The World is Full of Your Prayers
If a great shaykh says we can jettison religion, does that mean we can finally get on with living, loving, and connecting with others?
I sat my Sufi teacher, Reshad Feild, in front of the microphone in my Boulder, Colorado recording studio. A group of us lived in a big house at 19th and Mapleton in the late 70s, stumbling and bumbling to introduce the work of Rumi — considered to be the Pole of Love by the Sufis — to America.
I cued Reshad through the glass, took a conscious breath, and pressed record. He began to read:
“A great shaykh in Turkey once said to me, ‘The world is full of your prayers; now, all we need is love.’”
The haunting power of those words threw me off balance. “The world is full of your prayers; now all we need is love.” Wow, if a great shaykh says I can jettison religion, does that mean we can all get on with living, loving, and connecting with others?
Reshad continued:
“I used to wonder about the meaning of these words, and it was many years before I understood that for real change to come about in the world, we must know the meaning of love – of conscious love. Here in the Western world, people talk about love in such a vague way that it means almost nothing.”
Got it. Love is barely a meme — it’s a t-shirt.
“Here we talk about love, and yet we continue to walk the streets like sleepwalkers, hardly ever waking up to the real world, which is a world of love. For real change to come about, the love we talk about so glibly must become conscious love. We must learn to love consciously, and that means we must know who and what we are.”
Whoa... “know who and what we are?” That’s a tall order, but I liked the next part:
“The moment we say, ‘I love,’ we bring into play a force that has its own job to do in the universe regardless of ours.”
Was Reshad suggesting that Love is running the show? When I sat down to write my official report of our “Bondo Weekend” in Asheville, I had no idea that these words from forty-five years earlier would pop in from out of the blue to become my talisman for Bondo.
If you want to hear the original recording of Reshad and his wife at the time, Denise, I managed to resurrect the original reel-to-reel audio for this post. With the tape oxide disintegrating, I brought the recording back to life — a mirror to my journey.
In 1978, “Reason is Powerless in the Expression of Love” was the high point of my creative career in my young 20s. The staged performance included music, multimedia slides, and dance movement — The music is Alan Hovhannes, “Avak the Healer.” The title refers to an Armenian faith healer who came to Los Angeles in 1947.
When Reshad said, “The world is full of your prayers,” he meant, “full of our concepts” about love, religion, and spirituality.
Reshad described an active love, saying:
“The love we talk about so glibly must become conscious love. We must learn to love consciously.”
People asked me this weekend, “Is Bondo a noun or a verb?” This went in circles until finally, while walking the dogs, we adjusted the definition to underscore that Bondo is a superpower and a volitional act. Carole Anne suggested Bondo describes a “conscious connection,” and Julie suggested it's “heart-to-heart.”
We settled on BONDO: The capacity to form heart-to-heart relationships in the moment and over time.
It has been revised several times since, but you get the idea. Reshad again:
“The moment we say ‘I love,’ we bring into play a force that has its own job to do in the universe, regardless of ours."
If you read between the lines, Reshad suggested that Bondo was a force unleashed — a sorcerer of spark, and a Khidr of the heart, like a surfrider on the wave of love.
During the workshop, Carole Anne, my co-presenter, shared how she took her family to see the Avatar attraction at Disney World and, gulp, discovered a FOUR-HOUR LINE!! Without any plan of action, Carole Anne walked to the front of the line and started chatting innocently with the Disney staff. Suddenly, they smiled and waved her through. Bondo is a superpower.
Years ago, the Sci-fi author Ray Bradbury expounded on the feeling nature of Bondo:
“Thinking is not supposed to be the center of our life. Living is supposed to be the center of our life; being is supposed to be the center. This is the emotional thing — you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever.”
Bondo is that galvanizing force.
In today’s world of deep fakes, alternative facts, synthetic data, and disinformation, Bondo is real.1 Feelings are felt vibrations, not concepts. Bondo bypasses the mind; it’s a palpable wavelength of energy that has its own job to do in the universe. J.G. Bennett called this unpredictable force Hazard.2
When Karen passed, I had no idea how to survive a year without Bondo.
My golden umbilical had been cut. I was the guy with a beer tap in his basement bar who suddenly had to drive for a six-pack. Implausibly, ten months after Karen’s passing, and still no keg of Bondo, I found myself in Asheville leading a workshop on intimacy.
I fired up my first slide, a picture of astronaut Ed White taking the first space walk. I asked the group: What would happen if White suddenly found his golden umbilical severed? No oxygen, heat, biometrics, pressure, or BONDO!
That was me.
Weirdly, the terror of lost love in the vacuum of space had become my ally. Like a petri dish with fresh agar, I had to grow Bondo from scratch — not my strong suit. I spent weeks inquiring: What is this substance missing in my life? Is it longing, clinging, or something more vital and central to living?
Maybe Bondo is the source of energy for the entire universe.
Galileo famously said that the universe is written in the language of math. Similarly, Pythagoras felt that numbers explained the nature of reality. Gurdjieff boiled it down to the Laws of Three and Seven. The Law of Seven describes transformation, and the Law of Three governs relationship — one thing to another.
Niels Bohr said, "A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself." This Möbius-like statement gave me permission to inquire into the heart of Bondo. What did I find? FUSION.
Starting with the Law of Three (a+b=c), I could see Bondo as nuclear fusion, the energy source for the Sun and stars. In a fusion reaction, two light hydrogen atoms fuse to create a heavier atom of helium and release a burst of energy in the process. When you stand outside and bask in the Sun, the energy of nuclear fusion warms your face and supports life on Earth. It’s crazy that you can lay in the sun and let nuclear fusion warm your bones.
How does nuclear fusion relate to Bondo?
The energy released by the stars results from an interplay of opposing forces — the Law of Three. Two positively charged protons in the hydrogen atoms repel each other with electromagnetic force. If, by chance, they get super close — within a millionth billionth of a meter of each other and at a temperature exceeding ten million degrees Celsius — the enormous gravitational mass of the Sun creates the chance conditions for fusion to occur. The nuclear strong force binds the hydrogen atoms together to form helium and release energy. H2 + H3 = He (plus energy).
This two-minute video will ignite your curiosity toward the source of all energy:
Bringing it down to earth, consider the sitcom, “The Big Bang Theory:” Penny, a babe-alicious actress, moves next door to Leonard, a socially awkward physicist, and like human-charged particles, their neighborly circumstances get close enough for their worlds to collide. Like two isotopes of hydrogen toying with fusion, geeky Leonard is smitten by Penny, and they eventually marry — a fusion fairy tale before algorithms totally took over mating.
If you look at the state of the world, the repellent forces between people and nations seem near impossible to surmount.
After Karen’s passing, I felt like Rip Van Winkle waking from a 40-year dream to discover a world where men had become broadly characterized by white patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Yikes. Adding to my confusion, women were leaving men in the dust, making huge strides in confidence, focus, ambition, sense of agency, and mutuality.
Hooray, women! But that doesn’t solve the quandary when love partners find their mate repellent. How does the fun-loving personality you were attracted to suddenly seem loud and obnoxious, or the practical and reliable partner you were drawn to seem stultifying and boring?
This is a precarious time to ask the question: Will Bruce Miller find Bondo again?
My friends are encouraging, but I’m not convinced. For older people, our Bondo deficit seems insurmountable. We don’t have youthful charged particles coaxed along by a biological imperative. We bring elder complications into a relationship — property, illness, children, habits, and history, all making fusion seem impossible.
I created this diagram to explain. Instead of H2 Deuterium and H3 Tritium, let’s call them Claire and Jamie. These two beings present remarkably different life stories, inner dynamics, and astrological patterns. Imagine it takes 10 million degrees Celsius of youthful energy to plunge into all the unknowns of a relationship.
When you’re older, you’re either done plunging or subconsciously preparing for the end-of-life Big Plunge. The exception is if, through inner work, you keep showing up to life with fresh agar. The famous producer Norman Lear describes living this way as “Over next.”
At 101, Norman Lear has no plans to retire. His re-imagined Cuban-American version of the iconic “One Day at a Time” was ranked among the Top Ten New Shows of 2017, and its critically acclaimed second season is now streaming on Netflix. His weekly podcast, All of the Above with Norman Lear, is available on PodcastOne. He is also an executive producer on the award-winning Epix docuseries America Divided, now in its second season. Lear is currently in production on the pilot of Guess Who Died, an NBC comedy featuring the overlooked demographic of senior citizens.
Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You | Trailer
Unfortunately, the feeling nearly universally expressed by women of a certain age: “I’m good, thanks.”
I admit it is a skewed poll, as I have not been polling men. So here’s my question: Lacking hormones, what force brings humans into a fusion reaction?
That force is BONDO.
Yes, you say, but Bondo is a made-up word!! On the surface, Bondo is a trifle, like Mister Rogers inviting us to love our neighbor. I consulted Reshad, my Bondo talisman, and leaned into the invisible world to ask, “When you said we must learn to love consciously, what did you mean?”
If I remember anything about Reshad, one word comes to mind: Risk. Bondo demands risk if we dare unleash that pent-up force.
Quoting Anais Nin:
Older people fall into rigid patterns.
Curiosity, risk, and exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself.
You must not fear, hold back, count, or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself, and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature.
Ten million degrees Celsius, to be exact.
I planted my loneliness into the Petri of consciousness, and The Seven Seas of Bondo emerged.
The Seven Seas of Bondo spelled out how to love consciously.
I asked Carole Anne to present to our group while I added commentary.
ONE. Connection — A shared, energetic vibration deepens through face-to-face proximity and time.
A study by the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to become a “real” friend, and 200 hours to become a close friend.3
This research seems utterly ridiculous, but it reveals that connections deepen over time. What we call our friends are, for the most part, the people we go through life with.
The Blue Zone project sought to understand which lifestyle practices support the longest-lived people on the planet. They discovered that people living in places like Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Ikaria, Greece, live to be over 100 years old. The people of Okinawa belong to moai, social support groups that start in childhood and extend to age one hundred and more.4
The common denominator of Blue Zone communities is a lifestyle that maximizes face-to-face interaction with friends, relatives, and townspeople over time.
Polyvagal theory also describes how face-to-face connections resonate in the branches of the nervous system. Polyvagal explains how trauma shapes the nervous system away from connection and into patterns of protection. Deb Dana LCSW gives the best introduction.
Similarly, the new field of collective neuroscience found that when people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize like dancers moving together. The idea of “being on the same wavelength” is tangible and visible in the brain. Interbrain synchrony — connection — is a marker of relationships and the first C of Bondo. This research explains why we don't always “click” with someone and why social isolation is so harmful to physical and mental health.5
True confession: Mr. Bondo returned from dinner with a new acquaintance tonight that went horribly south from the first note.
“How are you feeling about our getting together?” I asked, hoping to connect. She responded, “Why should I be feeling something?”
I had never been in such an awkward attempt to mesh and kept nervously filling the ever-widening conversation gap with words until she looked at me like a jabbering fool (and I was). With purse in hand, she asked me to finish my coffee so she could leave.
I checked the DSM-5-TR, and discovered I had suffered a textbook case of Bondo Interruptus.6
I’m staring at the screen past midnight after the aforementioned episode (which it means it’s “existential Monday” when I regularly fall into substantial self-doubt about my grief journey). I don’t know if there’s a biological basis, but I notice that the 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross also had an occasional bad night. He claimed it was purifying, so I’ll go with that.
Sorry to cut this off. I will continue with the Seven Seas of Bondo 2-7, in the next post.
Thanks for reading.
Deep fakes (Actor Tom Hanks alerted his fans this week that the video of him selling a dental plan was a fake likeness). Alternative facts (A phrase used by Trump’s advisor, Kellyanne Conway, during a Meet the Press interview where she defended Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance at Trump's inauguration), Synthetic data (Information that's artificially manufactured rather than grounded in real-world events), Disinformation (False information deliberately spread to deceive people, often deliberate weaponization of lies by Russia, Q-Anon, MAGA, etc.).
Robert Fripp, J.G. Bennett, and Leibniz: The Universe as one Whole Block, or a Block with Holeshttps://epweissengruber.livejournal.com/10446.html
https://news.ku.edu/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it-takes-make-friend]
https://www.bluezones.com/live-longer-better/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-waves-synchronize-when-people-interact
Miller et al. “When human connection reverses itself, often the result of forces beyond one’s control.”