The Immeasurables

May 6, 2026 | permalink

Earlier this year, an acupuncturist placed a needle no thicker than a whisper, and something unblocked. That same week, OpenAI announced ads in ChatGPT. The dissonance between those two events — one ancient, one arriving at the speed of capital — became the first essay. Then the next. Then the next. Each one asked the same question from a different doorway: what remains uniquely human in an age of artificial intelligence?

What follows is a guide to the series (written since Jan 2026) — not a summary, because these essays resist summarizing the way a forest resists being described by its board feet. It's a bit of a trail map. The territory is vast, but the through-line is simple: as machines master the measurable world, the center of gravity of human life may be shifting toward what the Buddha once called the immeasurables.

• • •

THE EVIDENCE

Science of Soul Force
Your heart generates an electromagnetic field sixty times greater than your brain’s. When you enter coherence, that signal can be detected in the brainwaves of the person beside you. Not metaphorically. Electromagnetically. HeartMath has been measuring what Gandhi called the Law of Love — and it turns out, the law has data.

Deep Data — from computation to wisdom
AI excels at big data — the conscious, capturable kind. But there is a deeper layer: the intelligence encoded in your body, your intuitions, the space between two honest people. A manifesto for what algorithms cannot calculate, and a framework for what might matter more.

• • •

THE DIAGNOSIS

The Pattern
Google warned about ad-funded search, then built it. Facebook promised not to sell your data, then did. OpenAI called ads in ChatGPT “dystopic,” then announced them. Three founders, three broken promises — not from hypocrisy, but from gravity. Incentives pull even decent people into predictable orbits. If you don’t want the same outcome, you can’t use the same funding model.

The Eye Roll
When we say “we’re non-commercial,” people roll their eyes. But the eye-roll is itself the diagnosis — we have so internalized market logic that a structural alternative sounds quaint rather than rigorous. A connecting piece that links the science and the critique to seven concrete experiments under way.

• • •

THE RECLAMATION

Each of these essays holds a single domain — a territory that AI is rapidly mastering — and asks what opens on the other side.

The Game That Ends in Grace — from the known to the unknowable
There is a difference between the unknown and the unknowable. The unknown is what we haven’t measured yet — and AI is closing that gap fast. The unknowable is a country where knowledge itself kneels. What is left when every knowable thing is known? Perhaps what was always there.

Labor of Love — from necessity to love
Sam Altman says it takes a lot of energy to train a human. He’s right — and wrong about what that training produces. It doesn’t produce an information processor. It produces a heart. When AI renders all economic labor obsolete, the question that remains is the one markets never asked: why labor at all?

The Geometry of Trust — from control to trust
Something is fraying beneath shared life — not institutions, something older. The essay traces the geometry hiding beneath service and trust: squares (extraction), circles (reciprocity), and a third shape no spreadsheet has a column for. We trust what holds still long enough to be measured. What happens when the most important things refuse to?

Come In and See — from transaction to relationship
A researcher analyzed fifty-two million relationship comments on Reddit. In 2010, 30% of advice was “leave.” By 2025, nearly 50%. Large language models are trained on this data. The algorithm has learned our default: when it hurts, exit. Meanwhile, in a hospital room at 3 AM, a brother discovers the prayer no algorithm can generate: not suffer less, but suffer well.

The Overlooked — from extraction to emergence
The Harvard professor Clay Christensen spent a career studying how empires fall — not to superior rivals, but to things they didn’t bother to measure. Trust, coherence, transformation: these are the rebar of civilization, buried where no serious company looks. What if the gift economy is not a quaint alternative to the market — but its disruptive successor?

• • •

THE PRACTICE

The Counter-Curriculum
A set of talks at Harvard Business School, drawn from twenty-one days of a Laddership Pod. Nine shifts that mirror the B-school syllabus like a photograph and its negative — same shapes, inverted light. From content to context. From broadcast to deepcast. From scaling up to deepening down.

The Intelligence Between Us — from minds to fields
We have two superpowers: thinking and awareness. AI is eating the first. Social media already hollowed out the second. But there is a third thing — what happens when many people attend at once. Vinoba called it Samuhik Chitt Shuddhi: the collective purification of mind. A crowd erases difference. A field metabolizes it. This essay explores what no curriculum can teach and no individual mind can reach alone.

The Beam
In 1656, Huygens hung two pendulum clocks from a wooden beam. Within half an hour they synchronized. The beam did not keep time. It merely transmitted vibrations too subtle for the eye. Most AI is designed to be the clock. We built something designed to be the beam. A field report on what happened when fifty people were sorted into circles — not by demographics, but by resonance — and the AI stepped back.

• • •

The series is still unfolding. Each essay was an experiment in writing — not knowing where the argument would go, trusting that the question was more important than the answer. If there is a through-line, it might be this: AI is closing every door we used to walk through — the door of productivity, the door of knowledge, the door of prediction and control. And in closing those doors, it may be revealing the gateless gate that was there all along.

The immeasurable was never hiding. We were simply too busy measuring to notice.

Be The Antenna

Feb 23, 2026 | permalink

A glove does not decide what shape a hand should be. It receives one.

This is the entire curriculum.

There is a jellyfish called the moon jelly that has no brain and no plan. It pulses. The ocean does the rest — delivering it to phosphorescence, to plankton, to the particular corridor of salt where it was always meant to arrive. The moon jelly's gift is not strategy. Its gift is that it has not argued with the current.

Scientists have been measuring what the moon jelly already knows: the heart generates an electromagnetic field sixty times greater than the brain's. It extends several feet beyond the body. It carries information. When we feel genuine appreciation — not the professional kind, the real kind, the kind that arrives like a door opening in a wall we thought was solid — our heart rate variability smooths into sine waves, and every system in our body begins to hum at the same pitch, like an orchestra that has finally found its conductor.

They call this coherence. It sounds clinical, but it's not. It is the feeling of being briefly, entirely, yourself. Alive.

Our body is an antenna. It has been one this whole time.

Henrik Karlsson says the way to design a life is not to have a vision but to have a conversation — with the context, with reality, with the thing that is actually in front of us. He borrowed the word unfolding from Christopher Alexander, who spent his life trying to understand why some buildings feel alive and others feel like they were assembled from a checklist.

The answer, Alexander found, is the same answer the heart gives: aliveness comes from fit. And fit comes not from planning but from listening — adjusting, adjusting, adjusting — until the form and the context become indistinguishable, the way a riverbank becomes indistinguishable from the river that carved it.

We cannot get there by forcing. We can only get there by attending.

Now here is the part where the two sciences converge, and it can rearrange you a little. :) 

Our heart, it turns out, responds to events before they happen. One and a half seconds before the brain registers an emotionally charged image, the heart has already shifted. The heart is not reacting to the present. It is corresponding with the future.

And the unfolding — that iterative, fumbling, trusting process of paying attention and adjusting — is not merely practical. It is a way of keeping the channel open. Every time we choose to notice rather than decide, to iterate rather than insist, we stay coherent. And coherence, the research says, is not a private achievement. It broadcasts. Our coherent heart changes the brainwaves of the person sitting next to us. Not metaphorically. Electromagnetically.

So when Gandhi said be the change, he was not offering a greeting card. He was describing physics. The field we carry into the room is the room. Our coherence does not influence the context — it is the context that others unfold against.

Vinoba Bhave walked from village to village in India, asking landowners to give land to the landless, and they did, millions of acres, because he had become a door. He did not break people open. He made it easy for them to open themselves. He said: if gentleness doesn't work, get gentler. If subtlety fails, get subtler. This sounds like the advice of someone who has lost. But it's quite the opposite. It is the advice of someone who understood that coherence is the only instrument that does not break what it is trying to tune.

Coercion costs us our frequency. The moment we force, we are back to being a brain in a jar, operating on our own finite resources, which is like a moon jelly trying to swim upstream by thinking harder.

The yeast doesn't demand that the bread rise. The yeast rises. That is its entire contribution. And because it has been mixed thoroughly into the dough — not hovering above it, not commanding from outside — the bread has no choice but to follow.

This is the democracy of it. You do not need a platform or a fortune. All you need is a small act of kindness. A held door. An unhurried glance. The electromagnetic field does not check our credentials.

So the design process and the spiritual process turn out to be the same process: attend to what is actually here. Let the context be smarter than you. Stay in coherence. Adjust. Broadcast what you are becoming, not what you have decided to be.

This, if you have ever sat in a circle where something shifted and you couldn't say exactly what — is the undefinable thing. It is hard to define because what you are becoming is undetermined. Because the alive context is smarter than the stale content you have accumulated. Because the form is not in your plans.

The form is in the context.
The context is in the field.
The field is in the heart.

And the heart — that ancient, electromagnetic, 100,000-beats-a-day antenna — knew before you did.

The Game That Ends in Grace!

Feb 16, 2026 | permalink

[A conversation with my acupuncturist yesterday wandered into unexpected territory. Then this morning, a viral dating app and OpenAI's social ambitions landed in my feed. The resonance and dissonance between them wrestle below. :)]

There is a force that moves through all living things — call it Chi, call it grace, call it what the river calls the sea. It cannot be measured. It does not submit to spreadsheets. If you try to hold it in your hand, your hand is the wrong instrument. And yet a gifted acupuncturist, placing a needle no thicker than a whisper, can remove what blocks it, and the whole body remembers what it already knew.

This is the more ancient logic: you do not manufacture wellness, you un-obstruct it. You do not build the current; you clear the riverbed. Any meditator who has sat long enough knows this in their bones.

But we have built another logic, newer, louder, luminous with screens. Market logic. It says: name the problem, price the solution, measure the outcome. And it is not wrong — it is merely incomplete in the way that a map of a forest is incomplete. The map will show you every trail. It will never show you what the forest is for.

The trouble with measurement is not that it fails, but that it succeeds — so spectacularly that we begin to believe everything worth knowing can be known this way. Money demands an answer: how was my dollar used? And so we learn to value only what answers back. We build civilizations on the quantifiable and then wonder why they feel hollow at the center, like a bell with no tongue.

The Buddha spoke of four immeasurables — apramāṇa — compassion, equanimity, joy, and loving-kindness. Note the name. Not four virtues, not four practices, not four feelings. Four immeasurables. They are not actions you perform or emotions you cultivate. They are what remains when the one who performs and cultivates falls quiet. They are the weather on the other side of the Self.

And here is what the Buddha understood that our spreadsheets cannot: there is a difference between the unknown and the unknowable. The unknown is merely what we haven't measured yet — a frontier, a problem, a dare. The ego loves the unknown. It builds telescopes and particle colliders and sends rockets into the dark, certain that with enough cleverness, the dark will yield. The unknowable is something else entirely. It is not a gap in our knowledge. It is a country where knowledge itself kneels.

To the ego, the unknowable feels like failure. To the heart, it is the entry ticket.

Now consider: Chi multiplies in ways that no equation predicts. If you are regenerating your Chi, and I am present to mine, the field between us does not double — it blooms, unpredictably, the way a conversation between two honest people creates a third thing that neither one brought. 

This is love logic. It requires surrender — not the surrender of defeat, but the surrender of a sail catching wind it did not summon.

And now: we have built a mind of silicon and light. Artificial intelligence is mastering every domain of the known with breathtaking speed, and it will soon venture into the unknown with equal ambition. Every pattern we can name, it will name faster. Every question the ego has ever asked, it will answer.

Which means we are approaching the strangest moment in the history of our species: the moment when the ego's entire game — name it, measure it, master it — is played to completion. Not by us. By our own creation.

What then?

What is left when every knowable thing is known?

Perhaps what was there all along — the immeasurable, the field, the grace that moves through acupuncture needles and between two people who have stopped pretending. The unknowable was never hiding. We were simply too busy knowing to notice.

The old koans return, wearing new clothes:

Can you experience without the experiencer? Can you feel without the feeler? Can you love without the lover?

These are not riddles. They are invitations. And AI, that astonishing engine of the known, may turn out to be the most unexpected of all spiritual teachers — not because it possesses wisdom, but because it closes every other door, until only the gateless gate remains.

25 Years of Love Logic

Feb 2, 2026 | permalink

An excerpt from our latest newsletter ...

A lotus doubles every day. For twenty days, the pond still looks empty. On day twenty-five, only three percent of the surface shows green—you would say nothing is happening.

On day twenty-nine: half-covered. Day thirty: full.

We keep photographing surfaces. We forget the tendrils were moving beneath us the whole time.

This month, we launched a new home for twenty-five years of experiments in love logic: servicespace.org Wander through when you have a quiet moment.

It reminded us what the lotus already knew: growth funded by sunlight requires no business plan

What began as a social experiment now feels like a civilizational rehearsal.

Twenty-five years ago, some friends tested a hypothesis everyone believes but no one thinks will work: that what we do for love will always surpass what we do for money.

They gathered in ordinary living rooms for Awakin Circles—silence, a reading, a meal where no one sits until everyone is served. They shipped Smile Cards into the world with one instruction: do something kind, leave this behind. They turned restaurants into Karma Kitchens where your bill read zero—not because it's free, but because someone you'll never meet already paid for you.

Market logic said this would collapse. But something kept happening in those circles, pods and retreats. When people come together in service, they become like mycelia that forgot they were separate — suddenly conducting sugar and secrets through the dark, discovering that the truest reward for giving is the wild grace of getting to give again.

Ripples spread to dozens of countries. Nearly fifteen million visitors a month. No paid staff. No fundraising. No impact measurement—because just as a mother can't tabulate her love into a spreadsheet, real ripples escape the ledger.

Looking around: loneliness spreading, polarization deepening, climate unraveling, trust collapsing.

Underneath it all, a common thread: we've forgotten how to cohere. We want systems so good that we don't have to be. But when we skip personal coherence, we can't reach social coherence — and without that, no system can sustain the deeper field. AI may be the logical conclusion of that bypass: intelligence without coherence.

AI capacity doubles every few months. Wisdom takes decades to cultivate. Two billion people talk to chatbots today, and that number will soon double. But intelligence was never what was missing.

This is a crisis of wisdom.

Market logic photographs the surface. Love logic stays long enough to tend the roots.

Market logic can't build that field. It's been too invested in the harvest to tend the roots.

So who can?

Those in the margins. Communities practicing quiet transformation in living rooms, on streets, in circles no one was counting. While the dominant paradigm was calculating, they composted. Islands of coherence, scattered across the world.

Now the islands are finding each other. And in a strange twist, AI is what's forcing us to.

An AI Manifesto for Our Times

Jan 15, 2026 | permalink

Earlier this month, 500+ podmates from 45 countries held difficult questions together in our AI + Wisdom pod.

As we collectively grappled with what feels like a "species moment", I wrote a manifesto around Deep Data — "the wisdom encoded in our bodies, our intuitions, our unconscious processing" and "the signals underneath the waterline of conscious awareness" — as we stand at the convergence of big data and deep data, algorithmic intelligence and evolutionary intuition.

Love Logic: Our Theory of Change

Jan 2, 2026 | permalink

Small acts of service open us. An open heart coheres, and when coherent hearts gather, conditions arise for something nonlinear to emerge. The starlings don't plan the murmuration. Each bird watches seven neighbors—and the pattern emerges that none could choreograph. Collective emergence isn't created. It's allowed. But it requires a field.

Below is an article that just quickly flowed, around what can be seen as our theory of change ... 

'Tis the Season -- to Launch Websites :)

Dec 20, 2025 | permalink

We've just pushed out six substantial website revamps:

• ServiceSpace -- the mother ships. :)
  
  
• DailyGood -- now combines all our content portals.
  
  
• Karma Kitchen -- our gift economy portal.
  
  
• cShops -- a marketplace that accepts multiple forms of capital.
  
  
• Pods -- a peer-learning portal, with an entirely revamped backend too! 
  
  
• Maitri Tunes -- an upcoming portal for tunes of the mystic. :)

On top of that Awakin AI is continuing its new found ripples. :) 

Santa has been kind to us this winter!

Bodhisattva Retreat

Nov 1, 2025 | permalink

What an unforgettable Awakin Retreat! Dubbed the 'Bodhisattva Retreat,' it was held at Redwood Vihara Monastery and brought together some truly remarkable human beings — from Rev. Heng Sure, Vanessa Andreotti, Gary Zukav, Evan Sharp, Srinija Srinivasan, and Richie Davidson to Rebecca Henderson, and many more.

Mark Slagle's video below captures the sights and sounds of the retreat — and was delivered as a surprise to everyone on the last day!

And via Liz after our community night ...

Thank you again for co-creating such a palpable community night, last Saturday night in the redwoods! From the reflective breakout circles, to energizing conversations over dinner, to the many invisible elves whose heart, hands, and head prepared the evening, and the heart-opening evening woven with Stephen's sound of the genuine, Melinda's divine parenting journey, Rebecca's insights on death, Evan's prayer to "help us remember," Victor's playful "peel banana" song, Richie's reminder to "brush" our minds like we do our teeth, and so much more -- the evening moved us and reminded us to "sweep clean" our hearts, as Rev. Heng Sure and Nimo sang.

To relive the inspiration and share it forward, here's the recordings and clips alongside Jason's shining photos! :)

Of the many feedback emails we got from local friends and virtual live-streamers, here's a thoughtful reflection from Rev. Bonnie Rose: 

I have been looking at my relationship to service lately - how much of it is offered without attachment vs. how much is about seeking even subtle recognition for being a good person, etc. How do I reduce myself (my level of self-interest) to zero? And even in asking that question, am I seeking to "get something, to get it right, or get somewhere?" It's what the Franciscans call "the quiet practice of the better." The evening helped me keep the faith in what I currently believe is the gentlest yet most effective way to navigate these complex times. Thank you for being.

Until next time—let’s always keep on dancing! After all, “we are all bananas,” dancing joyfully to the “woosh woosh” sound sweeping our minds clean. As Clarissa Pinkola Estés reminds us, we were made for these times.

Reflecting such a murmuration, one of the participants shared the next day, "I'm no longer the tree. I'm the forest." In some small way, perhaps it feels like we are all part of that same spirit.

With folded hands, on behalf of everyone ... Liz

Awakin Europe Retreat: 18 Countries!

Oct 1, 2025 | permalink

In a back-to-back retreat across continent, we just ended a gorgeous retreat with change-makers from 18 European countries for our first Awakin Europe Retreat. Below are a couple offerings from the media team ... 

Here's our sacred meeting space, with emptiness at the center: 

More in our photo album: 

Gandhi 3.0 Grace

May 1, 2025 | permalink

It's completely unpredictable. And yet completely reliable.

The powerful convergence of our Gandhi 3.0 Retreat! Like new. And ancient.

Below are images from January 2025 that I was just reminded of ...

Immersions Video