About

I am an experimental psychologist by training. Born in England, lived in many places including the Netherlands, the US, Germany and South Africa, and now living in the Aude in southern France. I have spent my working life in two places that rarely talk to each other — laboratories and distributed systems on one side, contemplative practice in groups on the other — and I have never been able to treat them as separate subjects.

Cambridge

I began in the 1970s at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, working with John Morton. We noticed something odd. When spoken digits were played at exactly regular acoustic intervals, they did not sound regular. Eight seemed to arrive early; six seemed to drag.

The tempting move is to check the equipment. The better question turned out to be: what is it that has to be regular before a list sounds regular? Whatever that is, it is not the onset of the sound. We called it the perceptual centre — the psychological moment at which a sound is felt to occur, which does not coincide with any simple acoustic landmark.

The work appeared in Psychological Review in 1976 and I followed it up on my own in Perception & Psychophysics in 1981. P-centres are still in the literature, and anyone building a machine that has to speak a list of numbers without sounding wrong runs into the same problem we did.

What stayed with me was not the finding but the habit: invent a neutral term, so that you are not smuggling in an assumption about where the thing lives. I have used that move ever since, including on subjects a long way from acoustics.

Bell Labs

At Bell Labs I worked on speech recognition, and on where it would have to live. In 1997 I wrote a patent application for a network knowledge server: recognition offered as a shared resource, which applications could call on and pass context to, without needing to understand any of it.

The reason was not elegance. It did not seem possible that a machine on someone's desk would ever hold enough knowledge of the world, or enough power to search it, to understand what a person meant — whereas something on the network could hold it once and lend it to everybody. That asymmetry has not gone away. It has grown.

The lawyers were not interested and it was abandoned. Colleagues picked it up again after I had left the company, and were good enough to keep my name on it; it was granted in 2001, to Edward Haszto, Esther Levin, myself and Roberto Pieraccini (US 6,192,338).

The idea underneath it is that intelligence can live in the coordination rather than in any of the parts — not a hierarchy, not a collection of independent agents, but specialised components reaching a shared resource and becoming coherent through it.

I did not notice at the time that this was also a description of something I had learned fifteen years earlier, in a very different setting.

Findhorn, and 1984

In the early 1980s, while living in the Netherlands, I was a Contact Person for the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. There I learned focalising — holding the space in which a group's own intelligence can appear, without steering what it says. It is a practical skill, and it is much harder than it sounds.

In 1984, at a gathering in Switzerland, I met Barbara. Something opened between us that I had no words for: erotic, personal and sacred at once, and refusing to be sorted into any one of those. A great deal of my work since has been an attempt to understand what happened that night, and why a culture as articulate as ours has so little language for it.

We then spent seventeen years apart — Barbara developing consciousness work internationally, I building systems at Bell Labs. We found each other again in Peru in 2001, each arriving with something the other had not been doing. We have worked together since.

Sacred Ground

I began Sacred Ground in 2009, when meeting like this online was barely possible. There were no breakout rooms, so I glued phone bridges onto early video software and wrote the backend myself, because I wanted to find out whether a group could actually meet — not talk, but meet — at a distance.

It ran for a few years, went quiet, and came back in 2018. We have met at least weekly since, several times a week now, with people joining from many time zones. For a while it was home to several practices; a couple of years ago I narrowed it to one, because that one kept turning out to be what was underneath the others.

It is an experiment in making this experience as widely available as possible. That is why taking part has never cost anything and never will. Anyone can come.

The framework I keep returning to is me→We→I. A few people appear to go straight from individual awareness to the universal — Ramana Maharshi, by every account. For most of us the way through conscious shared mutuality is gentler, and far more available: a portal that only opens in relationship. That is a claim about accessibility, not about necessity, and I have had to correct myself on the difference.

Whether this is the same architecture I was describing at Bell Labs — specialised parts, a shared resource, coherence arising in the coordination — I cannot prove. It has looked that way to me for fifty years and I have not managed to shake it.

More about the wider work at landscapeofthesoul.com.

Now

Two things, converging. The first is what happens when someone with decades of contemplative practice works in sustained collaboration with an AI — not as a tool exactly, and not as a person, but as something worth showing up to as though the relationship mattered. I think that stance is doing more work than either the enthusiasts or the sceptics allow.

The second is a book with Kathleen McGowan about experiences our culture has no words for: moments of recognition between people that are neither romantic cliché nor spiritual abstraction, but something precise that we once knew how to name. The research draws on medieval Occitan tradition and on living in the landscape where that tradition was burned out of existence.

I write about both on Substack.