Silicon Valley spirituality

At the end, both the innocent and the guilty are executed without distinction

 Franz Kafka in his diary in 1915.

When in Silicon Valley, take the exit San Antonio Road West in Palo Alto. You'll see the Sun's old headquarters on the right site, ready to be demolished on that prime real estate area, to accomodate a community center. Turn right on Charleston and then turn right again on Fabian Way. Every single almost-new office building has signs for lease. Fabian Way meets the highway 101 and makes a sharp left turn. An abandoned restaurant has a rotten "Available" sign dangling in the windy rain.

For the next mile, almost every prime single office park is empty and available. They are facing Highway 101, where motorists could have seen the huge signs of of the Valley legends of the past.

The Bay Area continues to suffer one of the worst regional downturns in the nation's history, having lost 400,000 -- or 13 percent -- of the jobs in its seven-county area since 2001, according to the quarterly UCLA Anderson Forecast.

Stanford University is only two miles away. There is this inscription on the Wall of the West Transept of Stanford's Memorial Church

Thoughts and words travel just as God's life travels, They do not travel like an individual, but you breathe your spiritual life into the atmosphere as you do your breath, and some one else breathes it in. Those not present still receive it, for it permeates space, and all live in it and receive from it according to their unfoldment.

There is hope, I think, I believe, I need to believe. The indifference of the natural Darwinian laws of survival is not absolute. Maybe Stanford's blows it's spiritual life, made out of thoughts and words beyond the Valley, touching the planet. But the strongest, the purest breathing of that spirit is still here, in Silicon Valley.