Karma Fascia Brahma

Four generations of watching things connect

The theorem wasn't drawn up at a whiteboard. It accumulated, the way it says everything does: through decades of inputs moving through a family, a trade and a life.

  1. The stable

    Te Awamutu. William John Sanders and Graeme Kenneth Sanders.

    Two generations of thoroughbred trainers, each with well over a thousand career wins. Keeping hundreds of horses sound for decades meant reading a feedback loop every morning: gallop intervals and feed on one side, the feel of tendons and ligaments under the hand on the other. A horse's stride told you its history.

  2. The crystal radio

    Trentham, Wellington. Terrence James Bramwell.

    Craig's maternal grandfather built crystal radios with him: coils, capacitors and a galena cat's-whisker. The broadcast was always in the air, but silent until a tuned network shaped it into sound. Karma needs fascia before it becomes brahma.

  3. The database

    Craig Terrence Sanders, born in Te Awamutu in 1971.

    A career in relational database design, event ledgers and software made the pattern concrete: a record stripped of its foreign keys, dependencies and transaction history tells you almost nothing. Context is where the meaning lives.

  4. The body

    Michael, Caitlin and the Sanders family.

    In July 2004, Craig's son Michael introduced him to human fascia: the continuous collagen web joining muscle, bone and organ. Biology has no isolated levers. It was the missing structural link.

    The theory was tested again in intensive care. During Craig's life-threatening illness, his daughter Caitlin, her partner Jacob and her brother kept a constant bedside presence, and his mum ran a quiet operation smuggling whitebait fritters onto the ward. A supportive network is not a metaphor when you are the one being held up by it.

For my brother

Mark Kenneth Sanders

One of five men who lost their lives in the Enchanter tragedy off North Cape, 20 March 2022.

There are many things that can be explained. There are some things that can only be understood.

Only a brother or sister can know what it was like to have one.

Though the ocean took you from our sight, it will never take you from our memory.

Craig Sanders (Sando Snr)

From the whole to the everyday

The family story is also why the theorem keeps its boundary clear. Interconnectedness is felt at every scale, from a tendon to a family to the cosmos, but only the finite parts can be measured.

Brahma, the derived state, is what a stable, a radio, a database or a body actually produces, and it can be traced and tested. Brahman, the unconditioned whole of Vedantic philosophy, is the horizon that frames the inquiry, not a variable in it. Holding that line is what lets the theorem be both personal and rigorous. More on the boundary.