The Eye Roll

[TLDR: Since the start of the year, several threads have been weaving together. Science of Soul Force offers the evidence — coherence is real, measurable, contagious. The Deep Data Manifesto names the framework — AI masters the surface; who tends the roots? The Pattern diagnoses why markets can't answer that question. Below is the arc connecting those pieces to six website revamps and seven new experiments we're piloting — including Metta Circles, which makes our many-to-many vision concrete.]

You might have seen the Super Bowl ads yesterday. Anthropic mocked OpenAI with a glimpse of what AI might look like when it's ad-supported. It was sharp. It was funny. And it was familiar.

In 1998, Sergey Brin and Larry Page wrote in an academic paper that advertising-funded search engines would be inherently biased. Two years later, Google built a multi-billion-dollar empire running ads alongside search. In 2010, Zuckerberg wrote in the Washington Post that Facebook would never sell users' information. Meta then built its fortune harvesting exactly that. In 2024, Sam Altman described a "dystopic" future in which ChatGPT would recommend products. Last month, OpenAI announced it would begin integrating ads.

It's a pattern we know all too well — three founders, three broken promises. And the point isn't hypocrisy. It's gravity. Incentives pull even decent people into predictable orbits.

This isn't about malice — it's about speed. Recent emails from Anthropic — widely considered the "safety-first" AI lab — revealed they had trained models on vast libraries of copyrighted books, then shredded the evidence. Why? Because you have to get there before the other guys do. Especially if you believe you're the good guys.

The process shapes the product. Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles by the end.

If we don't want the same outcome, we can't run on the same incentives.

When we started Awakin AI, everyone asked the same question: How are you different from ChatGPT? I would say, "We're non-commercial." And people would roll their eyes — the way you do when you meet a do-gooder at a dinner party. So we learned to make up other answers. We show sources. We have wisdom-specific datasets. We do this and that.

But the eye-roll is itself the diagnosis.

We have so thoroughly internalized market logic that "non-commercial" sounds quaint rather than structural. Dig a little deeper and you find something more personal: we carry shared agreements about what it means to make a difference — and by those agreements, Google has impacted billions while ServiceSpace has not. We lack a cosmology that makes intrinsic motivation feel rigorous rather than romantic. And so choosing an unmeasurable path feels not just naive, but irresponsible.

But non-commercial isn't a moral badge. It's an engineering constraint. Different incentives produce different products. And the repeating pattern suggests that this may be the only differentiator that actually holds.

Everything else is cosmetic.

When the Process Changes

At our Europe retreat last quarter, change-makers from 18 countries gathered in a small Austrian village. Each day, a local woman who cleaned our rooms would inch a little closer to the energy of our collective space. She didn't speak much English, but her smile spoke volumes.

Until the last day.

As we all bowed around the periphery of the hotel in gratitude, she approached me — hands folded, eyes searching — asking without words: Can I join? Can I bow too?

Tears streamed down her face. She was born in that hotel. She had cleaned its rooms for over seventy years. And through her tears, she said:

"I've waited my whole life for this. Today, I am complete. This field of love has given me permission to listen to my heart's voice — and to spread love for the remaining days of my life."

No one organized that moment. No one planned it. It arose — the way grace arises — when conditions of sincerity and stillness come together.

And she is not alone. For years, quiet hands have mailed us stamps so we can ship Smile Cards across the world. Every month, a kind woman who has never once joined a circle sends us five dollars. I remember a child who walked into Karma Kitchen carrying his piggy bank — ready to practice paying forward.

These offerings don't fit neatly into dashboards or impact reports. And yet.

For years, everyday folks and global leaders alike would recommend ServiceSpace to others. Often as something that irrevocably changed their life. Then you'd go to the website and wonder, What? Is this actually a movement? Is it even legit? It's not that we didn't know how to build websites — in the early 2000s, we helped six thousand nonprofits get online. It's not that we were too dim to learn messaging. We send out 70 million emails a year.

We prioritized the hard part. Easy stuff didn't make the cut. We optimized for deepcast, not broadcast. Inner transformation over external impact. If I'm not a happier, lighter, evolved person today than 26 years ago when ServiceSpace started, what's the point?

After a recent Awakin Call, an article flowed out in less than an hour: Science of Soul Force. It reads a bit like our theory of change — that when you lead with inner transformation, boundaries between you and the other start to blur, and soon your coherence meets mine to regenerate with the momentum of nature's winds. The HeartMath research beneath it turns out to be extraordinary: your heart generates an electromagnetic field 60 times greater than your brain's, and when you're in coherence, that signal is detectable in the brainwaves of people nearby. The key variable isn't proximity — it's the coherence of the receiver. Not metaphor. Measurable physics. And it changes the entire calculus of what "impact" means.

As time ripens, pieces click almost effortlessly. What might've taken months happens overnight. As Birju noted, it's like a Rubik's cube: what looks like a jumble to the casual eye, two moves later, locks into perfect formation. That can only happen if you work on the hard part first.

The easy dominoes have begun to fall. We launched six substantial web portals — including ServiceSpace itself — and are piloting seven innovations. Each one born of intrinsic motivation. Each one structurally impossible in a market-logic world.

The ServiceSpace Question

Last month, we hosted the Awakin AI series and pod with 500+ people from 32 countries. A profound global dialogue around the overarching theme: Can AI Make Us More Human? It led to the Deep Data manifesto, which has now rippled to heads of many frontier AI labs. The manifesto names a distinction we keep returning to: AI excels at big data — the conscious, capturable surface of our lives. But there's another kind of knowing, what we call deep data, accessible not through algorithms but through attunement. Personal coherence is how we access it. Social coherence is how we regenerate it.

For ServiceSpace, rubber meets the road with this question: can AI help us grow in service? Service helps us find inner stability (me), skillfully bridge across difference (we), and redefine our identities as instruments of a larger whole (us).

Practically, that translates to a design question: can AI help us create more volunteer opportunities?

This is not a question anyone in Big Tech is asking. Not because they don't care, but because we're culturally conditioned to frame love logic as a subset of market logic. ServiceSpace's hypothesis is the opposite: love logic is the larger frame.

That's now unfolding through the four movements of social permaculture. Draw out latent gifts. Activate the impulse to give. Let those gifts circulate in a trust ecology. Then watch broadcast dissolve into intimate, many-to-many connection.

1) Everyone Is Good at Something

You've probably seen the video: metronomes placed on a wobbly platform, started out of sync, gradually finding their way into perfect rhythm. No conductor. No algorithm. Just empty cans beneath the board, transmitting vibrations without adding weight. Structurally essential, experientially invisible. The empty cans don't set the beat — they allow the signal to travel.

That's the design philosophy behind what we're building. Platforms that draw out latent gifts without imposing a rhythm. Empty cans for resurgence of heart intelligence.

Story Booth launches with the idea of turning small conversations into articles. Vicki had visited 185 places of worship in 30 days. "It transformed me," she wrote in an email inbox Mia has managed for years. After responding, Audrey assembled a small group of "guest listeners" to hold space on Zoom, and AI turned the conversation into a first draft. Vicki did a final edit. Before the story even went public, she wrote: "This brought ME to tears. I was a full-time professor for over a decade — I've graded a LOT of papers. This is just perfect. I really can't tell you how much I appreciate your time, your mission, your encouragement. Y'all are INCREDIBLE." This week, a 17-year-old from Zambia wrote about her passion for STEM research — and Brinda, a biology professor, will soon host a Story Booth dialogue. Last week, Aryae and Jinet offered to listen to the religious experience of someone from a different tradition.

KarmaTube Theatre went live with the idea of turning media consumption into connection, whose tagline for filmmakers reads: "Your Film Deserves More Than Views." It deserves a community of active listeners. Your ticket is a personal story around the film's theme. After the screening, your reflections give you access to a Pod for peer-to-peer interaction. Engaged participants are invited "backstage" to a group call with the filmmaker. Which filmmaker doesn't want an hour with people who have deeply digested their offering? AI handles the organizing overhead. We piloted with Michael Nagler's film on non-violence and will soon release Rajesh and Anne's classic Teach Me to Be Wild, followed by Emmy-winning Tashi and the Monk's follow-up.

MaitriTunes piloted as our first music portal, where you can listen to a Sufi qawaali in Urdu while following its English translations below, karaoke-style. Sacred sound from everyday mystics, made accessible across languages. Coming up:  Gujarati prayer, sung by Chinese and Polish Buddhist monks (beloved Jin Chuan and Jin Wei!), written by a Jain saint, with an English translation you can follow. Blended together by AI. Someone's gift, carried by empty cans harmonizing to a deeper song.

Everyone carries something worth sharing. These platforms create conditions to draw it out.

2) Everyone Can Be Great at Giving

When gifts couple with our innate impulse toward generosity, something deeper stirs.

Our decades of experience with volunteers is crystallizing into a micro-volunteering platform. The DailyGood team is the first to experiment — anything that needs doing can be broken into small, asynchronous roles. Suggest a story. Rate its fit. Add keywords like Tom has done for years. Write summaries like Glenda and Rosemary have done for hundreds of stories. Add photos. Copy-edit. A thousand different doors.

Usually the overhead of coordinating this many contributions is prohibitive, so organizations centralize. Wikipedia unlocked 100 million volunteer hours a year through micro-edits. What might we unlock — not just to get tasks done, but to activate micro-moments of coherence? That's our specialty.

This is where AI becomes genuinely useful. Not generating the content — but matching the right micro-task to the right person at the right moment, tracking what's been done, noticing what's needed, and making the coordination invisible. The empty-can logic applied to volunteering itself: AI handles the overhead so that the act of giving stays human, stays small, stays real. And is accessible to more people. One person's five-minute contribution becomes a door through which they walk toward their own transformation.

The broadcast story: each DailyGood email reaches 140,000 people. The deepcast story: each email is held by a dozen quiet volunteer acts. If "can AI help us create more volunteer opportunities?" is the ServiceSpace question, micro-volunteering its most literal answer.

3) When Giving Gets Connected

Something shifts when individual gifts start to circulate. A different ecology emerges.

In what may be ServiceSpace's most under-celebrated story, we've shipped millions of Smile Cards around the world — not through centralized fulfillment, but through dozens of volunteer shippers across countries. This isn't Amazon. Or Mechanical Turk. It's volunteers like Bradley and Linda and Ushma. Each package is wrapped in sacred intention, sent with a prayer of sorts. The product arrives, but so does something else. Deepcast infrastructure, hidden in plain sight.

Many groups rightly critique ad-based models and advocate for subscription-based alternatives. But that may just be rearranging chairs on the deck of a sinking ship. The underlying logic remains untouched: extract value from the user. Ad-based models want your attention. Subscription models want your money. What happens when a platform wants nothing from you?

Enter cShops — a quiet launch of our gift ecology "market with heart", with Meghna, Drishti and Bradley revving up the engines. The core innovation: it accepts multiple forms of wealth and operates in three modalities of trust. A pure gift — receive this freely, no expectation of return. Post-wealth — we ship first, you give back in your own way, in your own time. And pre-wealth — share a reflection or act of service, then receive. Rev. Heng Sure's "good karma music" works this way: do a good deed and you'll be emailed the album. Event "unTickets" are payable with non-financial wealth. Heart pins, Smile Cards, 21-day diaries — each flowing through whichever trust modality fits.

The post-wealth model is the most radical: ship before any reciprocity, pure trust. A UC Berkeley study of Karma Kitchen's pay-it-forward model found that people gave three times more than in pay-what-you-want scenarios. When you trust people, they rise to meet that trust. cShops is an attempt to build that insight into infrastructure — something like a PayPal for multiple currencies of the heart.

4) From Broadcast to Many-to-Many

Through thousands of Awakin Circles and over a hundred retreats, we knew the unpredictably predictable magic when love-logic is foundational. The pandemic pushed us to design a virtual version: Pods.

Marilyn participated in the New Story Pod, and it changed her profoundly. She started volunteering — and saw why. It wasn't the content. It was the context of service. Since then, she's helped hundreds volunteer in Pods to host many thousands across 120+ countries and countless themes. #MarilynMagic is our internal hashtag for this ripple. Now educators from Vietnam are hosting a year-long pod. Richie Davidson and Cortland are hosting one in March. HeartMath is doing a Coherence Pod. Cynthia a Qi-gong Pod. 19-year-old Miki in Japan is hosting a youth pod after 1,500 applied to her Peace program. For this month's Gandhi Pod, we're piloting self-paced pods — a format that KindSpring's 21-day challenges will soon fold into.

Post-pod, we're piloting something we think could be a game-changer: Metta Circles. The name is a play on the techno-sphere's metaverse, but the architecture aims to compost broadcast into intimate many-to-many circles of noble friendship. In our AI + Wisdom Pod, Rohit noticed the incredible diversity among participants. After the pod completed, we asked if people wanted smaller circles — of resonance (like-hearted folks), edge (differing views), or serendipity. The interest was remarkable. Our Circle Agent reads the deeper resonances between participants' reflections — not keywords, but the questions people are actually living — and proposes small circles of people who share something worth exploring together. It handles scheduling, quorum, space holders. Then it disappears. The full vision goes deeper — the matching engine, the anonymization layer, the space holder pipeline, and an honest reckoning with whether virtual mediums have a depth ceiling.

If Silicon Valley built the metaverse — scale without depth — this is an experiment in building a metta-verse. AI notices the resonance. Humans hold the space. Empty cans transmit the signal without adding weight.

We bake constraints into governance and data practices because the point is not purity — it's immunity to the pattern. Recently, we published how Awakin AI works and how Metta Circles holds your data. Read them side by side with any terms-of-service page in Silicon Valley. The difference is structural — because the process that produced them is structural.

Unpredictably Predictable

With that rich context, you arrive at the doorstep of something you can't engineer. Call it grace. Entirely unpredictable, non-linear — and yet, somehow, perfectly expected.

I recently met a high-profile leader. She had randomly run across Moved by Love by Vinoba and was quite moved; a longtime ServiceSpace volunteer on her staff lightly suggested we meet. For context: she met Jensen Huang of Nvidia that morning. After me, Sam Altman, then Laurene Jobs and Sundar Pichai.

Clearly, I was the odd man out. :)

Even AI was confused. Before our meeting, I uploaded Vinoba's book and asked why she would be inspired by it. It didn't make big-data sense.

Then we met. First question she asks: "If we don't change the hearts, we won't change much. How do we do that?"

Wow. Not what I was expecting.

Mid-way she asks, "What regenerates you?" Small acts of kindness, like the one I had done moments before she arrived. Meditation, like the 10-day retreats I go to every year. And Gandhi — for his imperfect experiments bringing inner resources to the maze of social suffering.

As we ended, she was excited to pay forward her heart-pin. She wrote to ask how to sign up for a Vipassana retreat — with her husband. She's keen to join an "agenda-less" retreat. We're soon scheduled to deep dive into social permaculture at a national level.

The broadcast story is the meeting. The deepcast story is how it came to pass: through one of her staff who has been part of the ServiceSpace community for decades. When we don't seek impact, we make room for deepcasting to work in alignment with its larger arcs of intelligence. Magic arrives at your doorstep. Unpredictably predictable.

The Hard Part

At our Bodhisattva Retreat last winter, Vanessa Andreotti stated what is becoming obvious: in an AI world, we're hitting a saturation of words, of concepts.

Fortunately, we are capable of languages beyond words. The app is already downloaded via our inner-net, straight into the heart. We just need to activate it.

Building websites. Mastering broadcast networks. Building technologies. That's the easy part. How can all of that serve the hardest problem of consciousness — who am I?

Service helps us hold that inquiry. Everyone is good at something. Everyone can be great at giving. When hearts start to cohere, a gift ecology emerges. And when everything connects to everyone — not through algorithms but through attunement — non-linear interventions arise.

If there was ever a time for non-linear interventions, it is now. AI is compressing every cycle — including the drift from promise to extraction. But it cannot manufacture coherence. That remains stubbornly, beautifully human. Which means every small act done with genuine love now carries signal in a world drowning in noise.

When I tell people Awakin AI is non-commercial, most still roll their eyes. But maybe the eye-roll is exactly what's worth examining. Maybe the reflex to dismiss intrinsic motivation as naive is the blind spot that keeps the pattern repeating — three founders, three unkept promises, on and on, as if there were no other way to build.

At that 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."