Listening to him yesterday being interview by NPR’s Terry Gross (transcript), I was stuck by Kaku’s beautiful description of his String Field Theory, which attempts to describe in one tiny mathematical formula the nature of the universe – or, in Einstein’s words “The Mind of God”:

Well, very simply, that all the sub-atomic particles – neutrons, protons, quarks – are nothing but musical notes on a tiny rubber band, that when you twang the rubber band, it changes from one frequency to another. So it changes from an electron to a neutrino. And you twang it enough, it can turn into all the subatomic particles we see in the world.

So all the subatomic particles that make up our body are nothing but different notes on many, many, many tiny little violin strings, little rubber bands, and that physics is nothing but the laws of harmony of these vibrating strings. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on these vibrating strings. The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein wrote eloquently about the last 30 years of his life, is cosmic music resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace. 

Why should you care? Because, every Monsanto victory destroys our right to choose what we put in our stomaches. Because every new GMO crop permanently contaminates the environment. Because GMOs are not grown in some sort of isolated, Sci-Fi laboratory – they’re grown in fields which contaminate other crops, including organic crops.

But this isn’t about organics or choice. It’s about responsibility … our responsibility to hold our government accountable. You’ve already wasted three minutes reading my blog … will two more minutes really kill you?

Sign the petition today. Tell a few friends. Let’s at least keep trying to fight these bastards.

Investigative journalism just got a huge boost today with the launch of the new Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN).

Serious media coverage of environmental issues has taken a beating over recent years, with some of the nation’s leader journalists – such as TIME / LA Times ace reporter Margot Roosevelt – getting axed due to budget cuts.

“Our stories will fall under the classic mandate of investigative reporting–to reveal corruption, abuse of power, and exploitation wherever it happens; to expose activities that the powerful work to keep hidden or to explore subjects that are just too complex for the breaking news cycle,” said Editor-in-Chief Sam Fromartz in today’s release. “We’ve chosen to focus on food, agriculture, and environmental health specifically because we feel these are under-reported subjects that touch people’s lives every day.”

FERN has gathered a serious staff and board of advisors, including Sam (author of Organic, Inc.), Ruth Reichl (former Editor-in-Chief of Gourmet magazine) and Allison Arieff, contributing columnist for The New York Times.

Jerry Nivens stands near what he refers to as “my little miracle in the desert,” a naturally occurring pond that is fed by ground water surrounded by arid desert. The pond is located less than a mile away from a proposed dairy site. By Vanessa M. Feldman.

FERN’s first story report takes a hard look at pollution by the powerful dairy industry in New Mexico and how one man became the driving force behind a movement that brought the state’s mega-dairies to heel. Click here to read the story.

On a personal note, I remember attending the meeting a few years ago which spawned FERN. The folks working on this project – including Sam, Naomi and Paula – are truly amazing and brilliant. Keep your eyes on FERN – they’re destined to make a big impact.

A registered 501(c)3 non-profit corporation based in New York, the Food and Environment Reporting Network was founded in October 2009 and began operations in January 2011. It is funded by the generous support of the The 11th Hour Project, McKnight Foundation, Clarence Heller Foundation, Columbia Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Nearby Nicasio reservoir, barely hanging on.

As I write, the season’s first major rain is falling on our fields. I’m reminded of a winter, 35 years ago during the drought of 1976-77, when our family farm, like so many others here in northern California, teetered on the edge of dissater. Bone-dry wells and powder-dry reservoirs lay barren, unable to quench the voluminous thirst of our cows and crops. Already, we were hauling in water by the truckloads, but the expense would soon overwhelm our already-marginal financial reserves. Even I, at the innocent age of nine, knew our future hung in the balance.

Desperate, my parents picked up the old rotary phone and dialed the number for Old Man Cerini.

Cerini, living in the nearby town of Tomales, was already 91 years old. I remember him bent over, his back hunched from decades of ranching and hardship. Then again, everyone looks old to a nine-year-old, I suppose.

Old Man Cerini wasn’t just any old man, however. He had a special gift. He would walk around the fields and, holding a switch of willow sampling out in front of him, would wander the pastures, looking intently in every direction, but most importantly at the switch itself. He was waiting for it to bounce and bob.

For indeed, Cerini was a water witcher, a dowser.  Something, some energy, was radiating inside his body that nobody could understand. In a way, it didn’t matter, because it’s what happened on the outside that was so astounding to the farmers gathered around, expectantly thirsting and hoping for relief.

*Not* Cerini, but sure reminds me of him.

Cerini’s gift was that he could find water deep underground. Not by looking for signs like the green grasses of an oasis, or the slightest trickle of moisture. No, whatever was going on inside of him somehow reacted to something going on way down under the ground, and the result would be a bobbing of his totally unremarkable, freshly snapped tree branch which he held in both hands, lightly between his fingers, slightly stretched out in front of him.

Now, Western scientists will tell you it’s all baloney. No matter how sound the scientific testing by researchers, another will come along and just as quickly poke holes in the research methodology. Religious leaders are equally dismissive, such as when the Jesuit Gaspar Schott declared over 350 years ago dowsing to be “superstitious, or rather satanic“.

Answering my parents call, he came out to our farm and, after searching high and low, finally settled on a spot. “Here … dig here.” So the drilling equipment trucks rolled in, placing the auger bit to the soil, and inch by inch, foot by foot, the hole sank deep until …

Drill, baby, drill.

Nothing. Absolutely not one drop. Undeterred, Cerini searched for another spot. Settling on a spot up on the hill, over by rock quarry, the digging began anew. And again, dry. Cerini walked across acres and acres of fields again and again, finding not one, but three more locations, each time certain that water would be discovered. With each dry hole, our desperation grew, and our wallets shrank. Thousands of dollars with each attempts, gone. And soon, hope was waning as well.

Cerini, too, was devastated. This had never, in all of his years, happened before. He beseeched my parent to allow him one last try. They acquiesced. In retrospect, I don’t think my family had much choice.

Good thing that Old Man Cerini didn’t know about the researchers’ skepticism, and thank God someone apparently forgot to give him the memo suggesting he was a fraud. Because there, in the 11th hour of our farm’s fate – some 15 years before we would eventually strike white gold with the launch of our organic milk – in a miracle that still sends shivers down my spine just writing about it, Old Man Cerini hit liquid gold – an underground aquifer gushing some 70 gallons of water per minute.

Maybe Old Man Cerini got lucky. We certainly did, as he saved our farm from one of the worst droughts in Northern California memory.

I’d interview Cerini if I could, but of course, he’s long since passed away. Interestingly, there’s another dowser in the area, who I’m hoping to interview soon. Reminds me of that line in The Empire Stikes Back … Obi-Wan laments that Luke is their “last hope,” but Yoda reminds him that “there is another.”

Ever wondered what it might be like not to have enough water? Grab some popcorn and watch the fantastic 1986 French film, Jean de Florette and sequel, Manon of the Spring.

Nope, I’m talking about the day I landed in London, this past July, stepping foot in the West for the first time after 15 months backpacking through Asia.

At Heathrow, people were queuing up in an orderly manner … definitely not the chaotic rugby-style scrum so typical at, for example, train stations in India where they’ve perfected cutting in line into a new artform. While we were lining up for Immigration / passport security, CNN monitors announced Amy Winehouse’s OD. The Underground was spotless. Trafalgar Square was packed with Harry Potter look-a-likes for the opening of the final installment.

Oh, and it was pouring rain.

I hadn’t been to London in … yikes … 13 years. And what a blast — especially meeting up with old friends and new (you know who you are).

12 years since we bonded while singing about cheese to the tune of the Sound of Music's Do Re Mi

As intense as the initial culture shock was, nothing prepared me for visiting my old buddy Paul out in the countryside, straight from the Virgin-privatized train to Games Day – where perfect children were competing in three-legged races on perfectly manicured British school lawns, while the parents sat on the sidelines, nibbling on traditional sandwiches of thinly-sliced cucumber and lightly buttered crustless white bread. A spot of tea completed the experience.

It was all just so … proper. Clean. Quaint.

Anyway, my new article on London was just published – it mentions the organic pub I found, but not the fact that those were my first IPAs in seemingly forever.

Good thing that my hotel was, literally, in crawling distance.

It happened like this – some years ago, after being led through a meditation practice which focused on feeling energy flow through the body, she began (and continues, to this day) to see energy:

It’s like seeing heat waves coming off an asphalt road. Not in color, but clusters of energy flying around – sometime coming off people, other times just flying around. Sometimes, it’s just odd shadows. 

She got me thinking about my own experience. For years, I’ve noticed that, especially at night, when I look into the darkness, I don’t see pure black. Rather, I see what can best be described as a dark version of the static you see in-between TV stations. I remember asking a few friends, wondering if my experience was normal, or whether my eyes are getting all wacky. Barbara has been researching this issue and found some interesting blog references.

Today, Barbara pointed me to a recent International Herald Tribune editorial discussing peer-reviewed research published in the journal Nature:

Evolutionary biologists at Cornell University have found that most land vertebrates — including humans — are descended from a predatory fish that lived hundreds of millions of years ago and could sense electrical fields in its environment.

 Have any of you seen energy?  Care to share?

As I wander their heirloom apple orchards and well-tended rose garden, thoughts of infinity float through my mind. I keep coming back to this idea that time is infinitely small – no matter how you slice it, you can keep on slicing it into smaller and smaller bits. And yet, we know that within that tiniest fraction of a moment, all the possibilities, choices, locations that we can imagine all exist concurrently. That is, the infinitely small contains the infinitely large. Or, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama summed it by just the title of his 2005 book: The Universe in a Single Atom.

While folks sit on hay bales  (oat, not alfalfa) munching down a freshly slaughtered spit-roasted pig, I’m trying to wrap my mind about infinity’s underlying mathematical patterns. It’s surreal and a little crazy-making, and I suddenly recall the portrayal of mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind. Would my mental meandering lead me to brilliance? To insanity? To missing dinner?

Munching on an apple, I recall that apple seed and flower petal patterns (to name just a couple) are expressed by the Fibonacci sequence. What other patterns underlie our reality? Fractals? Mandelbrot sets?

And that’s where things start getting weird.

I begin to imagine what might happen if you setup a computer to generate billions of random numbers, using a handful of rules – like Fibonacci numbers – as a foundation. What would evolve over, say, four billion years?

The next day, I strike up a conversation with the Swiss guy sitting next to me at the Science and Nonduality Conference who happens to mention the Global Consciousness Project. GCP is collecting – wait for it – billions of randomly generated numbers from computers around the world in an attempt to detect underlying patterns correlated to world events, such as 9/11.  Coincidence? Perhaps I’m in the center of a rapidly collapsing time-space continuum.

Moments later, Kerri Welch presents her doctoral dissertation on fractals and time (Welch herself recommends ‘skipping the first two chapters to get to the good stuff”).

“We’re embedded in a fractal reality,” Welch postulates. I love this … fractals and patterns not only in our physical reality, but in time itself!

Welch suggests thinking about measuring time in the way we think about measuring the coast of England. The smaller the unit of measure, the more detail we derive – to infinity.  And yet, in that infinity …. “We think of a moment (of time) as something small, a thin sliver of a timeline, but it’s actually the most encompassing unit of time there is, in that its eternal presence contains the entirety of the past and the future. It is simultaneously fleeting and eternal finiteness and infiniteness coupled together.”

Digesting all of this last night, and attempting to digest this crazy-making quantum math – including visualizations of Mandelbrot sets, like one I saw recently at Burning Man (but, at the time, didn’t know what I was seeing) – I’m overcome with a desperate need to take a break.

How did I take a break? Oh, you know … I Google’d a woman I’ve been obsessed with for nearly 15 years. Embarrassing but true. And yet, maybe there’s a method to the madness.

Connected to one of her on-line profiles was an illustration of E8 – a conceptual representation of the non-random interrelationship of elementary particles, as proposed by theoretical particle physicist A. Garrett Lisi.

Is your head hurting? Mine is.

According to Welch, fractals are not only embedded in our experience of time, but also exist in arenas including music and brain frequency. That is, fractals appear in energy. Which kinda makes sense, with Einstein’s formula connecting energy and matter.

Delving a bit deeper into E8, I discover yet another mathematical system hidden (in plain sight?) in nature …  Solfeggio numbers – ancient musical frequencies and harmonics common in Gregorian chant, and purported to have healing properties.

And yes, there are New Age type folks selling Solfeggio-inspired tuning forks for healing. If you use ‘em, let me know if they work. Maybe it’ll help with this damn headache!

Meanwhile, some researchers are testing the impacts of Solfeggio harmonics on the crystallization of water molecules – i.e. testing whether sound shapes physicality. Interestingly, this research appears to parallel the work of Masaru Emoto, who’s exploring the interaction of human consciousness and the molecular structure of water.

Emoto photographs water molecules after labeling their vials with emotion-laden words

Turns out Franti is a geek for Geckos.  Who knew. I wanted to interview him for this story, but hopefully I’ll track him down when I return to Bali later this year (oops … uh, never mind).

In the meantime, I just published this new Green Traveler Guides review about his Soulshine Bali retreat.  Enjoy!

Well, that was a long time ago, and I was way in over my head when I attended Fred Alan Wolf’s 4-hour seminar on Quantum Physics at the Science and Nonduality Conference being held near San Francisco.

“Normall I use the language of metaphor to explain the secrets of Quantum Physics,” Wolf begins. Fantastic – he’s an excellent communicator of QP to the masses. “But today,” and I feel my heart sinking, “but today, I’m going to use the language that we physicists use … mathematics.”  I’m doomed.

This conference is unlike any I’ve attended. Over there are theoretical physicists who’ve worked on top-secret military experiments, and there drum-beating shamans who’ve plunged the depths of their souls with Ayahuasca. I’m talking with a professor of yoga from Mumbai about X-Men and karma, and later sitting next to a self-described former Evangelical Christian whose life changed 180 degrees when one day she was beset with pre-cognitive visions of Mecca.

Here are my raw notes from the plenary session with Francis Lucille, a spiritual teacher in the tradition of the Advaita Vedanta (non-duality).

He sits in absolute silence on the stage, staring at the audience, slowing, very slowly, back and forth. Reminds me of Braco, the Croatian energy healer. Is there a point? Perhaps Lucille is, like Braco purports, transmitting power. Perhaps he’s demonstrating the relativity of Time, and how it slows down when we’re expecting him to talk. Maybe he’s waiting for absolute attention from the audience, and gauging our connectedness. Or watching how many of us will walk out, frustrated at wasting time in a non-event. What are other people thinking? Maybe there’s curiosity. Maybe this is a new game, with new rules that we haven’t been told. He sits, continuing to stare in silence. Hair neatly groomed, nondescript eye glasses, deep blue denim pants and a light blue button down dress shirt, unbuttoned at the top with no tie. His hands are neatly folded on his lap, un-twitching. Well, I guess I needed some time to write. Or maybe my lack of full attention i preventing the session from continuing. Perhaps I am to blame? Is there an energetic shift in the room? Will anyone break the silence? Total silence. At this very moment, my friend Monica whispers to me. Synchronicity? More rustling. Finally, after what seemed to be an hour, but was more likely about twenty minutes, he speaks. Slowly. “It’s not about how much time we spend together, or how many words are spoken. It’s all about love. Thank you.” And, with that, Lucille walks off stage, to a smattering of applause.

Lucille was, however, an odd anomaly to an otherwise fascinating series of talks by experts from MIT, Stanford and other leading institutions.

We’ll see what Sunday brings.

Orchha, India

Remembering Orchha, I think about my friend, Canada Mike, a deeply spiritual seeker from a blue-collar working class background who, over the course of just a few short days, became a close friend. And Chiara, our friendship blossoming at the strangest New Years Eve gathering in memory, who told me about Orchha in the first place.

I recall the nearby Khajuraho, home to ancient erotic statues – so incongruous with modern India’s uptight attitudes about sex. I remember our bizarre experiences as extras in the Hollywood film Singularity, where our hotel was haunted with evil spirits.

I feel like that now, back in the Bay Area. Every moment is alive with a new freshness, an appreciation for my friends and the absolute uniqueness of each encounter. It’s like, in each moment, there is a pure expression of infinity.