Something happened when I was around five years old. I recognized — not as a thought, but as plain fact — that my deepest nature is something that doesn't come and go. I've spent the decades since trying to understand what that recognition means, and why it's so hard to talk about.
Around the same age, I taught myself to lucid dream. I had thousands of lucid dreams in the following years, offering an additional window into the nature of experience.
I was also drawn to mathematics early. At eighteen I published a few papers in quantum computing with the University of Michigan's quantum circuits group (earning me Erdős number 3, through John Hayes). I graduated in computer science shortly thereafter and spent eight years as a software engineer at Google. While there, I worked as a research assistant in psychophysiology at Stanford, coauthoring three papers, and taught meditation to colleagues. I kept trying to get these two halves of my life to talk to each other.
That eventually led me to psychedelics. I've done high-dose psilocybin countless times, and many of the ideas I write about here come from those experiences. At Google, I pushed for research on psychedelics and compassion — briefly collaborating with Johns Hopkins and MAPS — because the connection seemed too important to ignore.
I write here to think in public: to work through ideas that are still forming, and to find others who are asking similar questions. The through-line is always the same — how direct investigation of experience relates to the formal structures we use to describe it.
This site is deliberately simple. No tracking, no analytics, no newsletter pop-ups. Just writing.