The Ananda College of Living Wisdom, of which I've written a few posts lately, is seeking to expand its Board of Directors with two new members.

If you explore the College's website linked above, you'll see that the College is very much part of a new movement in higher education to approach subjects from the standpoint that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality of creation. As a result, the College and its cirriculum accept and embrace the need for spiritual awareness and personal, inner development, rather than rejecting such concerns or confining them to a few courses on "religious philosophy."

For those of us who have taken such steps in our own lives, being part of a larger effort--and watching it grow from nothing more than an idea in early 2003--is truly inspiring. Having been involved from the beginning myself, and participating in the College's "Travel Abroad" program with the students and faculty, I'm very much looking forward to its development in the years ahead.  What might it be 15 years from now, when my own young son is ready for his higher education? In some ways I feel that my efforts as a member of the Board of Directors is to serve him, or at least many others like him who will find such a College transformative for themselves and, through that, transformative for the world at large.

So we're inviting others who are also so inspired to join us in the development of the College by volunteering to serve as a Director or by simply nominating others who might be interested. The kind of people we're seeking is described below. If you're interested or have suggestions, please contact myself (kraig (at) kraigbrockschmidt.com) or registrar (at) anandauniversity.org

I also want to mention that we're looking to build our newly-created Advisory Board whose first member is Dr. Amit Goswami whom I wrote about in an earlier post. This board will be composed of those who are inspired by what the College is doing and want to participate at a level of influence, but are not otherwise able to commit the time and energy as a full Director.

I'll also suggest, in my capacity as a Director, that if you are inspired by the college too but aren't in a position to serve, do consider a tax-deductible (and employer-matchable) donation. As noted in my prior post, we are a pioneering effort and deeply appreciate the support of people like yourself. Indeed, as Dr. Goswami would point out, waht matters so very much at this early stage is not so much the size of the gift, but the very fact of a gift. For taking such a step gives tangible expression to a new consciousness in higher education that is trying to manifest on our planet at this time. Contact information for the college is found at http://www.anandauniversity.org.

My heartfelt thanks to you in advance for your consideration.

Ideal Qualities for Prospective Board Members:

1. A passion for launching a new approach to higher education for higher consciousness, integrating non-dogmatic, non-sectarian, and universal spirituality into an intellectually stimulating curriculum. This passion extends the development of higher consciousness in oneself through personally chosen spiritual practices.

2. A willingness to bring a new level of creativity and intuition, in addition to the necessary time commitment, to help build and guide this new paradigm of higher education.

3. A background that ideally includes experience as a board member, professor, consultant, or fundraiser in a contemporary if not progressive higher education setting (colleges, universities, and non-profits). Fundraising abilities within spiritual venues are especially desirable at this time.

4. A network within their fields or professions that may include:

   1. Fundraising ties with science, business, and industry.

   2. Business and industry ties that are looking for interns and/or graduates trained in ethics, holistic approaches, sustainability, entrepreneurship, a unitive world view, and other key values expressed in the Ananda College of Living Wisdom curriculum.

   3. The ability to spread awareness of the College and its unique offerings and goals within that network.

Current Board Members:

• Nischala (Sara) and Nakula (Paul) Cryer, directors of the Ananda College of Living Wisdom
• Devi Novak, co-director of Ananda Sangha worldwide
• Walter Cruttenden, founder of the Binary Research Institute
• Nayaswami Seva Wiberg, also of Ananda Sangha and representing the spirit of renunciation
• Henry Huta (retiring from the Board), founder and CEO of EcoEarth Energy
• And myself, Kraig Brockschmidt, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Corporation

At my recent visit to the Ananda College of Living Wisdom, I heard a few stories of interested parents who came to visit with their sons or daughters. When they arrived at the Ananda Meditation Retreat, where the College is located, they had to ask "Where's the College?" It's a legitimate question, because if you look at either of these websites, you'll see pictures of people and nature, and very few of buildings, especially the kind of buildings that one normally associates with an institution of higher education. And what you do see is an assortment of new and old structures that have been built at various times since 1968, including geodesic domes, yurts, and yes, even a modular office trailer. In short, not exactly what the word "college" generally brings to mind.

This got me thinking, though--what exactly is a college? To think about this clearly, the real question--and the question that prospective students and parents should ask of any such institution--is this: what do you expect from a college?

That's not too hard to answer, really. A student enters this magic box we call "college" and in a few years supposedly comes out as a more educated, more employable, and hopefully better or more actualized human being.

The big question, then, is what's that thing in the middle. And really, what we're after here is this: what is the essence of that "college" thing? Is it, in fact, just a matter of the buildings in which this college thing happens? No--of course not. It's the transmission of understanding from instructors to students. That's what matters in the end: a human-to-human connection for the transmission of consciousness.

With that in mind, we can then ask: "So what do you need to make this transmission of consciousness happen most effectively?" Is it just a matter of erecting a typical academic edifice, or is it about creating a whole environment that's conducive to this transmission? It has to be the latter, if college is to be the most effective.

If we're looking for such an environment, we can easily see that the big institutional structures that people come to expect from "college" are actually detrimental to the true goal. If a structure creates barriers between students and instructors, then the transmission of understanding is impeded. By removing these structures, on the other hand, and allowing closeness, (impersonal) intimacy, and relationships, the transmission can be supported and even amplified.

I remember, as an example, a history class I took my freshman year in college at the University of Washington. I was one of 800 students in that class--it was so large that while I knew the person way down there on the stage was the brilliant professor Jon Bridgman, there wasn't the kind of deeper connection that one needs in order to be inwardly magnetized and inspired by that brilliance. I was fortunate that, being enrolled in the "honors section" of the source, that my section (a smaller group breakout) was led by Professor Bridgman himself. This managed to bring the group size down to 30--better, of course, but there was still a pretty wide chasm between myself and the one from whom I was supposedly drawing higher education. In the end, it simply meant that expectations were higher!

Imagine, then, what it would be like to have that chasm removed altogether, where a student' access to their instructors is, compared to the typical experience, something like the best broadband Internet compared with 1200-baud dial-up service. In such an environment, a student has the opportunity to be deeply inspired and magnetized by not just one instructor or professor, but all of them. And in such an environment, I'll willing to bet that much more "college" actually happen than it does in most other institutions. It's a difference well worth considering!

Just recently I had a very busy two days at the Ananda College of Living Wisdom, with which I am a member of the Board of Directors. It's a small college, only now in its 7th year, having started from nothing more than an idea in early 2003 (a meeting I was in as well). Considering that, it's quite amazing to see how far it has come in a very short time for this kind of project. The faculty and student body are expanding, the finances are in the black, and the college will likely be granting its first bachelor's degree next year.

It's fitting, too that the young woman who is poised to be this pioneer, Chitra Sudhakaran, already has another great honor to her credit, the National Balashree Award of India, one of that country's highest arts awards given directly by the President. To me, it signals the caliber of student that the College has already been able to attract even in its formative years.

To me it also reflects on the college's primary specialty, which is itself rooted in the ancient wisdom of India and the West together and indicated by the "Living Wisdom" part of the name. That specialty is approaching every subject from the standpoint of higher consciousness, taking as an axiom that consciousness is the fundamental reality of the universe, not matter. This is really a new approach to higher education, on in which there is great potential to be explored. This potential, indeed, underlies my own interest in the college, and I'm engaged in developing an area of the curriculum that's related to my own professional expertise: technology and engineering. The question here, really, is not just how to go about teaching these subjects, but to ask how technology and engineering can be tools for transformation when picked up from the thread of consciousness. (My book, Mystic Microsoft, suggests some of those directions.) Developing this area will help the college expand beyond the core liberal arts subjects like the arts, psychology, world cultures, and so forth.

In this regard, the first expansion of the curriculum into the sciences has been the Physics and Consciousness course, led by David (Byasa) Steinmetz, a trained astronomer but also a deep spiritual seeker for many decades. What has been very special here a the end of the 2009-2010 school year is a new relationship that we've formed with the author of the most widely-used textbook on Quantum Mechanics, Dr. Amit Goswami.

Dr. Goswami's own primary interest today is in the same realm as Physics and Consciousness, especially the implications inherent in quantum mechanics to questions of consciousness and existence. Calling himself a Quantum Activist, it was fascinating to discuss with him how this approach can actually provide a scientific proof for God, which is to say, a "non-local" consciousness that is greater than what we experience individually (which is to say, "locally").

For details, I'll refer to Dr. Goswami's written works, information about which can be found on his own website as well as the documentary about his called The Quantum Activist (he also appeared in What the Bleep Do We Know?), a film we were honored to watch and discuss with him and the filmmakers when he recently visited the Ananda College of Living Wisdom.

Dr. Goswami was very generous with his time, giving several classes as well as giving the address at the college's closing ceremony on May 27th, 2010. in closing this post, then, I offer a selection of quotes from these talks that are relevant to the College and its mission (recorded by faculty member Carol Gray):

More [students / teachers/people] will come to this kind of place [the College] because it’s wonderful to work in a new paradigm. You can be creative in a new paradigm.

Highly intuitive students will come to schools like this – not Harvard or Princeton.

This is the right way [of education]...this wonderful university…liberal arts is to liberate you through the study of arts, humanities, social sciences…this school will attract highly intuitive students.

My young friends, you will figure out for yourself how to make a living. Education is to liberate you from tyrannical jobs so you can have meaning while making a living. The idea of separating jobs from meaning is a very poor idea. The workplace must be meaningful.

And since I am a member of the Board, I have no shame in saying that the college is constantly looking for students who are ready for this level of adventure: higher education for higher consciousness. See http://www.anandauniversity.org for more information, and make sure to check out the YouTube video! We are also looking for new members for both our Board of Directors and our Advisory Board. See this post for details.

Posted to the articles section of my main website: http://www.kraigbrockschmidt.com/Pages.aspx?page=article_leavingamark. Comments are welcome here.

I was at a seminar yesterday with other attendees from various companies. Of course, introducing myself as a Microsoft employee, and compounded by the fact that the two instructors had worked with Microsoft in consulting capacities, I was automatically approached as an individual representative of the whole company. In this way, any reference that was made to Microsoft was addressed to me as if it was something personal. One of the instructors at one point asked my permission to tell a story about Microsoft that had nothing to do with me.

With this kind of response, which is just as true today as it was twenty years ago, I wondered if the same thing would happen if I was an employee of, say, Boeing. That is, would people expect me to be answerable or responsible for their experiences with a 737 in the same way they do about their experiences with a Windows PC? It didn't seem like it.

What I realized is that people approach Microsoft employees more personally because their own relationship to Microsoft is essentially a personal one--personal, daily, and often for-much-of-the-day interaction with a Windows computer of some kind. Their interaction with most other things, like a Boeing 737, is much more sporadic and much less personal (the airline owns and operates the airplane). And so the tendency is to then project that intimacy with one's computer--more speciifcally, the software--to a personal representative of the company that makes it.

It's also that 90% of computer users are on Windows, so any group that contains professionals--which are the kinds of people you meet in such seminars contains probably 90% Microsoft customers. And those who aren't probably have a strong opinion as to why, because of their intimate relationship with another computer system.

I have a hard time thinking of any other technological relationship that gets projected in this way. With automobiles, there is much more of a mixture--many manufacturers, many different models, so a representative from, say, Chevrolet, wouldn't have the same experience unless they were specifically attending a meeting of Chevrolet owners.

Personally, I'm not bothered by how people respond to learning that I'm employed by Microsoft. I'm not in the least way shamed by the relationship and, in fact, deeply honor it. Indeed, when I attend such seminars and hear some of what people experience in other workplaces, I'm increasingly grateful for the fabulous environment in which I'm blessed to spend my professional hours.

I've been wanting to add some recordings to my Music Performances page for a while, primarily pieces from a Christmas concert of last December. I finally got a chance to do that just now, and also added two other pieces on that page from 2007 that I found while consoldating some backup hard drives.

The teams at Microsoft working on the ADO.NET Entity Framework and WCF (ADO.NET) Data Services are wrapping up work for .NET Framework 4, and are ready to kick off the next round of features. This is really part of their open design processes, and they're right looking for your input on new features.

Here's where you want to go:

http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2010/02/10/vote-for-future-entity-framework-and-data-services-features.aspx 

Data Services Page: https://connect.microsoft.com/dataplatform/content/content.aspx?ContentID=15540 
Entity Framework Page: https://connect.microsoft.com/dataplatform/content/content.aspx?ContentID=15541   

Available on my main website: New Year's is Good Timing for New Year's Resolutions!

Comments are welcome here.

I know it's been a while (almost three months now) since I wrote anything about the Microsoft technologies I work with, and haven't reported anything more on the ModelCalc project that I started on last summer. Priorities do change, and throughout most of the fall I was very much focused on merging two MSDN Developer Centers, specifically Data and "Oslo" (now SQL Server Modeling). Both of these live on www.msdn.com/data, and I wrote a post on the Data team blog to tell that story. A big piece I wrote as part of this effort is Data Development Technologies: Past, Present, and Future, a piece that's been very well received (e.g. by Douglas Purdy, for whom I'm now working). I very much encourage anyone working with data development to give that one a read.

That merger was also timed with the Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference in Los Angeles in late November, which was the first conference I've attended in quite a few years. What worked great about the timing of the conference was that we immediately went into the holiday season after that, which was for me mostly a time to catch up with everything I'd been neglecting while focused on the other tasks, and to clean out all kinds of old data, emails, etc., to get a fresher start here in 2010. (I also spent some time figuring out how to combat comment spam on my blog here.)

That said, as my reality rapidly expanded last fall to include various data development technologies like ADO.NET, Entity Framework, and WCF Data Services, I've been focusing lately on projects to get myself up to speed on those goodies. In particular, I'm working up some samples around my personal reading history. I've been keeping this data first in a Word document and then in an Excel spreadsheet since I got out of college in 1990. The list of unique titles (that I've actually) is up now to 497, which is a nice set of data to work with. Eventually that whole set will be accessible through my personal website through WCF Data Services; before then I'll have some portions of the data out with the schema as part of other samples. In fact, the first piece I'm working on has to do with different ways to define and deploy database schema, as I've been working through the different options that Microsoft has to offer.

Any thoughts on such projects are welcome here in the comments, of course. (And I look at the comments before approving them, since most of them are garbage. But I do look and approve the real ones!)

Cases of terminal childhood diseases often awaken our pity, and even dismay at the apparently unfairness of the universe. But in some cases, at least, there is the possibility of real purpose behind what otherwise appears to be a life cut short, a purpose to awaken in us not mere pity, but a deeper compassion and understanding.

This article explores that possibility more deeply. I'd originaly written it in November but neglected to announce it; at least it gave me the chance to make a few edits just now.

Comments are welcome here.