Love Logic: 25 Years Later (+ New Website, Pods)

A lotus doubles every day. For twenty days, the pond looks empty.  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌
ServiceSpace

View in Browser

ServiceSpace Community

2010 Retreat in California

25 Years of Poetry

"True poets do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art." —James P. Carse

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.

The Science

What Love Logic Knows

On this month's Awakin Call, Rollin McCraty -- whose pioneering research on the heart is the foundation of today's Apple Watch and Oura rings -- asks us: What are we feeding the field? 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.

Read: Science of Soul Force →

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.

A Species Moment

Deep Data: Can AI Help Us Grow Wiser?

Earlier this month, 500+ podmates from 45 countries held difficult questions together around AI + Wisdom. As a podmate noted, “nuance is humanizing”. Our closing call became a sanctuary for that shared humanity, a simplicity beyond the complexity. Colin’s mesmerizing visual poem from 2018 Olympics, Doruk from Turkey explaining pod journey to strangers, a physicist’s journey of asking questions to a tree and then to ChatGPT, legendary performance artist Rachel Bagby’s improv song, and lots more! Watch clips here→

As we all grappled with these challenges of our time, a profound manifesto has emerged 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.

Read the Manifesto →

These are turbulent times. But if you are the pond, you feel the tendrils — the slow work beneath the surface that makes blooming possible.

The water is warm. Perhaps something is asking to be born.

To slip into the pond ...

Introducing ...

Self-Paced Pods!

The magic of our pods is no secret—but life doesn't always offer the space they ask for. So we've launched self-paced pods: you move at your own rhythm, and the technology adjusts to meet you there.

By quiet demand, we're offering the AI + Wisdom Pod again, this time self-paced.

AI + Wisdom Pod →

To mark the anniversary of Gandhi's passing, we invite you into a Gandhi Pod—beginning with a conversation between ninety-year-old Gandhian pioneer Michael Nagler and Raj Sisodia, founder of the Conscious Capitalism movement. Two lives shaped by the same question: how do we live what we believe?

Gandhi Pod →

In a gentle way, you are shaking the world. 🙏

Gems From the Archive

From around the ecosystem

MUTUAL LIBERATION

At our AwaKin Retreat in September, Srinija Srinivasan names a quiet paradox at the heart of our times: what we want most — mutual liberation — is precisely what we resist. Moving from command-and-control systems to jazz improvisation, she reframes uncertainty not as a threat but as the very condition for love and collective wisdom. Her reflection asks what it would mean to design our technologies, economies, and inner lives in service of freedom together. Listen to her 13min talk→

BODHISATTVA PATH

At the same retreat, Rev. Heng Sure spoke to an illustrious group of change-makers about the ancient path of compassion -- "We ignore the seeds and fear the harvest. Bodhisattvas tend to the seeds, and ignore the harvest." Watch →

Awakin Retreat

ServiceSpace incubates volunteer-run projects that nurture a culture of generosity and uplift the spiritual commons. Such small acts of service unlock an inner transformation that sustains external impact.

Get Involved

Join as an individualPartner as an organization

UnsubscribeNewsletter ArchivesContact Us

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to save money.