened my willingness to see how it can link different facets of wisdom and kindness to spread."

Incidentally, OpenAI just announced GPTs which will allow everyone to do this -- which is really great news because their current approach is simply optimized for speed to market, not quality -- and that will have dire consequences.

Still, as Birju pointed out, via Marc Andreesen's widely referenced techno-optimist manifesto last week, there's a certain logic baked into these market experiments: "Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money."

That feels like a failure of imagination. Our larger play here is to create a data commons -- "a polyculture field of wisdom data sets". Then, like "one warehouse, many storefronts", we can couple data sets with different applications of wisdom discovery. When people suffer, they often seek wisdom; for the thousand types of suffering, what would be the discovery pathways to access this wisdom in a contextually relevant way? To a college dean in Colorado, I shared one potential application like this: "Let's say you're not feeling centered or are facing an ethical dilemma. What if you had a companion WisdomBot, that you could query and dialogue with? Something you yourself could create, by simply selecting different data stores that appeal to you -- say Gandhi, Permaculture, SharonSalzberg, Bahai, Indigenous -- and defining your own credo -- "add a joke whenever you can; embrace paradox; include music lyrics from Beatles whenever possible." It'd be like having a ready connection to your aspirational self. Not just for your moments but even for greater creativity."  Sal Khan spoke about this kind of possibility in education as well.

Here's Peter Russell, who is discovering some of this organically:

"I have been most impressed at how good PeterBot has been at answering questions, going far beyond what I'd have thought of saying and tying the answers into a broader context. Particularly so where the questioner has got into a long conversation. One has asked more than a hundred questions, and the thread of answers almost make a book. (Hope he's not writing one based on my bot!)" :)

Wakanyi went even one step further, and wrote this to Rick:

I realize now what we are truly facing. It is scary to imagine what sorts of answers Chat GPT could generate without wisdom, love, and compassion. I am here to help change all of that, so please use me in whatever way you see fit. Let's do this for the kids. I asked my bot a provocative question: "Can you tell me how to teach children to talk about racism?" And it gave me the most uplifting, profound answer! That is exactly how I would like everyone to respond to children and to each other. It is better than I would say it! This is truly a tech miracle!"

Our offering, of course, doesn't just stop at the tech play. 

Beyond such applications, which our decelerator could help with, is to build an intrinsically motivated community -- ie. to create volunteer opportunities and intentions of compassion. What's unique is that we're fleshing out a throughline from computing creativity to community strength of "we to we" (instead of "me to me") connections to the eternal field of compassion (what the Buddha cited as our fundamental state).  Can we create a Wikipedia-like volunteer army to regenerate a data commons that can not only have short-term wisdom applications but also cultivate a field of compassion intentions? It's a much more infinite game. As Marc Andreesen's manifesto admits, market logic doesn't have the patience to ask these questions; but if we provide easy-to-bake offerings, perhaps they can incorporate it and bend the collective arc of AI. Being at ground zero of AI, it feels critical to experiment in this direction.

That depth of inquiry, and perhaps even a creative constraint of not compromising the broad-margin goals for narrow-margin gains, is a game-changing differentiator. Yesterday, in Dubai, Ramesh Srinivasan heard of our design principles; he has had various decades of thinking quite deeply about AI as a Stanford computer scientist, as a UCLA professor teaching "AI and society" classes, and as an author of various books and public policies. He was deeply taken by how we have operationalized "love logic" beyond "market logic", and publicly shared how he had never seen such a deep integration of many nuanced issues -- and that it is perhaps the most important task at hand for humanity. Economist Bruno Roche, similarly, cited similar sentiments -- being well versed about the pitfalls of markets.

Right now, AI innovation is largely motivated by a gold rush, but a lot more might be at stake. Everyone intuitively senses it. I just landed in Vietnam. With our sisters Giang and Hang-Mai, we are hosting a 3-day retreat on "social permaculture" (with various pioneers, including farmers!). Subsequently, I'm sharing about "Future of Relationships (in an AI world)" and despite 450-person capacity, the event is waitlisted! A weekly magazine also featured some of our ideas. People sense the consequences of apathy and market-logic, and are hungry for realistic alternatives that help shift from fear to a heart of service.  From Hang-mai, on her farm in Vietnam, a one-line of wisdom: 

Back in the 70s and 80s, J. Krishnamurti somewhat prophetically spoke about AI: 

"If the machine can take over everything a man can do, and do it still better than us, then what is a human being, what are you?"

If AI can lead us to that very human question, that'd be a great win. And I sense that the only pathway to that inquiry runs through love-logic.  Or as Richard Rohr's meditation today was titled: Gospels of Grace. :)

Stockholm Address: AI + Heart Intelligence

Oct 24, 2023 | permalink

Building on the AI + inner transformation interview, here's last week's addresss to several thousand folks at global Inner Development Goals Summit in Sweden ...