R Pages — No. 19
About
We have two needs you would think would work together. First we have the need to seek the truth, and second we have need to be loved and uplifted.
I'm George Norwood, the creator of Deepermind. I write all original material, format it, write the html and put it online myself. I keep updating it. I want it to flow, and be clear. I keep digging deeper. What is nice about publishing on the web, it is updated instantly, in contrast to a book that once published never changes. The subjects I write about, constantly looking for deeper truth is not very popular as people have been indoctrinated by their upbringing and most never stop to consider that it might be wrong. Here I am doing the opposite of main stream, constantly searching for truth and constantly updating. Religion is frozen and science has bias towards materialism. So I am way outside what is common, actually thinking and proud of it. So how did I get to be so different. I think I hatched under a strange rock.
Actually it was a huge amount of work. For about 35 years I was a technical writer, and wrote about extremely complicated subjects. I tried to get to the bottom of things and write as clearly as possible. First thing I did was to learn the hardest thing about what I was going to write. Imagine writing an index, when you don't know what you are talking about. About the time I retired, computers had spell checkers, and there was the internet, and more recently AI. It was a perfect time to dig deeply into the hardest subject ever -how we work inside. It was shocking to find out that with all the history of behind us, there was so much noise. Everything I read was based on assumptions and biases passed on by previous generations. All of it seem to be heavily biased by politics and the need to control. There was poetry, and some independent thinkers but they were not technical. I wanted the real meat, really the depth, stepping back from all the different cultures.
Things that did not make sense and did not help just had to go. It is like panning for gold, and there is mostly gravel out there. So I kept most of science, and also the uplifting and wise part of religion. What seems to be obvious fact is that God is extremely smart as He created the universe from scratch. The universe itself is actually firsthand information about how deep and wonderful God is. In contrast the Bible was written by many people over a long stretch of time. Most people do not understand how they work inside and it's all a big blur. They suffer from confusion, loneliness, and a sense of disconnection from love. They try to get high on drugs, entertainment, and are pretty much lost in spite of their strong egos. There are exceptions, but the majority are like grownup children.
01 — Who I Am
Basic Things About Me
When I was a child, the lower grades seemed to work. There was a collective wholeness to things. When I was in high school, I had teachers who knew less about everything and were focused on a narrow subject. I notice that most people in our culture had a very narrow range of wisdom and knowledge. You got into trouble if you asked deep questions outside the spectrum. I went to catechism classes in the Catholic Church, and it was painful. Everything was like reading bumper stickers.
Sometimes I am like scientist seeing things in terms of block diagrams and math. But when I mingle with people, I put this aside, and look for warmth, encouragement, kindness, and compassion. One way I get this is by going to an Agape Spiritual Center which is based on uplifting, spirituality, and love. Other religious communities are similar except that believing is a prerequisite. So basically a mixture of intellectual pursuits and being with people.
02 — The Story
My Journey
I grew up in Petaluma, a small, charming town in Northern California once known as the Egg Basket of the World. My early life was deeply Catholic, a faith my mother instilled in me with real love and dedication. I attended Mass and catechism classes with full devotion, and as a boy I saw myself as a good Catholic kid, swinging between states of grace, when my sins were freshly forgiven, and back to my ordinary sinful self. Catholic doctrine shaped my early worldview almost completely, except that I also loved science, and the two never fully agreed with each other.
Even then, something nagged at me. Why was everything sinful? Science proved things through experiment and mathematical logic and gave clear answers. Doctrine didn't work that way, and questioning authority left me feeling guilty rather than satisfied, since I didn't yet understand how thoroughly guilt had been built into my own sense of self. Confessing to a priest was genuinely painful.
As a teenager I wanted the real truth, whatever it turned out to be. I rode my bicycle to every church in town and bought paperback books at the drugstore about Buddhism, Hinduism, and of course science. There was a real conflict running inside me, church on one side, science on the other, fighting it out.
After high school I left home for RCA Institutes in New York City, a leap into calculus, electronics, physics, and the very new world of computers. I had no real idea how computers worked, fell behind, and started failing. In desperation I turned to prayer, hoping God would simply intervene. God did nothing. My grades did not improve through prayer, and I felt, plainly, lied to. Eventually I learned how to actually ask questions and how to study, which turned out to matter far more than any amount of pleading ever did, and which served me well for the rest of my life.
That disappointment shook something loose. I started questioning not just the power of prayer but nearly everything. My spiritual search widened for years afterward: I went on retreats with Ken Keyes's group and with disciples of Swami Satchidananda, and at various points I joined the Hindu, Buddhist, Bahá'í, and Unitarian communities outright. Nearly all of them felt out of date to me in one way or another, and even the Bahá'ís, the one group genuinely comfortable with science, still wanted me to accept the Holy Books rather than think it through for myself. I wanted something current and demonstrable, not something I had to take on faith simply because it was thousands of years old. I wanted to understand first, and believe only afterward, if at all.
After a few marriages that didn't work out, I went back to school, earning a psychology degree at the University of Texas at Dallas, which gave me real insight into anatomy, mental illness, and child development. By day I worked as a technical writer on complex equipment, and that work sharpened my mind in its own way. The stage was set for Deepermind without my quite knowing it yet.
In early 2024 I found a spiritual community that finally met both needs at once: Agape Spiritual Center in Frisco, Texas. Like other groups I had joined, Agape offered real uplift, but what set it apart was its interest in the actual mechanics of inner experience, not just feel-good messages. That combination gave me a new kind of clarity.
By then I had already spent more than forty years as a technical writer, and along the way I had taught myself HTML and learned how to build web pages as well as manuals. Paired with a genuine thirst for truth, it turned out to be the right combination at the right time. I was not afraid of complex systems, and I had spent decades explaining them clearly to other people. The remaining challenge was the hardest one: uniting science and religion into something coherent.
My first attempts at Deepermind were rough. I used simple HTML and strung facts together, mostly cataloguing everything wrong with various religions, every contradiction and bit of bad logic I could find. Then Michael A. Singer's work found me, and it changed the direction of the whole project.
03 — The Influence
Michael A. Singer
Singer gave me a clear, experiential way to separate awareness from the mental and emotional activity it observes, and that clarity became one of the foundations that let me connect spirituality with science instead of treating them as opponents.
In The Untethered Soul, Singer describes something I had already sensed but didn't yet have language for: that most human suffering comes from identifying with the constant inner voice. The mind, he points out, isn't who we are. It's a mechanism that produces thoughts, commentary, and stories about experience, and believing that voice is "me" is what traps a person inside it. His key insight is that there is an awareness inside us that simply notices the mind, the ego, the emotions, and whatever the senses bring in, undisturbed by any of it. He calls that awareness the soul. Singer never drew diagrams for any of this; I had to make those myself, but he gave me the raw material to draw from.
That perspective let me map the inner world with far more precision than I had managed on my own. Thoughts could be treated as mental events. Emotions could be felt as energy moving through the nervous system. The sense of "me" could be watched forming and dissolving, moment by moment, none of it requiring dogmatic belief, all of it checkable directly through meditation. For the first time, science and spirituality were sitting on the same page. Observation comes first. Conclusions come second.
Singer also emphasized letting go, since our mental loops keep us worrying long after there is any reason to. That's roughly where I started building past him rather than simply repeating him: he laid the foundation, and I tried to add the science and structure underneath what he calls blockages, or samskaras. In Living Untethered, Singer turns the same insight toward ordinary daily life rather than peak experience, staying open in relationships, in challenges, in small ordinary moments, instead of protecting a fragile inner ego. Deepermind's whole idea of weight that needs to move off one part of the plate and onto another grew directly out of that extension of his work. His newest book, Wisdom Untethered, uses a question-and-answer format across 213 pages; I'm enjoying it as I work through it now.
I recommend reading Singer's books directly. He is an excellent, patient writer who walks through the basics slowly and thoroughly, and he genuinely helped me more than I can easily summarize here.
For anyone who wants a quick introduction, these are a good place to start:
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04 — The Community
Agape Spiritual Center
I first encountered Singer's teaching at Agape Spiritual Center, a welcoming refuge in Frisco, Texas, set inside a part of the country that is predominantly Christian in culture. Founded in March 2009 by Senior Minister Rev. Lee Wolak, Agape holds in-person gatherings every Sunday at 10:00 a.m. at the Hyatt Regency in Frisco, and Rev. Lee weaves principles from The Untethered Soul directly into his teaching, treating practical spirituality as a path toward a more conscious, fulfilled life.
Agape leans on meditation, affirmative prayer, affirmations, forgiveness, visualization, and gratitude as everyday tools, encouraging people to move past limiting beliefs toward more openness, connection, and joy. There is no dogma there and no demand to believe anything in particular, just encouragement, warmth, and a shared sense of humanity. On the rare Sundays when the Hyatt's space is not available, I will sometimes visit a temple or church instead, not looking for a new belief system, just staying open and connected to the many ways people express sincerity and meaning.
05 — The Tools
Tools of the Trade
This site is built and updated using Microsoft Expression Web 4 for the HTML, which is also true of every page in this R Pages series.
How I Use AI as a Thinking Partner
I don't use AI to replace my thinking. I use it to clarify it. Most of my ideas start as intuitions rather than finished thoughts. I sense something is true before I can explain it well, and writing directly from that place often comes out tangled or incomplete. A good AI thinking partner slows that process down enough for me to see what I am actually saying.
What I value most is that it behaves like a patient thinking partner. I put a rough idea into words, however messy, and work it through several revisions; responding, correcting, and refining sharpens my own understanding as much as the writing itself. It is similar to how people actually learn together in conversation, one person speaks, another reflects it back, and something clearer comes out of the exchange.
I think in systems, diagrams, and the relationships between parts when I am working alone, and a good AI partner helps translate that internal structure into language that stays precise but also reads as human and accessible. It does not add meaning that was not already there; it helps surface the meaning that already was. It also has no personal stake, ego, or attachment to my words, which makes it unusually useful for honest editing. If something is unclear or inconsistent, it can be revised without anyone getting defensive about it, including me.
I started this way with ChatGPT, and it served me well for a long time. More recently I have done most of my writing, including the R Pages series on this site, with Claude AI instead, and the difference surprised me. Given the same rough idea, Claude tends to come back warmer and less mechanical, closer to something a thoughtful person would actually say than something correctly assembled. On a site that is trying to hold science and spirituality together without letting either one flatten the other, that warmth turns out to matter more than I expected. It is a real part of why the tone of this site has shifted somewhat since I made the switch.
I don't experience either tool as an authority. I experience it as a mirror and an editor, a space where a rough idea can mature into something coherent. Sometimes I let it draft more on its own, and the result occasionally connects things I hadn't quite put together myself, not really new ideas out of nowhere, just familiar pieces joined in a way I hadn't tried. Other times I tell it exactly what I want changed and read the result carefully, rewriting by hand wherever it still doesn't sound like me.
Models like these are trained on an enormous body of text, something on the order of trillions of words, which is why one can sometimes seem to already know an obscure book I have picked up, recognizing its table of contents the way a librarian recognizes a book's shape without having read it cover to cover. If you tried to read a trillion words yourself, at one word a second, it would take you roughly 31,688 years. It is not hard to see why the result can feel almost human.