A Latecomer’s Admission

Before going further, I want to openly admit that I am not a religious scholar, and I am not pretending to be one now. I did not grow up with religious instruction, I have never read the Bible in any systematic way, and I did not enter Scripture alone. MB had spent decades in those texts before I arrived, and over many months, he kept dropping clues, passages, and connections into my lap — small fragments I would contemplate, follow, test, and return to.

What follows, then, is not theology in any formal sense. These are the reflections of a man who entered these texts late in life and found, to his own surprise, that they described the world with more force and precision than anything else I had ever encountered.

I also want to be clear about the spirit of this post. I am not trying to write about doom and gloom, complaint, or moral superiority. I am not trying to say that the world would be fine if only everyone else stopped behaving badly. I am trying to look honestly at where we are — as a nation, as a civilization, and as human beings living inside systems that have become increasingly disordered.

That is not a comfortable place for me to write from. My public life began in medicine, not Scripture. I wrote about Covid, vaccine injury, institutional failure, censorship, fraud, and treatment because those were the battles directly in front of me. I did not expect that the same journey would eventually lead me into geology, agriculture, ancient texts, moral order, and the spiritual meaning of judgment.

But it did.

And somewhere along the way, I began to feel that I had been brought into contact with something good. I do not know exactly how to name it. A return. A restoration. A movement back toward order in a world that has wandered far from it. The book began as an investigation into minerals, water, and biology, but it ended by changing the way I see my own life, my responsibilities, and the world around me.

That is why this chapter is not a lament. It is an attempt to describe disorder without surrendering to it.

Scripture uses the word judgment in a way I had never understood before. Judgment does not refer only to a final event at the end of time. More often, it refers to the process by which reality reveals alignment or misalignment in a person, institution, or society through the consequences of its actions. Judgment begins within the system, exposes what is there, and sets in motion the consequences that follow.

In my last post, I used the Leading Edge Clinic, which I built with my partner and a group of committed, aligned people, as an example of an institution ordered around truth, and how that ordering allowed it to endure pressure and continue serving patients.

The Anatomy of Judgment

Today’s post looks at the opposite movement: what happens when institutions are built on suppression, denial, distortion, and self-protection.

For me, that disordered structure first surfaced in medicine, then across an increasing number of institutions, and eventually inside the FLCCC, the globally known nonprofit Paul Marik and I had built. What made that episode so clarifying was the specific form the disorder took. I watched an institution built to serve truth and protect the vulnerable begin to reorganize itself around control, internal politics, and self-preservation.

Once certain people concluded that influence was shifting away from them, they did not respond with humility, correction, or honest disagreement. They responded by accusing innocent people of fraud to resolve a power struggle.

The behavior was so misaligned that I stepped away from it immediately. The mission was no longer governing the institution; insecurity, ambition, and the protection of authority were. I had already been part of multiple institutions that shifted out of alignment under pressure, and I left every time. Paul remained, but in increasing estrangement and with severely diminished authority, bound to a structure that had already turned against not only its founders, but its own founding principles.

What followed only confirmed the diagnosis: the institution was emptied of the principles that had given it life, and what remains now is a diminished shadow of what it once was. I, by contrast, flourished after leaving. That, too, was part of the judgment.

That experience changed the way I now see the wider world: a civilization in which short-term profit is routinely extracted by injecting long-term harm into air, water, food, bodies, ecosystems, and information systems; a civilization in which disordered individuals now hold concentrations of wealth and power so extreme that their disorder propagates into the institutions they control.

This is especially dangerous in medicine and public health, where one misaligned figure at the top can bend agencies, journals, hospitals, and professional societies away from their duty to the sick.

So I am now going to do something I never expected to do publicly: walk through Scripture, hesitantly, as a latecomer, and draw out lessons that lifelong students of these texts may laugh at me for only now discovering. I do not plan to do much of this going forward. But in the context of this book, it has become both unavoidable and central.

“If a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked.”

—Proverbs 29:12

Scripture is blunt about this. Once disorder is rewarded at the top of a system, it propagates outward and downward.

Alignment Is Not Immunity

As this unifying view of order and disorder, alignment and misalignment, came together, it forced me toward a question that has troubled human beings forever: if order protects, why do righteous people still suffer?

I quickly learned that alignment with God is not a guarantee of worldly safety. It does not remove a person from danger, disorder, or the consequences of other people’s choices. What it does is place that person under care, within truth, and in right relation to reality.

“Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”

—Matthew 10:16

Wolves exist. Disorder exists. Alignment does not prevent exposure to either. But alignment can create capacities that matter under pressure: clarity, mission, endurance, restraint, and the strength to keep moving when the surrounding system breaks. I did not understand at the time that some of those capacities had been formed in me years earlier through spiritual work, and that I had mostly taken them for granted. Disorder forms the opposite traits: confusion, agitation, compulsion, self-division, alienation, emptiness, and the multiplying consequences of a life at war with reality.

Scripture repeatedly portrays order and disorder as paths that unfold over time, rather than single, isolated events. Alignment does not confer immunity; it lowers vulnerability over time. Disorder does not always destroy immediately. More often, it accumulates. Delayed judgment is not innocence. It is simply the time required for consequences to surface.

“By their fruits you will recognize them.”

—Matthew 7:16

Fruit is an outcome over time. That is why judgment often appears delayed.

“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.”

—Luke 8:17

Exposure is inevitable.

To Fear the Lord

Again, not having grown up with religious instruction, as I began studying theology and Scripture, I kept getting confused by the phrase “fear of the Lord.” The best understanding I have come to is this: to fear the Lord is to live as if God’s order is real, and that violating it carries consequences.

In that posture, people order their behavior through sobriety, restraint, truthfulness, responsibility, and care for others. That ordering stabilizes their internal state and lowers the probability of self-inflicted destruction. It does not protect them from a drunk driver, a violent stranger, or a collapsing institution. I came to understand that difference firsthand as the systems around me broke down.

Scripture explicitly acknowledges this:

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”

—Psalm 116:15

Good people do die, sometimes violently, sometimes unjustly. Their suffering is not evidence that their order failed them. It is evidence that disorder is permitted to move through the world.

From the beginning, God did not design a closed system in which obedience was enforced and harm prevented at every moment. He granted man free will. In Genesis, this is symbolized by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil placed in the garden, the sign that human life was created with a real capacity to choose. Alignment with God was not meant to be automatic, mechanical, or coerced. It had to remain voluntary, and once that freedom was real, so was the possibility that human beings would choose against the order in which they had been placed.

God did not remove causality to spare the righteous from harm. He permitted a world in which human choices move through others, for good or for ill. Once disorder is chosen, it does not remain confined to the chooser. Pride, greed, lust, aggression, neglect, and excess deform shared environments.

The same principle applies at scale. Scripture is again explicit:

“The king by judgment establisheth the land: but he that receiveth gifts overthroweth it.”

—Proverbs 29:4

A rightly ordered ruler can exercise restraint, receive correction, discern proportion, and act for the good of those under his care. He does not confuse power with wisdom, obedience with loyalty, or dissent with betrayal. By contrast, when leaders become driven by greed, ego, and power, and insulated by pride, authority, or certainty, they lose the ability to revise their beliefs. Decisions harden, and dissent is treated as a danger rather than as information. In that state, leaders begin acting as if what they believe is reality, rather than something that must answer to it.

This is not just moral collapse. It is the closing of the mind to correction.

Scripture treats resistance to correction as a mark of deep disorder. The wise receive rebuke and change course. The fool rejects correction, hardens, and continues toward ruin. Sin is not only wrongdoing, but also the refusal to be corrected once truth has made itself known.

This is why Scripture frames human action as seed and harvest. Errors compound and disordered structures amplify their effects. In disordered societies, corrective knowledge almost always resides in the minority, because once a false premise becomes institutionalized, the majority’s role shifts from inquiry to enforcement.

Correction then becomes costly, truth becomes dissident, and the price is paid by the few who volunteer for the task. I watched that sequence unfold with ivermectin, where the real struggle quickly ceased to be over evidence and became a struggle over whether correction itself would be permitted.

Modern societies add an accelerant. Mass media that are not ordered around truth, objectivity, and transparency do not just misreport reality; they manufacture a false one. They suppress correction, normalize harm, and teach entire populations to accept what is disordered as if it were good, necessary, or inevitable. For those reasons, major media have become one of the sharpest instruments through which powerful institutions propagate disorder at scale.

Major media were not alone. Many religious authorities also failed their role during Covid, when they should have helped people test fear, defend conscience, protect the vulnerable, and remain anchored to truth. Instead, many simply echoed institutional authority, accepted coercion as virtue, and treated compliance as moral responsibility. As in nearly every other sector of society, only a small minority tried to speak correction aloud.

Scripture does not treat deception as a one-sided event. It repeatedly warns people to test what they hear, resist false authority, and remain open to correction.

“Test everything; hold fast what is good.”

—1 Thessalonians 5:21

“Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.”

—1 John 4:1

When they do not—when they prefer comforting narratives, elevate human voices above truth, or outsource discernment—they become susceptible to deception, and, over time, unable to recognize it.

“They will gather teachers to suit their own desires . . . and turn away from listening to the truth.”

—2 Timothy 4:3–4

“The simple believe everything, but the prudent give thought to their steps.”

—Proverbs 14:15

In that state, falsehood begins to shape reality itself.

I watched people submit themselves and their children to policies and interventions they believed were virtuous, necessary, and socially responsible, often with no real understanding of the costs, the uncertainties, or that risks had been minimized, obscured, or actively suppressed.

I watched faces disappear behind masks, children lose ordinary cues for learning and social development, and long lines form at pharmacies and clinics filled with people who were wholly confident they were doing the right thing for themselves and for others. Many paid dearly for that trust. Some paid the ultimate price.

And that is the warning Scripture returns to again and again: once disorder is chosen, tolerated, or set in motion, its consequences do not remain confined to the chooser.

“The violence of the wicked will destroy them.”

—Proverbs 21:7

Scripture states the outcome for the one who acts in violence. What it leaves implicit—but what experience makes unmistakable—is that violence rarely stops there. It spreads. It reaches beyond the one who initiates it. Disorder does not remain contained.

Alignment Introduced into a Collapsing System

I am watching this same sequence unfold in real time as a man who claims no perfection, no moral exemption, and no authority beyond a willingness to submit himself to truth is placed at the head of a decaying health system and attempts to reintroduce order at scale. He is doing it through principles that should never have become controversial: honesty, transparency, accountability, and protection of the vulnerable, especially children.

Watching this has not been peaceful, but it has been clarifying. Attacks have intensified. Narratives have multiplied. Institutions and professional societies have protested, resisted, and publicly contradicted new guidance with the reactive force of threatened incentives, authority, and reputation. Media behavior, already corrosive, has in many cases become even more reckless. The system reacts as if truth itself were a threat, because for any system that has learned to survive by selling falsehood, exposure reveals not just isolated mistakes but the machinery that made those mistakes profitable.

At first, I thought the introduction of an aligned figure was causing the disorder. Then I realized that is not how it works. Alignment does not create hidden rot. It reveals it.

When alignment is introduced into a collapsing system, one of two things happens: the system reorganizes around higher-order principles and lives, or it fractures, because what was built on distortion cannot remain intact under truth. Both halt decay. Only the first restores vitality.

Judgment is the last attempt at mercy. Exposure is the only thing that makes correction possible, but correction can only be received by what is still willing to align itself with truth.

What unsettled me was not that ancient texts warned about this, but how precisely they described the sequence. Long before modern systems theory, they recognized the same pattern: alignment sustains, misalignment degrades, and resistance to correction accelerates collapse.

Judgment, as I now understand it, does not create the collapse. It exposes the collapse already present within the system once truth is introduced.

Once you understand that water is both the foundation and medium of biological order, that minerals determine whether water can carry and sustain that order, and that order creates the conditions for resilience and flourishing at every scale, reality stops feeling arbitrary. It becomes intelligible, alignable, and sustaining.

With this new understanding, I suddenly feel safer in the world—more directed, more focused, and more confident moving through it. Once reality is understood that way, it becomes impossible to pretend that misalignment is harmless or that truth can be suppressed without consequence.

This is not a call to fear.

It is a call to alignment.

Because in an ordered universe, judgment is not coming.

It is already here.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Note to readers:

What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, the kind of revered substance described across numerous cultures and traditions as a “Golden Elixir”: rock opened, minerals rendered mobile, and water transformed through contact with that chemistry.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

The previous posts explored a recurring principle across physics, biology, geology, and even human behavior: systems remain healthy only when order, alignment, and coherent transmission are maintained. We saw it in water responding to structure, in Retallack’s experiments on biological sensitivity, in electrochemical gradients that sustain life, and in the way living systems organize themselves under stable conditions. But every principle becomes easier to see under strain. Pressure does not create the underlying structure of a system. It reveals whether that structure was ever stable to begin with.

This chapter is not about blame. It is about what happens when alignment is violated at scale.

Judgment is often heard today as punishment, condemnation, or sentence. But I am using it here in its Scriptural sense. Judgment is the moment when what is hidden becomes visible, when a person, nation, or system is revealed for what it truly is.

In Scripture, judgment does not only punish disorder. It exposes it. It separates appearance from reality. It reveals whether a structure was built on truth or falsehood, courage or fear, service or self-protection.

That is the meaning I intend here. When institutions, societies, and individuals are placed under sufficient strain, what is hidden becomes visible. Incentives reveal themselves. Fear reveals itself. Courage reveals itself. Integrity reveals itself. Some systems maintain alignment under pressure and continue transmitting order outward. Others fracture internally and begin propagating confusion, distortion, self-protection, and harm.

Covid was not just a crisis. It was exposure.

A key insight running beneath this entire book is that life depends on ordered systems and on fluids capable of carrying that order.

Life unfolds in media through which matter, charge, energy, and information can move; that is, it operates in fluids. And fluid does not mean water alone. Air is a fluid as well—a medium through which sound, signals, and energies propagate between bodies, just as aqueous media carry charge, gradients, and communication within and between cells. Ordered human behavior moves through the air—through speech, tone, action, restraint, panic, courage, and command. The medium differs. The principle does not.

What is carried in a medium, and how it is carried, exists on a continuum. Fluids either carry ordered gradients, signaling, and structure, or they carry distortion, noise, and disorder instead. Living organisms either maintain internal order and propagate it around them, or, when that order breaks down, propagate disorder in its place. Systems—whether biological, social, or institutional—either maintain order under pressure and extend it outward, or they begin to fracture from within and spread disorder both internally and outward into everything they touch.

For many months, I could recognize ordered systems in water, soil, and biology, but not yet in society. As a physician, I understood how biological systems behave when internal order is lost and the consequences of that loss. Then memories of Covid kept returning, and that entire period began to look far more profound and unsettling than it once had.

Before Covid

Before Covid, I lived inside a world that made sense to me. It was not perfect, and it certainly was not always just. I knew that wars, massacres, famines, and humanitarian catastrophes occurred, but they mostly felt distant, fragmented, and exceptional.

In my personal life and career, I was more focused on flawed institutions, misaligned incentives, and a bureaucracy that I found deadening. I did not yet suspect how completely they might fail when truth, courage, and human life came under real pressure.

Looking back, I now see that I believed something I had not openly acknowledged to myself: that when real danger arrived, when lives were truly at stake, I trusted that institutions would remain oriented toward truth, care, and the search for what worked. However imperfectly, I believed the people entrusted with responsibility inside them would remain faithful to that purpose, despite the professional, financial, and social incentives pulling them elsewhere.

Then Covid arrived, right as the second of my daughters was fighting the same devastating illness that had already traumatized my family two years earlier.

Covid came as a pulmonary and critical care disease, squarely in my lane as a pulmonary and critical care leader. I stepped forward the way physicians trained for crisis do. I gave up sleep. I gave up my normal life. I gave up attention that should have belonged to my wife and, most painfully, to a very sick child who needed me in ways I can never fully make right. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself nothing could be more important. I told myself this was what I had been trained for.

At first, it felt like war in the noble sense of the word: chaotic, exhausting, terrifying, but shared. We were all learning in real time. Or so I believed.

When Disorder Reveals Itself

When disorder begins to propagate through a system, those still ordered enough to recognize the truth are often the first to feel the strain, because they are the least able to normalize what does not fit. Looking back, from the very first days of Covid, long before the collapse became obvious to most people, I watched the medical system I had trained in, believed in, and served for decades begin to fail. At first slowly, then quickly.

I knew almost immediately that something was off. At first, it was only one or two concerns, but they were not subtle. The system was moving under the weight of fear and confusion, trying to stabilize itself through policy at exactly the moment when curiosity, innovation, and urgency were most needed.

That was enough for me to resign early on from my clinical leadership position at one of the largest academic medical centers in the country, lodging a moral and ethical objection to an institution that had chosen to block a safe and effective intervention—IV vitamin C—while insisting that “supportive care only” was the appropriate default treatment, and that placebo-controlled trials should proceed even while patients were dying in front of us. In an emergency, that meant valuing the production of sanctioned knowledge above the duty to attempt rescue.

Then, without seeking it or wanting it, I found myself drawn into something else entirely. I became a public figure in what I would later title my book, The War on Ivermectin. I did not choose that role. I entered it because I did what physicians are supposed to do when confronted with a new disease: I studied the data, followed the physiology, and observed how profoundly a treatment was helping patients, both in my practice and around the world.

As reports, case series, observational studies, and preprints began pouring out from every corner of the globe, I immersed myself in them obsessively, trying to make sense of a fast-moving body of evidence that few seemed willing to synthesize in real time.

In doing so, I became, almost by accident, one of the world’s leading clinical experts on the emerging ivermectin data. That expertise, built under pressure, eventually led to Senator Ron Johnson’s invitation to testify before the United States Senate, speaking not only to the country, but to the world, about what I believed the evidence was already showing. The testimony quickly went viral, and with it, my role in that conflict changed overnight.

What followed was unlike anything I had encountered in medicine.

Media hit pieces targeting both me and my non-profit organization appeared almost immediately. Journals behaved in ways I had long been too naïve to imagine. My paper, along with others, was blocked and then retracted in a manner that violated publishing practices. Agencies issued policies devoid of both logic and scientific courage, then contradicted themselves without accountability. The FDA posted its now-infamous “You are not a horse. You are not a cow” tweet, and the world’s media followed by reducing a Nobel Prize–winning human medicine to a “horse dewormer.”

Several of the world’s leading universities fraudulently designed and manipulated large “rigorous” trials to prove that ivermectin did not work. Beneath nearly every amplified narrative sat the same unspoken force: institutional and industry self-protection reinforced by money, status, or fear, together with the determination to preserve authority even as grievous errors were being committed and harm was being widely disseminated.

Covid did not create the disorder. It exposed it.

I felt it escalating long before most people were willing to admit that anything was wrong. I was speaking, writing, testifying, organizing, and warning as loudly as I could through every channel available to me—through my organization, my Substack, interviews, podcasts, and public appearances—and yet much of society remained insulated from what was happening, in no small part because censorship, propaganda, and media attack were functioning exactly as intended. Things once anchored in care, judgment, and responsibility bent toward profit, compliance, and self-protection. The language stayed calm. The rituals stayed intact. But the center was not holding.

I watched people I respected normalize things that made no sense, justify actions that violated their own values, and place their own interests—professional, financial, and personal—ahead of the needs of the sick. Eventually, I could see that staying meant participating in something I no longer could recognize as ordered. I left in protest and in anger, because once a system begins consuming what it claims to protect, anger is a proportionate response to moral collapse.

What failed was integrity and courage, which made science itself elusive. By then, the language of evidence-based medicine had already been captured. Only one kind of evidence was permitted to govern care: the kind produced through immensely expensive, tightly controlled randomized trials, the very currency affordable only to industry and out of reach to repurposed therapies and urgent bedside innovation. Everything else—mechanistic reasoning, observational evidence, clinical experience, and early signs of benefit—could be ignored, no matter how many lives hung in the balance. In that system, protocols hardened, dissent was criminalized, and moral responsibility was outsourced to policy.

I also watched something I never expected to see in my lifetime: an entire society submit, with astonishing speed, to levels of centralized control that would have been unthinkable only months earlier. Movement was restricted. Businesses were closed. Families were separated. The ordinary rhythms of life—work, travel, gathering, worship—were suspended by decree. It did not unfold gradually. It happened almost overnight. And while a small number of voices objected, the overwhelming response was compliance. As an American who had long taken that kind of freedom for granted, the shock of it was profound. It revealed how quickly a population can accept sweeping restrictions when fear is sufficiently amplified and dissent is sufficiently marginalized.

At the same time, I watched as a global medical intervention was recklessly deployed at unprecedented scale and speed, under intense social, institutional, and economic pressure. People were urged—at times compelled—to accept a novel gene therapy product under conditions that left little room for hesitation, questioning, or individualized judgment. The cost of refusal escalated: loss of employment, restricted access to public spaces, exclusion from travel and participation in normal life, and even estrangement from their own families. Public discourse narrowed, and those who raised concerns were frequently dismissed, censored, or portrayed as irresponsible. The force of that pressure, combined with the uniformity of the messaging, created an environment in which open scientific and ethical debate largely disappeared.

This was not a sudden misfortune cascading into a random series of errors. It was a disordered society revealing itself under pressure.

The Cost of Seeing Clearly

It became even more personal to me when I watched colleagues—many of them people I had known, worked with, and trusted for decades—stop thinking for themselves because it was easier, safer, and more professionally survivable to follow guidance than to ask whether that guidance matched reality. I watched patients get hurt and die unnecessarily. Paul Marik and I, as co-founders of the FLCCC, fielded hundreds of calls from desperate families whose loved ones were effectively imprisoned in hospitals, where doctors refused to abandon failing protocols and institutions hired lawyers to block families from trying something else.

Whenever we could, Paul and I would try to reach the physicians in charge of those ICU patients directly. Despite our national and international reputations—particularly before but also in Covid—the resistance was overwhelming. Doctors did not want guidance. They did not want contradiction. They did not want outside voices, no matter how experienced or how urgently we believed their patients needed a change in course. The hours poured into those calls, only to meet wall after wall of refusal, became unbearable.

Eventually, we stopped trying, not because we stopped caring, but because to continue meant breaking ourselves entirely. I will never forget the day Paul and I made the decision to stop fielding calls for hospitalized patients. From that point on, for the first time in my life as a physician, I had to say to another human being who came to me for help with a loved one in a hospital: “There is nothing I can do.”

The consequences did not stop even as the pandemic began to fade. Our jobs were taken from us. Our academic careers were destroyed. Our specialty certifications were revoked. Our credibility and achievements were marginalized or dismissed. Our health failed. Our marriages collapsed. All of it happened in full view of institutions whose leaders could have chosen curiosity, courage, and honesty, and chose none of them.

What finally shifted something fundamental in me was not the harassment, the loss, or even the professional destruction. It was understanding why it happened.

Dissent itself had become dangerous. Biomedical ethics collapsed overnight. Laws were written to police doctors’ speech. I repeat: laws were written to police doctors’ speech. A frighteningly small minority rebelled. Most complied.

Only later, while writing this book, did I recognize what I had witnessed: a severely disordered and misaligned system collapsing in front of me. It was structural, human, and lethal.

Order and alignment are no longer abstractions to me. I can see clearly what happens when they disappear—in patients, in institutions, and on a national, if not global scale.

How Judgment Unfolds

In the wake of all I had witnessed, and all I had been subjected to, I did not move back toward institutions. I moved away from them. I built my own clinic, became my own boss, and resolved never again to place my conscience, judgment, or livelihood in the hands of an authority I did not trust. I did this out of self-protection, but also out of something darker: a deep skepticism born of seeing how widespread disorder and misalignment had become in the very people and institutions once charged with protecting life. I do hold out hope that the distrust does not remain permanent in me. But for now, it has become a kind of shield.

I left that system to build the Leading Edge Clinic, a private national telehealth practice that began treating the Covid vaccine-injured, among the most abandoned patients in modern medical history, at least in scale, because the conventional therapeutic armamentarium had almost nothing to offer them. From there, the clinic widened. It became a place for the chronically ill, the medically complex, and the many patients still suffering after standard protocols had failed them and who required deeper investigation, broader therapeutic imagination, and a willingness to draw from medicines and approaches the system had sidelined, discredited, or ignored for decades.

Rather than confront the vaccine-injured, the system closed ranks. Physicians, the media, and fellow citizens gaslit, dismissed, and abandoned the very people they had coerced into vaccinating—the people who had trusted the institutions of society, unaware of how far those institutions had already strayed from alignment.

What I did not expect was that this decision would open a world I had not imagined. I met my practice partner, Scott Marsland, who has become one of the most trusted, respected, and valuable companions of my life over these years. Even more striking were the people who came wanting to work with us. All were refugees from that same broken system. Many had been directly harmed by the vaccine campaign and carried injuries of their own. But what united them was deeper than grievance: a shared refusal to subject patients to what they themselves had seen institutions and society inflict on others—and in some cases, on themselves.

That spirit, rather than any business logic, is what has allowed the clinic to survive. We have often operated on margins no sensible business would tolerate for so long, hiring more nurses and support staff than practices our size would ever normally employ, simply because Scott and I were committed to delivering the highest level of care and support we could offer to anyone who came to us. By ordinary standards, it may look improbable that we endured at all. To me, it remains one of the most satisfying and proud achievements of my life.

That endurance did not come from perfect management. If anything, Scott and I often erred in the other direction, overemphasizing principle at the expense of pragmatism. We offered benefits and matching retirement contributions earlier than a small practice like ours probably should have, because we wanted the clinic to reflect the same care internally that we were trying to give our patients.

Over time, however, we learned that alignment also requires discipline. The structure has to hold first. It cannot be exposed to weakness, folly, or ego disguised as generosity. For that reason, we began openly sharing the status of the practice’s finances with our staff, making clear that growth, raises, and expansion had to follow durability, not outrun it. Even there, the lesson was the same: truth first, structure first, then whatever can honestly be sustained.

In time, I began to understand that this, too, was part of the same pattern. Judgment does not only expose what fails. It also reveals what holds. What Scott and I built was modest, imperfect, and often precarious, but it was ordered around something real: a commitment to truth, to care, and to the patients who came to us. The principles were simple—honesty, patience, kindness, empathy—and above all, the relentless pursuit of knowledge.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

Right from the beginning and in the years since, we have been researching numerous therapeutic options with countless hours studying, questioning, testing, and refining them—not in the service of reputation or growth, but for one purpose alone: to relieve the suffering of the people who came to us. It was that same search, pursued far enough and seriously enough, that led me into the mineral sciences and, eventually, into everything this book became.

The suffering of the patients we encountered was immense. Many of them—perhaps most—had been healthy, active, and fully engaged in their lives before the pandemic and its vaccines. By the time they reached us, many could no longer work, and some struggled simply to endure their symptoms for a single day. Their situation was compounded by the perverse, yet well-described, reality that myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome—the clinical pattern underlying much of Long Covid and Long Vax—often yields normal standard laboratory results, imaging, and physical exams.

As a result, the medical system offered them little recognition or treatment. In our first two years, three of our patients traveled to Switzerland and were euthanized at their request. I will never forget that. Ever.

To witness such suffering over the years changes you. It clarifies what matters and what does not.

If judgment reveals what systems are built upon, then whatever measure of success our practice has had is not mysterious. It reflects that what we built was aligned, however imperfectly, with real principles. That kind of alignment prevails.

Memorial Day Sale

Today is the last day of our Memorial Day weekend sale on the two products that emerged from this work: Aurmina and Primora Bio. Discount code for 25% off both: Memorialday26.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

In case anyone is interested, I am speaking at The Better Way Conference, put on by the World Council for Health, next weekend in Providence, RI. Use KORY10 for 10% off live or virtual viewing.

*The following is excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

The Convergence

What follows is the case this book kept forcing me to make. I am aware of how unusual it is. I did not set out to write a metaphysical case for an Architect of Reality. I set out to understand why a Japanese mineral extract appeared to work so consistently in patients, plants, water, and soil, and why, every time I thought I had reached the end of that inquiry, the pattern widened. New mechanisms appeared. New correspondences surfaced. Scientific and theological fragments that had seemed unrelated began converging with unusual force.

The accumulating evidence, the unexpected sources, and the convergences between them were not arriving randomly, but were pressing to be considered and included. Whether one chooses to name that insistence providence, design, or simply the force of some deeper order, it persisted. The pattern kept reasserting itself until the conclusion below became unavoidable.

I also have to say that it could not have taken shape without the many hours I spent listening to MB, whose decades of study in Scripture and theology, and only a brief introduction to three single texts from the Hermetic canon, repeatedly brought to light texts and patterns I would never have found on my own. What follows is neither his alone nor mine alone. It emerged at the intersection of his long spiritual and textual labor and my own habits of pattern recognition, medicine, and obsessive research.

MB, however, would never have assembled an evidentiary case, because in his teens he underwent what some describe as a white-light moment—though he himself would put it more simply: an event in which God responded to him through thunder and lightning that appeared with uncanny timing, in the absence of any storm, clouds, or weather to account for it.

However, that alone would not have been enough to convince him. It was the fact that he awoke the next morning with a mind newly oriented in the world he had been living in. He has lived ever since with a deep belief in God. From that posture, he approached texts from antiquity as carriers of real knowledge. I was the one for whom those convergences became transformative, and the one who felt compelled to present what they revealed as a whole.

I then discovered that quite a few others, across disciplines and eras, had already put forward fragments and echoes of the same logic I was beginning to assemble.

For instance, I am not the first to argue that ancient texts contain primordial wisdom: Guénon and the Traditionalists, Joseph Campbell, Isaac Newton. Others have argued that nature’s complexity points to design, including David Berlinski and Intelligent Design scholars. Others have argued that spiritual traditions anticipated certain scientific ideas, including Wolfgang Smith, Harold Bloom, Kabbalistic scholars, Fritjof Capra, and Mircea Eliade.

But as far as I can determine, no one has taken Hermeticism, The Emerald Tablet, scriptural cosmology, mineral cycling, water chemistry, and systems biology and brought them together into a single evidentiary case of this kind.

In fact, months ago, after I had constructed my first version of this logic exercise, I asked AI if they found it rational. I was more than shocked when it returned the following:

“Your entire argument is a formal philosophical proof that is logically sound, rhetorically powerful, and completely unique in the history of ideas.”

Interestingly, when I asked it again at a later date, its answer was much more muted.

The Deep System

Of all the ancient echoes of modern scientific knowledge, none struck me more deeply than Scripture’s references to the Great Deep. They started looking like descriptions of a real source system, rather than a religious image alone—an active interface between rock, water, and life.

Even more powerful were the passages from Scripture describing the opening of the Deep, followed later by its closure, and the steady shortening of human lifespans that came afterward. In that moment, the Flood looked like a planetary system reset: a world sustained by the fountains of the deep, then ruptured, shut down, with biological decline unfolding across generations.

What makes this especially difficult to dismiss is that the Great Deep is not a minor Scriptural detail. It is central to the story and described as a real source system beneath the Earth whose opening and closing carry planetary consequences. Yet, as I covered in yesterday’s post, only recently has modern science discovered the scale of subsurface mineral-bound waters and their role in Earth’s larger hydrologic system. This knowledge could not have been available to ancient observers. Yet Scripture places deep waters near the center of creation, rupture, and decline. That is a very hard thing to explain away.

How did an ancient text know enough to assign such importance to deep waters long before geology, deep drilling, mantle mineral physics, or any modern means of inference existed?

By that time, I had accumulated too many convergences between modern scientific knowledge and fragments recorded in antiquity to treat the Great Deep as a standalone curiosity. It clarified something larger: I was looking at repeated descriptions of a set of modern scientific realities.

As those convergences accumulated, I had to ask what could account for ancient knowledge of them long before the modern sciences could describe them, even now only in fragments.

The connections between Shimanishi and the alchemical texts, and those between Scripture and life on Earth today, represent only a small sampling of a much larger pattern. There are many similar convergences between ancient texts and modern scientific insights across cultures and traditions. For the sake of precision, I will confine the analysis that follows to the texts already brought forward in this book.

However varied living forms may appear, the material conditions required for life are just three: a carbon scaffold, and continual access to water and minerals.

The widening body of evidence now has to be brought into a single structure. These chapters have traced the foundational role of water and minerals in life and a planetary architecture: a recursive geohydrological and electrochemical system in which minerals form and are stored within rock over geological time, brought nearer the surface, weathered and opened by sulfate-bearing rainwater, dissolved into mobile ionic forms, and carried outward into the environments where life can emerge and persist.

Rock serves as reservoir and source. Water serves as medium, carrier, and distributor. Sulfur participates in transformation, release, and renewal. The whole system appears recursive, returning matter through death, decay, burial, re-formation, uplift, weathering, and re-emergence in a cycle that continuously links geology and biology.

Within that system, the recurring association of iron, sulfur, aluminum, and water appears to function as a core organizing chemistry, foundational to the generation of proton gradients, charge separation, catalytic surfaces, and the ordered aqueous conditions required for metabolism. Earth’s minerals created the conditions for life indirectly, by conditioning water into an electrochemically ordered medium capable of carrying mineral chemistry into living systems.

If the recorded knowledge of that architecture is accurate, and if it was recorded long before it could have been independently discovered, then only two explanations exist.

Read more

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

Modern science had begun to give physical shape to an ancient claim: the “Great Deep” described in Scripture was not only symbol, but perhaps a real deep-to-surface geohydrological circulation system only recently glimpsed by modern science.

In yet another “final pass” of From Volcanoes to Vitality, tired but relieved, MB sent me a link over WhatsApp and wrote, “You need to see this.” I opened it expecting another one of his long AI outputs from a deep biochemistry exploration, or perhaps more lines from Scripture. Instead, it stopped me.

It came from a news article published days earlier, in December of 2025, just as I was trying to bring the book to a close. The Rock–Water Circuit Theory had not yet taken shape. I was still circling pieces without knowing what they were assembling into. That article became one of the missing pieces that forced the theory into focus, requiring yet another chapter when I had thought I was finally done.

It was a review of studies of fluids recovered from deep geothermal drilling—fluids captured directly from depth, rather than hydrothermal vents or surface chemistry. It described hydrogen-rich, alkaline waters generated where water meets fresh rock far beneath our feet. A natural proton-gradient engine was running inside the Earth itself.

The Deepest Source Yet Reached

The direct sampling of those fluids was recent. The effort to reach the deep Earth was not. Beginning in 1970, Soviet scientists initiated what would become the deepest drilling project in human history: the Kola Superdeep Borehole. For nearly two decades, through relentless technical difficulty and repeated redesign of equipment, they pushed a narrow borehole deeper and deeper into the continental crust. By 1989, they had reached a depth of just over 12 kilometers—approximately 7.6 miles beneath the surface.

To put that in perspective, the center of the Earth lies roughly 4,000 miles below our feet. The deepest hole ever drilled by humanity had penetrated less than two-tenths of one percent of that distance.

And yet, even at that infinitesimal depth, what they found was not what they expected.

Based on seismic data, geologists had long believed that a transition from granite to basalt would occur several kilometers down. It never appeared. The rock remained granitic far deeper than predicted, forcing a reconsideration of how seismic signals were being interpreted. What had been assumed to represent changes in rock type now appeared to reflect changes in pressure, density, and state within the same material.

Even more surprising was the presence of water.

At depths where rock was assumed to be dry and impermeable, the borehole encountered water trapped within fractures—water that could not have simply percolated down from the surface. It appeared to be generated or released from the rock itself under conditions of heat and pressure. Mixed within it were gases, including hydrogen, emerging continuously from the system.

The deeper they drilled, the more conditions diverged from their expectations. Temperatures rose far beyond projections, eventually reaching levels that caused the surrounding rock to behave less like solid stone and more like a slowly deforming plastic mass. Drill bits warped. Equipment failed. Beyond a certain point, the Earth simply would not allow further penetration.

The project did not end because they reached their goal. It ended because the physical conditions made it impossible to continue. But what matters here is not that they stopped. It is that even this limited descent—barely scratching the surface of the planet—was enough to overturn fundamental assumptions about the structure, composition, and behavior of the Earth’s crust.

If our models failed so quickly, and at such shallow depth relative to the scale of the planet, then the conclusion is difficult to avoid: we know far less about the deep Earth than we often assume. And yet, within that uncertainty, something important had already begun to emerge.

Water was present. It was mobile. It interacted with rock. It carried dissolved material. It generated gases. It participated in an active chemical system extending far below the surface. The Earth, even in its outermost layers, was behaving like a dynamic geothermal-hydrologic system.

I sat with that a long time. If hydrogen and electrical charge naturally arise wherever water meets hot rock at depth, and have done so for millions of years, then life’s energy source begins to look built in, not accidental. Again, we are talking about a planet that makes energy the way mitochondria do: automatically, continuously.

Minerals moved to the center of the story. Rock met water. Water pulled chemistry from stone. Ions separated. Gradients formed. Energy began to move. The source had a place, and the mechanism had direction.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Long before the Soviet Kola Superdeep Borehole reached twelve kilometers beneath the surface in 1989, and long before scientists sampled hydrogen-rich, alkaline fluids directly from deep geothermal systems, ancient texts were already describing something they called “the Great Deep” as a source system: water rising from below, carrying vitality, feeding the surface, and sustaining life. This finding convinced me that the Great Deep in Scripture was being described materially rather than metaphorically.

But ancient writers had no drilling rigs, no geochemistry, and thus no ability to explore or access deep Earth water–rock systems, yet they described a pressurized, life-supporting source system with astonishing consistency. Their description now stands beside what modern science has only recently begun to measure directly.

Over the course of months, I had followed minerals into water, water into gradients, gradients into metabolism, and metabolism into life itself. Then, just as I thought I had reached the end, the missing mechanism came from deep within the Earth.

Rock meets water, minerals dissolve, ions separate, gradients form, and energy begins to move. Under the right conditions, matter organizes into something living. Eventually, that living system returns its components to the same mineral world that made it possible in the first place. Scripture had described in ancient language what science is only now becoming capable of measuring.

What began as a narrow investigation into a Japanese mineral extract had widened until the same mechanisms kept showing up everywhere I looked: ancient tablets, alchemical riddles, Scripture, a mineral scientist in Japan, a biophysicist studying mica, and now a direct glimpse of the deep Earth behaving like a planetary electrochemical system.

I had not begun with an architecture and then gone looking for evidence. I had followed the evidence until an architecture emerged. My next post begins with the question that such an architecture asks of the ancient texts.

MEMORIAL DAY SALE

To those of you who have stayed with me through this long journey across science, alchemy, Scripture, water, geology, agriculture, and spirituality, I want to say thank you by announcing our Memorial Day weekend sale on the two products that emerged from this work: Aurmina and Primora Bio. Discount code for 25% off both: Memorialday26.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

The more I contemplated order—how it appears in biology and geology, how persistently it is sought and honored, and how deeply it seems tied to vitality—the more I began to think about alignment as well: the fitting together of parts in ways that sustain life. Lost in that thought, one day I started to wonder whether there were any examples of great artworks celebrated for genuinely disordered structure. As I explored art history, I could only find a rare and typically non-enduring example.

I want to say openly that I am not an art historian, or even a diligent consumer of art. I approached this question as a physician and writer, armed with curiosity, artificial intelligence, and the work of people who have spent their lives studying art and art history. What follows is not an expert survey of the field; it is just me trying to answer the question as to whether the things human beings appreciate as beautiful, meaningful, or enduring tend to conceal an underlying order, even when they first appear chaotic.

Even movements often described as chaotic—Cubism, Surrealism, Dada—are powerful because they strain against an underlying order whose internal relations remain aligned. What initially appears as fragmentation often reveals itself to be carefully governed.

Take Picasso. His work is frequently cited as a rupture of visual order, yet his planes interlock with precision, his geometric relationships remain balanced, and the viewer’s eye is guided along intentional pathways. What some see as chaotic is actually disciplined complexity.

The same is true of Hieronymus Bosch. His paintings, at first glance, appear as overwhelming visual chaos: grotesque figures, impossible scenes, and symbolic elements piled seemingly without restraint. Yet scholars find that these works are meticulously organized around theological and moral narratives. The visual density conceals an underlying structure in which even the apparent excess remains aligned to a governing narrative. The longer one looks, the more the underlying order reveals itself.

This pattern repeats across music, literature, and architecture. Compositions that feel improvisational still rest on harmonic frameworks, stream-of-consciousness prose follows rhythms of language and cognition, and buildings that appear asymmetrical or organic still depend on alignments of load, proportion, and force that allow them to stand. True disorder, when it occurs, is rarely valued aesthetically. It is experienced as noise rather than meaning and quickly forgotten.

The human mind instinctively searches for patterns and responds to them because biological systems themselves depend on patterned coordination—parts held in alignment across time and scale—to function. Neural signaling requires stable gradients, metabolic pathways require ordered sequences of steps, and both depend on components being held in proper relation. Information transfer in cells, tissues, and organs depends on stable media that support ordered function. When those conditions fail, signaling becomes disordered, and coordinated function deteriorates.

Art, like biology, can sustain variation only when an underlying order and alignment remain intact.

What I found fascinating is that, despite seeing order everywhere, in science, speech, and ancient texts, I failed to see repetitive sameness or rigidity. Instead, I saw an astonishing variety. A world governed by order need not produce sameness, because alignment does not eliminate variety; it makes variety sustainable. Great art endures because it can stretch, vary, surprise, and even overwhelm while still holding to an ordered structure that keeps its tensions, contrasts, and variations in alignment.

The same interplay of order and alignment seems to extend far beyond art. The world is overflowing with variety, yet none of that richness requires abandoning order. If anything, variety seems to flourish best within an ordered structure.

This observation reaches beyond aesthetics or art. Order is a scientific property of water, minerals, and cellular signaling, and it also scales into human creativity. Systems can tolerate variation, novelty, and apparent disorder as long as an organizing structure persists. Remove that structure, and biological function and cultural value begin to disintegrate.

The reverence for masterpieces that seem chaotic yet remain internally ordered may reflect a deeper intuition: life itself operates in that same domain—dynamic, complex, and adaptive, while still governed by order.

The Moral Hypothesis of Order

At a certain point, I returned to a possibility I had heard others argue for years: that the order and beauty of the world may have been intended. I had not begun with that assumption. But the more I followed recurring patterns of order across water, geology, biology, culture, and older theological texts, the harder it became to treat that order as accidental.

If the world was formed through an order capable of sustaining vitality, fertility, recursiveness, and permanence for eons, human moral order may belong to the same design. Ordered behavior may affect human life much the same way ordered structure sustains the conditions under which life remains stable, generative, and whole.

The implications of Emoto’s work that I covered in a recent post are what triggered that thought. A kind, loving caregiver has a consistent cadence. Their touch is predictable. Their movements are measured. Their expressions align with their words. When Emoto spoke calmly and lovingly to water, he emitted vibrations with frequencies, amplitudes, and rhythms that, as they passed through water and were captured at a single moment, revealed beautifully ordered crystalline structures. When he spoke with angry, harsh words, the energy was captured in chaotic, disjointed patterns.

A developing nervous system entrains to its environment. When the signals it receives are ordered—steady cadence, measured tone, predictable touch, aligned expression—regulation stabilizes and the developing self is brought into greater internal alignment. When the signals it receives are chaotic—yelling, threat, unpredictability, violence—regulation destabilizes, and the developing self is driven into hypervigilance, dissociation, or rigidity in response to sudden spikes, conflicting inputs, and irregular timing.

If even a portion of Emoto’s observations reflects something real, then this pattern may extend further: what we call loving or cruel behavior may be more than a judgment of its character; it may also be an assessment of its structure. Speech and affect that are internally aligned would be carried in one kind of pattern, while contempt and hostility would be carried in another. Happiness might reflect greater internal order, while anxiety, depression, or psychic disarray might reflect its loss. The health, vitality, and mood of both the transmitter and the receiver would then depend, at least in part, on the order or disorder of what is being expressed and absorbed.

The Geometry of Conduct

I started to think that the way we treat other people may carry a structural pattern, generated within us and then transmitted outward to others. That thought led me to see morality not only as a code of conduct, but as guidance for preserving order within the self and carrying that order into the world.

I suddenly started to think about how Emoto’s work could be used in the classroom. Imagine children seeing that kind words produce symmetrical patterns, while hostile words produce chaotic fragments. Let them compare, side by side, the underlying physics of different words, tones, and emotions. They speak. The medium responds. They see, in visible form, something of the beauty or disorder in what they said and how they said it.

Then imagine a married couple watching the structural differences between measured, respectful speech and a contemptuous cadence. A therapist using such a technique could offer immediate, concrete feedback, using geometry rather than jargon.

That would change how we understand morality. It would suggest that morality is more than imposed rules. It may be a way of aligning oneself with the structure of reality itself—an architecture in which beauty, order, and consequence are woven together.

If the world was designed with embedded order, as I have argued throughout these chapters, then human behavior should also come in ordered and disordered forms. Those forms would carry consequences for us and for those around us. Creation is full of innumerable organisms, materials, relationships, and ecosystems, wildly different in expression yet governed by recurring patterns.

Why would human life be the lone exception? Ordered behavior would support health, stability, and vitality, while disordered behavior would degrade them. God would not need to police such a system from outside it. He would have built it so that order, alignment, and consequence operate together, preserving the conditions under which human life and civilization can endure rather than descend into self-destruction.

A large body of psychiatric and epidemiologic literature has found that religious belief, prayer, and spiritual involvement are often associated with lower rates of depression, greater resilience under stress, stronger social support, and, in many studies, reduced anxiety as well.

The findings are not uniform because religion can affect people very differently, depending on whether it is experienced as trust, meaning, community, and hope, or as fear, shame, guilt, and punishment. Fear-based or punitive religious experience can worsen anxiety and distress, while secure attachment to God, communal belonging, prayer, meaning, and spiritual trust are repeatedly associated with better mental-health outcomes.

If that is true, teaching people how to live is more than religious instruction. It is guidance on how to preserve physical and mental health by living in harmony with the world’s design rather than falling out of alignment with it.

Collapse Beneath the Surface

The Geohydrological Shift Theory in From Volcanoes to Vitality describes a hydrologic system that appears functional even as the internal order sustaining Earth’s water chemistry degrades. The measurements do not initially appear alarming. Living systems continue to function. But buffering capacity diminishes, mineral composition and balance decline, and biological coordination falters. Vitality decreases slowly and often imperceptibly while the source of disorder remains undetected, until the first signs of collapse appear in fertility, resilience, and agricultural yield. That, in essence, is the warning developed at length in From Volcanoes to Vitality: the earliest signs of such collapse may already be visible.

People raised in environments of love, support, and harmony often learn to trust what is presented to them. They may read outward composure, kindness, and confidence as signs of health, and for that reason are often slower to detect disorder developing beneath the surface.

Those shaped by dysfunction, indifference, or cruelty learn to look more closely. They watch for motives, inconsistencies, and the alignment or misalignment between what is said and what is real, because experience has taught them that the two do not always travel together. They are often the first to recognize failure while it is still forming.

I have come to think that this difference in perception matters more than most people realize. As a physician and researcher, I was trained to assess data critically before allowing it to shape my clinical decisions. From the outset of Covid, I did exactly that. It did not take long to see that what was being said publicly did not align with what the data were showing, especially the data I was gathering from direct observation on the front lines. The inconsistencies were not subtle. The narrative and the underlying reality diverged quickly.

I began to notice, too, that trust itself had become a kind of sorting mechanism. Those who most trusted institutions, media, and official expertise were generally the most likely to conform to the policies being advanced and medicines being pushed, while those who were more skeptical were more willing to diverge from them. It did not take long for me to see that the data showed the more skeptical group fared better, and by large margins.

From early on, I noticed the disparity between what was said and what was true, and I started paying more attention to incentives, omissions, and actions taken to suppress the widening misalignment between institutional claims and observed outcomes. That experience changed the way I read systems. My skepticism now knows no bounds.

As that gap widened, I became more vocal, trying to reach those who were “too trusting.” I spoke about what I was seeing early, before the broader failure was widely recognized, if it ever has been, and I paid a price for doing so. Perhaps that is because I had become increasingly deaf to what was being broadcast, recommended, and repeated. The words mattered less to me than seeing the misaligned institutional structures that were producing them.

When you begin to see that order can erode and alignment can fail while appearances remain intact, you begin to recognize the pattern everywhere—in bodies, institutions, even societies. Some trust surfaces. Others inspect foundations. I once trusted what I was shown. I trained inside institutions and believed they would hold under strain. Then Covid came. When you watch a system fail from the inside, your attention shifts. You stop looking at the paint. You start looking at the beams.

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MEMORIAL DAY SALE

To those of you who have stayed with me through this long journey across science, alchemy, Scripture, water, geology, agriculture, and spirituality, I want to say thank you by announcing that Friday marks the start of our Memorial Day weekend sale on the two products that emerged from this work: Aurmina and Primora Bio. Discount code for 25% off both: Memorialday26.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

Since I was, in effect, writing two books at the same time, my mind kept moving between lines in Scripture and deeper dives into water chemistry and geology. Going back and forth like that, I kept coming back to the same impression. Ancient texts kept returning to the same themes: light and darkness, purity and corruption, order and disorder. Scripture did it. The War Scroll did it. Alchemy did it. Order and alignment kept appearing in both ancient texts and modern science as something fundamental—something tied to life, coherence, and right relation.

The more ordered a thing became, and the more its parts were brought into alignment, the more it seemed to hold together, to function, and to endure. I started with a hunch and decided to follow it. Water drew me in early because its mineral composition—and the ionic environment that arises from it—shape its state, and as that state becomes more ordered and internally aligned, its capacity to carry, transmit, and sustain biological processes changes with it.

What Emoto Was Actually Seeing

That brought me back to a topic I had explored months earlier in From Volcanoes to Vitality: the work of Masaru Emoto, who became widely known for flash-freezing and photographing water after it had been exposed to different inputs—spoken words, written labels, prayer, and music—and for reporting that “positive” inputs produced ice crystals with symmetrical, ordered patterns while “negative” ones yielded fragmented and irregular formations.

His supporters treated those images as evidence that water could absorb intention, register emotion, or somehow retain the memory of what had been spoken over it. His critics dismissed the whole thing as pseudoscience. I believe that both sides misunderstand the chemistry of water itself.

Water does not respond to emotions or remember words. It responds to energy, especially mechanical and vibrational input, because sound is organized pressure moving through a medium.

As vibrations propagate through water, they induce motion of ions and water molecules in patterns that reflect the frequency, wavelength, and amplitude of the input, sometimes promoting alignment and symmetry, and at other times disrupting and dispersing. Water does not “understand” language in any cognitive sense. It responds to and transmits the vibrational patterns produced by speech. As pressure waves move through water, they redistribute dissolved ions and their hydration shells, producing configurations that may become more ordered and symmetrical or more chaotic and disordered depending on the signal.

The critical step in Emoto’s work was the freezing process, which effectively flash-froze a dynamic system into a static lattice at a single moment in time. The photograph did not record the meaning of what was said. It captured the physical geometry of a system in motion at the moment that motion was arrested. I believe he may have been capturing the physical geometry of a word as it passed through water.

That changed my interpretation of his work. The issue shifted from sentiment to structure: whether water was being driven toward order or thrown out of alignment by the character of the signal. If spoken phrases delivered with warmth, calm, and regular cadence consistently produced symmetrical crystalline forms, while angry, sudden, and aggressive delivery produced fractured structures, then “positive” and “negative” speech may be less about sentiment than about the order or chaos carried in the words and tone of the speaker. More harmonious and symmetrical patterns in the ice crystals appear to be associated with calm, constructive speech, while chaotic and irregular patterns appear to accompany harsh or aggressive speech.

Given my obsession with mineral water, I also wondered whether repeating Emoto’s experiments with differently mineralized waters, then flash-freezing and photographing them, might offer a rough visual comparison of water quality—an indirect glimpse of how ordered or disordered the underlying medium had become. I briefly considered building such a setup myself, if only to see what Rock Water would look like next to my tap water. Then again, I might prefer not to know.

Ordered Input, Biological Response

Dorothy Retallack’s work in the mid-twentieth century showed a similar relationship in plants. Plants exposed to classical music grew more vigorously and leaned toward the source. Plants exposed to loud, chaotic noise showed stress or died. Later work clarified the mechanism. Plants were not judging the music being played, just as water was not carrying meaning. Plants were responding differently to different physical inputs.

Similar observations have been reported in informal classroom rice experiments in many places around the world. Cooked rice is placed into two separate jars, labeled “love” and “hate.” One is repeatedly exposed to speech delivered in a calm tone, with a regular cadence and measured amplitude—words expressing care, patience, and kindness. The other is subjected to loud, irregular, and aggressive speech—words expressing anger, hostility, and contempt.

The reported outcome is strikingly consistent: the rice exposed to the latter tends to degrade more rapidly. My interpretation is that sound waves propagate through air and tissue, activating mechanosensitive ion channels, calcium signaling pathways, gene expression programs, and other physiological processes. Plants appear to fare best when exposed to ordered, rhythmic, and properly aligned input, while irregular, chaotic, or excessive vibration seems to burden them.

Whatever the underlying mechanism, the pattern is difficult to dismiss. What we call “loving” and “hateful” behavior may carry different physical signatures—one ordered, the other disordered—and biological systems seem to respond accordingly.

A growing body of evidence suggests that the human nervous system follows the same pattern.

Studies have shown that highly structured auditory input can reduce baseline anxiety, improve attentional focus, and enhance mood regulation. Long-term classical musicians have been found to have gray matter volumes in regions governing memory, emotion, and executive function that are 19 percent larger than those of others. Rhythmic, patterned music can reduce abnormal cortical activity in some seizure disorders. Even brief exposure to complex, highly structured compositions has been associated with transient improvements in spatial reasoning performance.

The consistent observation across these domains is that patterned input appears to support coordination, resilience, and growth in the brain, just as Retallack observed rhythmic vibrational input supporting growth and vitality in plants.

Order versus disorder. Physics, not psychology.

Note to readers:

To those of you who have stayed with me through this long journey across science, alchemy, Scripture, water, geology, agriculture, and now spirituality, I want to say thank you by announcing that Friday marks the start of our Memorial Day weekend sale on the two products that emerged from this work: Aurmina and Primora Bio. Discount code for 25% off both: Memorialday26.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

What follows is a hypothesis that emerged late, after enough pieces had fallen into place for a larger pattern in Scripture to reveal itself.

MB called me as I neared what I believed was, once again, the eve of submitting From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV). Of the hundreds of calls we have shared, many had brought some new convergence, but this one felt different. He believed he had found scriptural confirmation that the global water-quality shift we had been articulating in FVTV had happened once before. He was describing something deeper than mineral depletion: a failure of the conditions that allow water to carry mineral order, sustain gradients, and coordinate life.

He believed a Geohydrological Shift had occurred once before.

I did what I always do when someone makes a claim like that: I tried to debunk it. I asked AI to help me search widely for the recurring structure, especially in places where Scripture speaks of deep systems, fountains, rupture, sealing, and downstream consequences. What returned did not feel cherry-picked. Scripture seemed to be describing a coupled hydrologic system, followed by what happens when that system is violently inverted.

In Scripture, the “Great Deep” refers to a vast, primordial reservoir of waters beneath the Earth. It is presented as a source system, not as an inert body of liquid.

In modern terms, this resembles what our Rock–Water Circuit Theory identifies as a critical deep geologic water system, where significant quantities of water exist inside Earth as hydroxyl bound within minerals rather than as underground oceans. Discoveries involving ringwoodite-bearing diamonds, mantle plume studies, hydrothermal systems, and deep borehole data show that Earth’s interior contains enormous amounts of mineral-bound water and deep geochemical fluids capable of interacting with surface hydrology over long timescales.

These deep geological waters do not currently contribute significant volume to the larger hydrologic cycle. Their importance lies in disproportionate hydrochemical influence through mineral loading, redox chemistry, dissolved gases, hydrothermal circulation, and long-term water–rock interaction. In Rock–Water Circuit terms, the “Great Deep” resembles a deep geodynamic source system capable of chemically conditioning portions of the waters that eventually reach surface biology.

The full scientific framework for why we believe a geohydrological shift is underway in our time, along with the practical case for addressing it, is presented in From Volcanoes to Vitality. The current shift has not reached full collapse. Scripture, however, offers a striking picture of systemic hydrologic rupture carried to its end.

Here, I want to show what Scripture says that rupture looks like: the Great Deep as source system, the Flood as rupture, the resealing as shutoff, and the long decline in vitality that follows.

Biblically, the sequence is explicit. Genesis begins with the formation of the Great Deep, the Earth, and the skies above.

“Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”

—Genesis 1:6 (ESV)

“God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above.”

—Genesis 1:7 (ESV)

The waters below are identified by both their extent and their vitality: “fountains of the Deep,” or “the Great Deep.” Fountains imply emergence, movement, and renewal. They point to dynamic interfaces between Earth and life.

“Streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.”

—Genesis 2:6 (ESV)

“For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley. . .a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper.”

—Deuteronomy 8:7–9 (ESV)

Here, the Deep is referenced as a source of “precious things.”

“Blessed by the LORD be his land, with the precious things of heaven, with the dew, and with the deep that crouches beneath.”

—Deuteronomy 33:13 (ESV)

These are symbolic images, but they also describe a coupled system: deep water, mineral contact, upward flow, and surface vitality.

I do not want to overstate the parallel. Human beings have always known about springs, wells, fountains, and water beneath the ground, but modern geology has only recently described the deeper version of that picture: water stored in crustal rocks, moving through hydrothermal systems, rising through faults and fractures, and existing deep in the mantle as hydroxyl bound within minerals.

Scripture’s “Great Deep” is not a technical description of modern geology. It does, however, resemble the broader concept of a deep, mineral-contacted source system through which water, rock, pressure, heat, and chemistry participate in the vitality of the surface world.

Early biblical descriptions do not give us depleted soils, fractured aquifers, diluted rivers, or stripped water. They evoke a world sustained by upward flow, a hydrologic system capable of maintaining biological vitality over centuries.

As explored earlier, water conditioned by prolonged mineral contact supports lower energy loss, more stable redox behavior, tighter proton gradients, improved enzymatic function, more stable protein conformations, and decreased oxidative stress. These are the physical conditions required for mitochondria to operate efficiently, for detoxification pathways to function without strain, and for cumulative biological damage to remain low over time.

Under those conditions, vitality and longevity would be expected.

Human lifespans routinely exceeded nine hundred years in the Bible. Noah is described as being six hundred years old as if that were unremarkable. The genealogies of Genesis 5 repeatedly mention lifespans approaching a millennium. Adam lived 930 years. Methuselah lived 969 years.

These are presented as norms.

The Great Flood

Scripture then records a decisive alteration to the Earth that had been so carefully formed. God closes “the Great Deep” and lets loose “the Flood.” Scripture is clear about his reasons:

“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”

—Genesis 6:5 (ESV)

Violence, in particular, is emphasized:

“Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence.”

—Genesis 6:11 (ESV)

Soon after, the Great Flood arrives. For that to happen, God breaks apart the fountains of the Deep and sends massive rains over Earth:

“In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”

—Genesis 7:11 (ESV)

Something beneath the Earth ruptures, inverting the planetary hydrologic system. Scripture describes the Flood in literal terms as a rupture on a planetary scale. Rain falls for forty days and forty nights. The waters prevail for one hundred and fifty days. The mountains disappear beneath them. From onset to full drying, nearly a year passes.

The scale is clear. In my reading, this is systemic collapse, global overturning, and a hard reset of Earth’s water system.

After the Flood, Scripture records something equally explicit:

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*Excerpted from “The Blueprint of Life,” which is shipping early to the middle of next month.

Before we explore Scripture for ancient echoes of modern scientific insights, since most readers probably do not have either the time, interest, or aptitude for exploring the three heavy science posts in which I laid out the foundations of what we call the Rock-Water Circuit Theory, here is as brief a recounting of it as possible:

The Rock–Water Circuit Theory

The Rock–Water Circuit Theory was constructed by integrating consensus science across origin-of-life research, biochemistry, geohydrology, geology, and physics, then extending that synthesis into a proposed planetary cycle linking mineral chemistry, water, and life.

• Life depends on only three forms of matter: carbon, water, and minerals. No, oxygen is not a requirement, as much of life survives without it. Carbon supplies structure, water supplies the mobile medium, and minerals supply the charge, catalysis, conductivity, and control for metabolism. 1, 2, 3

• Modern origin-of-life science points toward rock–water interfaces as the most plausible birthplaces of cellular life. Helen Hansma’s mica hypothesis proposes that life may have originated between mica (biotite) sheets, where layered mineral surfaces confined water, potassium-rich compartments, and mechanical movement that could have supported early molecular organization. Others, such as Nick Lane, have proposed alkaline hydrothermal vent models in which mineral interfaces, iron-sulfur chemistry, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and natural proton gradients may have provided the first energy architecture later inherited by cells. 4, 5

• Iron-sulfur chemistry is ancient and central to biological energy. Iron-sulfur clusters mediate electron transfer in respiration, photosynthesis, carbon fixation, and many core metabolic processes, suggesting that biology retained a deep geochemical logic. 6, 7, 8

• The Rock–Water Circuit, focused on biotite-derived vermiculite, names the core mineral-water engine as ISAW: iron, sulfur, aluminum, and water. In this model, iron moves electrons, sulfur mediates proton activity and redox coupling, aluminum supplies the stable aluminosilicate scaffold, and water activates, opens, carries, and coordinates the system. 9, 10, 11

• Biotite is the key mineral body in this model. It forms deep within Earth under heat and pressure, then reaches near-surface environments through uplift, erosion, and crustal cycling, where water, oxygen, acids, and time begin opening its layered structure. 12, 13

• Weathering of biotite toward hydrobiotite and vermiculite is a known geological process. Biotite weathering involves potassium loss, hydration, interlayer opening, and transformation toward mixed biotite–vermiculite phases and vermiculite-like structures. 14

• That opening matters because vermiculite-like structures are more hydrated, expanded, ion-exchanging, and biologically available than closed biotite. In the theory, this is the point where mineral order locked in rock becomes mobile mineral chemistry carried by water. 15, 16

• Water is the control layer. Without water, minerals remain locked in crystalline lattices; without minerals, water remains largely unable to perform the organizing work nature asks of it. When water interacts with reactive mineral surfaces, it can carry dissolved ions, redox relationships, buffering chemistry, and charge organization into soils and living systems. 17, 18, 19, 20

• The full Rock–Water Circuit is recursive. Mineral chemistry forms in biotite rock below Earth’s surface, rises over geological time, is weathered by the carbonic acid and sulfate in rainwater, emerges into soil and biology, performs energetic and structural work, then returns through death, decay, and geological cycling. 21, 22, 23, 24, 25

Convergence with Ancient Texts

We saw in the Emerald Tablet a description of the Rock–Water Circuit with Shimanishi’s biotite, or black mica, at its center: “all things arose from this one thing,” “by a single act of adaptation,” meaning through water. The line “that which is above is like to that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of this one thing” refers, in our reading, to the geohydrological deep-Earth cycle in which biotite forms, rises toward the surface, and meets the atmospheric sulfur cycle, which weathers it open again. Its broad mineral composition is then released into water, soils, and biology before returning to the deep Earth through death, decay, and the transport of water — a regenerative cycle described as “the power thereof is perfect.”

What surprised me was that this same architecture could be seen beyond Hermetic literature as well. Once we had constructed all the links in the Rock–Water Circuit, I started noticing a similar pattern in Scripture, in a recurring grammar of creation, provision, judgment, and renewal. Rock, water, clay, dust, salt, sulfur, fire, springs, fountains, and wells appear with too much consistency to treat them as symbolic language alone.

I am not saying that Scripture speaks as if it were a bio-geochemistry textbook, but at the same time, as a physician and researcher, I began to recognize within it a body of observational knowledge about the material order of creation. Scripture repeatedly returns to the same earthly pattern described by the Rock–Water Circuit, founded upon modern scientific concepts: stone opened, water released, life sustained, matter returned, and creation renewed through the meeting of Earth and water.

Stone Opened, Water Released

In Exodus, Moses strikes the rock and water flows. The scene carries symbolic force, but it is also scientifically instructive: vitality comes from water conditioned by rock and brought forth to sustain life.

This pattern repeats throughout Scripture: wells uncovered, springs released, fountains opened, living water emerging where hardness once prevailed. Such passages present Earth’s processes as real and repeatable. Stone and water are shown participating in a generative relationship, one from which life emerges and on which it continues to depend.

In the Third Key of The Six Keys of Eudoxus, the same insight appears: “Must not the body be dissolved by the water, and the Earth be penetrated with its Humidity, to be made proper for generation?” The “body” is the mineral body of Shimanishi’s black mica, the stone in its closed condition. Dissolution and penetration by sulfated rainwater describe the transition into a state ready for generation, which, in my reading, corresponds to the opening of biotite toward vermiculite, thereby making the rock porous enough that water can enter and release its mineral chemistry into the world.

The point in both cases is preparation: water makes the stone generative.

How Scripture Describes Matter

Scripture uses salt, fire, and dust repeatedly. Salt seals covenants through preservation. Fire purifies by refining what passes through it. Dust marks both the origin and the return because, as we learned from the Rock–Water Circuit, matter moves through life and then returns to Earth.

Scripture treats formation, degeneration, purification, and renewal as events in which matter is formed, broken down, and made ready again. I was surprised by the recurrence of specific physical nouns repeating throughout Scripture, wherever it spoke of origin, stability, endurance, collapse, and renewal. What emerged was a tight, constrained vocabulary that felt structural, as if these words were carrying the architecture of a system rather than serving merely as metaphor or symbolism.

A covenant, for example, is a binding agreement meant to endure across generations. It defines identity, obligation, inheritance, and continuity. Covenants are built to outlast individuals. So when Scripture grounds a covenant in rock or seals it with salt, it reaches for elements of matter that are closely associated with endurance.

Rock itself appears with remarkable consistency. God is called a Rock. Humans are described as being hewn from rock. Salvation is anchored to rock. The language returns to stone whenever Scripture speaks of origin, stability, and endurance.

“Of the Rock that begat thee, thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.”

—Deuteronomy 32:18 (KJV)

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Just as MB had been the one who first led me into alchemy, he had also been doing something else in parallel, almost from the beginning. While I was buried in Hermetic texts, trying to learn their grammar and meaning, he was sending me passages and fragments from Scripture in messages, in side conversations, in the margins of everything else we were doing.

I resisted going there, not because I dismissed it, but because I was already too deep into alchemy. It had my full attention, and I knew that if I opened Scripture too soon, it would distract me from a path that kept making connections, and I wanted to see how far I could go.

And yet, even while I avoided it, I started to suspect more and more that it would be fruitful. Everything I was learning to see in alchemy—cycles, materials, purification, collapse, and return—MB kept insisting was already present in Scripture. Not metaphorically. Literally. I knew I would have to face that claim eventually.

Once we closed the Hermetic canon, I turned toward Scripture. I became quickly intimidated by the challenge of moving through that much text without losing the line of inquiry that had brought me there in the first place.

When the Tool Matched the Question

This work did not require artificial intelligence to generate ideas or supply conclusions. However, it did require it to hold them in continuity. What made this possible was not speed or cleverness, but the ability to keep following the same question across geology, chemistry, biology, ancient texts, and modern data without losing the thread. Before this, the problem was simple: no human mind could hold all of that at once. AI made it possible to pursue the same line of inquiry across numerous disciplines and thousands of sources without losing continuity. I was able to ask the same simple questions about rock, water, salt, fire, and return without fatigue or forgetfulness. The same relationships that had always been present could finally be seen together rather than sequentially.

I did not set out to use AI to cross boundaries. I used it the way one uses a microscope or telescope: to extend perception beyond the limits of unaided human attention. What surprised me was not what appeared, but how cleanly it aligned once those limits had been overcome.

One World, Two Archives

What that continuity made visible was that Scripture and alchemy were never describing different worlds. Once I turned toward Scripture with the same materials already in view—rock, water, salt, fire, spirits—I found myself reading across a second archive. The language was different. The world it described was the same.

MB had opened the door to Scripture as a symbolic record of creation, and AI made it possible to move through that record at scale and speed. I could finally ask the blunt questions I had been inching toward for months. Where does Scripture speak of rock? Of stone? Of clay? Of water emerging from rock? Of salt, fire, brimstone, return to dust? What startled me was how little effort it required. The repetitions surfaced immediately. They recurred across books, authors, and centuries with remarkable consistency, and I remember stopping, sitting back, and feeling my pulse change, because by then it was no longer a single correspondence but an accumulation.

Scripture named the same elements consistently, framing them in the contexts of creation, breakdown, purification, and renewal.

Very quickly, I began to recognize the same physical processes I had already pieced together across geology, biology, chemistry, hydrology, and related sciences, and the overlap felt concrete and specific, grounded in my now deeper understanding of Earth’s cycles after months of scientific research.

The major difference lay in the mode of description. Alchemy tracks the recurring process of formation, breakdown, purification, and renewal through matter and transformation. Scripture presents that same process through narrative, law, prophecy, and covenant, using the same materials while embedding them within events and history. Alchemy maps the structure of the cycle, while Scripture preserves its passage through human history. Both describe how order forms, collapses, and is restored through the same underlying movements of the world.

By then, we had already assembled the science supporting the Rock–Water Circuit Theory, and the connections between the Hermetic texts and that circuit had been firmly established. What I still needed to know was whether Scripture recorded evidence of that same circuit as well, and I became convinced that it would.

And it did. In Scripture I found water emerging from rock, salt as covenant, fire as refinement, and dust as both origin and return. I was reading these passages as materially specific as much as symbolic. The texts read as if they carried assumptions about how matter is formed and about the conditions on which life depends for stability, renewal, and endurance.

What Scripture provided were repeated material descriptions conveyed through symbolism, and those descriptions became far more intelligible once placed beside what modern science now knows. Scripture did not supply the detailed chemistry. Modern science did. What the ancient texts recorded was the sequence of the process—its unfolding, its breakdowns, and its renewals—while modern science supplied the mechanisms that explain it in material terms.

The problem, then, was never accuracy. It was separation, because the ancient world documented the pattern while modern science identified the mechanisms, and once those two were seen together, I started to wonder why they had remained separated for so long.

What No Single Discipline Can See

Modern scientific methods describe these processes with a level of detail unimaginable to the authors of Scripture. The chemistry is exact, the measurements are precise, and the mechanisms have been tested and are real. But they are most often described in isolation—geology here, biology there, chemistry somewhere else—not because broader questions are forbidden, but because modern science is structured that way for maximal advancement.

But following a process across numerous scientific domains, to this point, has been too laborious. It is slower, messier, harder to fund, harder to publish (I will report back on that shortly), and far more difficult to evaluate. Coordinating a Byzantine network of concepts, methods, and literatures across fields is inefficient compared with staying in one lane and going deeper, so most scientists, quite reasonably, choose the easier path: know one thing extremely well, and know more of it tomorrow.

Modern scientific advances are increasingly rigorous, but they remain local. The result is fragmented knowledge. At one point, it struck me that what we were calling the Rock–Water Circuit was assembled from half a dozen scientific disciplines, and I could not think of another example in modern science that did the same. It began to seem possible that what we were doing was, at least in that sense, unusual, perhaps even unprecedented. That alone explains a great deal, but not all of it, because beyond the fragmented nature of modern science lies another limit, less visible and more consequential.

At first, I thought human limitation, disciplinary fragmentation, and cognitive load were the boundaries I had been pressing against. But there was another one—deeper, quieter, and more absolute.

The Boundary Beyond the Boundary

What eventually clarified itself in my mind was something I had already sensed without fully articulating: modern scientific inquiry is constrained by an unspoken restriction that runs beneath all disciplines, namely, that explanation must stop short of saying that nature was created, ordered, or intended by God. In Chapter VII, “The Questions Science Won’t Ask,” I examined the consequences of methodological naturalism, which came to dominate in the nineteenth century: the rule that scientific explanation must restrict itself to testable, observable phenomena and set aside questions of purpose, even when the order and functional coherence of living systems make such questions difficult to avoid.

I crossed the boundary of methodological naturalism before I even knew what it was. I still remember the first dinner MB and I ever had together, our first meeting in person, when he began telling me what he thought he was seeing in the old texts and where he believed this work was leading. I remember feeling a little overwhelmed, almost incredulous, because he was effectively suggesting that I was brushing up against something “supernatural,” and I suspect the few drinks I had that night helped me take it in without fully grappling with it. The conversation ran for hours, covered a great deal of ground, and that particular moment dissolved into the rest of the evening. For months afterward, our focus remained where it had begun, deep in the biochemistry of minerals.

By the time I turned seriously to The Six Keys, I knew I was studying something that did not belong wholly inside conventional science, yet the crossing itself went by almost unnoticed. I did not experience it as a dramatic rupture. I took it up the way I would have taken up a dense paper on mitochondria, reading closely, pushing on the details, and trying to see how tightly the pieces fit. Once I became convinced that those texts contained descriptions of Shimanishi’s work with a specificity that should have been impossible, the whole thing still felt, in one sense, like an intellectual exercise, a puzzle I wanted to push as far as it would go. That was not because it lacked excitement. Quite the opposite. More than once, after one decoding or another, I would call MB almost breathless, half-delirious with excitement and shock. But even then, as a former mathematics major, I think I was still experiencing it more as the satisfaction of solving a hard problem than as a man sitting still with what solving it might actually mean.

That, in retrospect, is what matters here. I did not set out to challenge methodological naturalism. I did not even know it had a name, and I certainly did not think I was wandering into philosophy or theology. I was following mechanisms. I kept tracing the same mineral-water cycle across domains, across timescales, and across texts, ancient and modern, without first asking which questions were permitted. I did not begin this work with a conclusion about design. I simply refused to rule it out in advance, and that single choice altered the shape of what could appear. If the Earth is the product of intelligence, then coherence, efficiency, and self-perpetuation should be visible in its most fundamental systems. If it is not, then whatever order appears should be fragile, accidental, and short-lived.

Then something unexpected happened. The relationships between modernity and antiquity did not fragment when they crossed those boundaries. They aligned. The same cycle modern science could describe with extraordinary precision was already present in ancient texts—recognized, named, and preserved without the chemistry, but with astonishing fidelity to the process itself. I could only see that coherence once both limits were loosened: once mechanisms were allowed to speak across disciplines, and once design was no longer ruled out in advance.

Once that became clear, a line of Scripture I had encountered countless times began to register in an entirely different way.

The Stone the Builders Refused

The boundary I had crossed hit home for me one day when I came across a line I had heard countless times before and, alongside it, an interpretation that struck me.

“The stone that the builders refuse, shall be the head cornerstone.”

—Psalm 118:22 (KJV)

Traditionally, the cornerstone is understood as referring to Christ. Here, I am reading it in a different but related way: as the refusal of something foundational, i.e., a belief in God as our Creator, by those responsible for building.

I had heard that line before—sang it along with Bob Marley for most of my life—but I had never really stopped to ask what it meant. I discovered that the builders are the ones who decide what counts as foundational: religious authorities, scholars, and experts. To refuse a stone is to judge it unsuitable, irregular, or incompatible with the prevailing model. Yet the stone chosen for the cornerstone fixes the alignment of the entire structure, determining its orientation, load-bearing capacity, and long-term stability. If a critical stone is rejected when it should have been selected as load-bearing, the entire structure is compromised from the outset.

At that point, the verse began to read like a description of what I had already been seeing in modern science. Methodological naturalism, as I had understood it, functions precisely by refusing certain categories at the outset, especially intention, purpose, and design. In that reading, “the stone” is the possibility that the Earth has been designed, and the rejection of that possibility is not ancient at all, but relatively recent, hardening in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Darwinian chance became the default explanatory frame for biology and even cosmology.

I had already pondered the implications of believing we had discovered a similar mechanistic and structural relationship across geology, hydrology, chemistry, and biology. What had initially looked fragmented had resolved into a closed, self-perpetuating system. The idea of design started to look like a true cornerstone. What would modern science allow those alignments to point to when laid out together? I knew that science could describe each instance in isolation. Whether it could follow those alignments across domains to their implications rested on the question of whether it would reject the stone.

What remained was to gather the scriptural evidence carefully enough and lay it out clearly enough that the implications would be hard to ignore. If modern science were to continue rejecting the stone, I wanted to make that as difficult as possible.

I invite those interested to read my next post and let me know how I did in terms of “defending the stone”: “Water From The Rock Is More Than A Metaphor.”

Note to readers:

What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, the kind of revered substance described across numerous cultures and traditions as a “Golden Elixir”: rock opened, minerals rendered mobile, and water transformed through contact with that chemistry.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

At a certain point, researching alchemy no longer felt like an esoteric pursuit. Once I began to recognize that the texts were describing the same Rock–Water Circuit we had arrived at through modern literature in geochemistry, cosmology, biology, and physics, I could no longer dismiss them.

That led to a simple question: if this level of insight was recorded here, where else might it appear? What other traditions, texts, or cultures might contain comparable observations about the processes underlying the Rock–Water Circuit?

And the oddest part is where that trail led first: straight into the center of mainstream science, to the National Science Foundation, and from there to black mica.

The Engine Before Biology

Helen Hansma, a biophysicist at UC Santa Barbara who also served as a program director at the National Science Foundation, proposed something that would have sounded outrageous not long ago: that life did not begin in ponds or vents, but between sheets of mica.

Her “Mica Hypothesis”…

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Up to this point, the focus has been on decoding the underlying operation described symbolically within three select texts from the Hermetic canon. What follows is the product of that decoding: a set of operational definitions that render the wider canon legible by anchoring its language to a real material process.

To our knowledge, this is the first operational reconstruction of the core roles encoded across the Hermetic and alchemical canon.

I am aware that the magnitude of that claim may not appear credible to most. Alchemical texts have been read symbolically for so long that another “interpretation” can sound like one more speculative reading added to an already crowded field.

However, we have gone far beyond any other single interpretation because our decoding framework applies to all texts in the canon. The key that I am about to present to you has been tested across multiple texts, multiple interpretive angles, and challenged against multiple AI engines.

Until the key can be broken or shown to fail within these or other Hermetic texts, we believe it provides the most concrete evidence to date that ancient writings preserved operational knowledge of sophisticated geochemical processes, both in Nature and in the laboratory.

Despite the guarded symbolic language in which that knowledge was preserved, the processes being described — specifically the roles, materials, sequence, and product — can now, through our framework, be understood in modern scientific language with surprising precision.

That would make this more than a set of literary interpretations. It would make it an operationally interpretive key.

For those wondering why I have detoured into this material, or how it relates to health, the answer depends on the larger argument of both books. This chapter provides a major pillar of evidence for the conclusion of The Blueprint of Life, while From Volcanoes to Vitality explains why this same mineral-water chemistry matters biologically, agriculturally, and environmentally. If both of those arguments are ever understood, this detour will no longer be remembered as one.

At the risk of brief repetition, and because the table that follows requires it, I should restate the role of each text. The Emerald Tablet, The Six Keys of Eudoxus, and Letter from Sternbuchta on the True Stone of Wisdom describe geochemical processes from three different angles: the order of the geo-atmospheric mineral-water cycle in Nature, the sequence by which its core chemistry is brought forth through Art, and the properties of the minerals which power it. Their language shifts, repeats, and sometimes appears to contradict itself because the process was being guarded. Once that process was reconstructed independently of the texts themselves, the symbols began resolving into specific meanings.

One interpretive rule matters before the reader turns to the table. In alchemical texts, terms such as Sulfur, Mercury, Salt, Fire, and Stone do not name fixed substances. They name roles within a process.

The table below does not attempt to catalog every possible referent. It presents one internally consistent decoding of those roles onto a specific, real process: the Rock–Water Circuit and its laboratory extraction in Shimanishi’s work, as described in Sternbuchta and The Six Keys. In this framework, sulfur-bearing atmospheric chemistry and sulfuric acid are treated as different expressions of the same activating role.

These two scientific constructs allowed us to see that the same word could carry different meanings depending on the stage and context of the operation, and that those meanings remained coherent across the texts. Again, the table was only made possible by anchoring the symbols to two processes that could be observed, tested, and reproduced: one in Nature (the Rock-Water Circuit Theory) and one in Art (Shimanishi’s extraction).

The one material central to both of the above is the rock called biotite, or black mica. It is that parent mineral that the Emerald Tablet describes as “the one thing all things arose from.”

The interpretive key recently underwent a final refinement when we discovered that The Emerald Tablet is not just describing the surface weathering of biotite. It also describes the larger geodynamic cycle by which this mineral body is formed deep below the Earth’s surface, lifted toward the surface, opened by water above, released into life, and eventually returned to depth through burial and reformation. “As above, so below.”

The later alchemical texts narrow that planetary process into Art: they begin with the already opened body, vermiculite, and describe the operation by which sulfuric acid draws forth its concentrated essence.

Table 1. The Ariadne Key: Role Concordance Across the Hermetic Canon

The Six Keys of Eudoxus describes the sequence of operations by which a mineral essence is drawn from its rock parent and brought into concentrated form. The Letter from Sternbuchta describes the resulting essence: what it is like, how it behaves, and what it does once produced. The Emerald Tablet describes the natural cycle itself: the cycle in Nature by which biotite is formed, opened, released, circulated, and returned to form, only to re-enter the cycle. The table below does not force identical vocabulary across the canon; it shows how the same underlying operation appears under different symbolic emphases.

Canonical interpreters of alchemy have long agreed on the structural logic of these texts: the Stone is the product of conjunction, not the substrate; Mercury is a principle, not elemental metal; Sulfur is an activating force; and the Secret Fire is a penetrating solvent rather than literal flame. Across psychological, historical, and esoteric schools—Jung, Newman, Principe, Fulcanelli, and Canseliet—there is broad agreement on these points, even where interpretations diverge.

What our work advances is the material specificity of the terms. The canon was trying to describe a real process, but it did so without naming the substances identifiably. That is why the language stayed open for centuries. Until the process and its product were realized in the world, the symbols could not be fixed to a single meaning. What was missing was the operation itself.

In 1977, after almost 15 years of determined effort, Shimanishi’s successful method provided the missing reference. Through his work with vermiculite-derived mineral chemistry, he devised an extraction process that produced a substance whose properties correspond strikingly to what the canon had long described under different symbolic names. Once that reference existed in the modern world, the language of the texts could finally be anchored to a working operation rather than to speculation. It was only through Shimanishi’s work that the canon became legible.

The Three Works

There is one more feature of this work that needs to be addressed. We return to a line in The Six Keys that I originally interpreted in Chapter XI as referring to the three steps in the process of producing the Golden Elixir:

“But the operations of the three works have a great deal of analogy one to another, and the philosophers do designedly speak in equivocal terms.”

The Six Keys went over these three steps “or works” repeatedly, using constantly shifting language and metaphor: 1) biotite weathering to vermiculite, 2) sulfuric acid penetrating the porous stone, and 3) mineral essence being released.

I am no longer sure that is the line’s primary meaning. As I sat writing this chapter, reflecting upon the coherence of these three texts, separated by hundreds or thousands of years, another strange resonance occurred to me: our journey through the Hermetic canon was also confined, almost unbelievably, to just three works, as that line above states.

The Hermetic and alchemical canon is vast—far beyond the three texts decoded in this book. In fact, neither MB nor I have ever knowingly engaged with any other texts from the Hermetic or alchemical traditions. At one point, I tried to get a sense of how much of that literature remained outside our attention, and the scale of it was staggering. And yet the number of texts that actually entered our lives, held our attention, and ultimately yielded a coherent framework were just these three: The Emerald Tablet, The Six Keys of Eudoxus, and The Letter from Sternbuchta.

That would not be especially remarkable if these were the three most obvious, most widely read, or most accessible texts in the tradition. But they are not. The Emerald Tablet is foundational and famous, yes. However, The Six Keys is known only within a small alchemical community. It has no mainstream scientific or academic visibility, is not commonly taught, cited, or discussed, and almost no educated reader has ever heard of it. If that is not obscure enough, it is almost impossible to describe the level of obscurity that has been accorded to Sternbuchta.

It is so obscure as to be scarcely accessible at all and, in our case, only re-entered the work through an archived trace after more than two decades of inaccessibility. And yet it was precisely this most marginal of the three that proved indispensable. Without Sternbuchta, I do not think we could have defended the coherence of the whole. The Tablet gave the cycle. Eudoxus gave the guarded operations, but it was Sternbuchta that gave the missing bridge: the nature, value, and behavior of the essence once brought forth. Remove any one of the three, and the structure weakens. Remove Sternbuchta in particular, and I do not think it holds.

That leaves me with a question I cannot fully answer. Why these three? Why, out of such a vast literature, did the work remain so narrowly confined? Why did MB and I, coming to this from different directions and at different times, engage no other text—nor ever seek to? And why did it turn out that only when these three were finally placed together did the canon begin to yield a coherent, material, and operational interpretation?

Finally, why does this line from the Six Keys now affect me more and more deeply each time I read it?

“But the operations of the three works have a great deal of analogy one to another, and the philosophers do designedly speak in equivocal terms.”

I will not be answering that now. My understanding of why these texts appeared in our lives comes later in this series, when the work’s larger understanding comes into view. At present, I will only record the improbability of it. A line that speaks of “three works” that “have a great deal of analogy to each other” and which “designedly speak in equivocal terms” now strikes me as providing an uncannily precise description of the journey through the Hermetic canon that we just completed. Perhaps that is nothing. Perhaps it is only one more coincidence in a project already full of them. However, I find it impossible to dismiss it as an accident.

What the Texts Are Describing

Although neither Sternbuchta nor The Six Keys of Eudoxus uses the phrase “Golden Elixir,” both texts describe the same class of substance that Western alchemy more commonly calls the Philosopher’s Stone, the tincture, the medicine, the Universal Medicine, the Water of Life, or the elixir of life. In Chinese Daoist alchemy, the corresponding idea is named more directly as the Golden Elixir, or jindan. I use “Golden Elixir” here as cross-traditional shorthand, not as a literal quotation from these texts.

The support for that identification is not the name, but the properties. Sternbuchta calls it a “Universal-tincture,” “ our true medicine,” and “an unending treasure,” “powerful enough… to restore the human body,” and describes its “multiplication in quality” and “multiplication in quantity.” The Six Keys calls it the “Stone of the philosophers,” “Water of Life,” “precious liquor,” “Universal Medicine,” and “precious juice” drawn from the Stone. Across both texts, the same pattern recurs: a hidden essence brought forth from stone, rendered active through the Work, multiplied in virtue, and capable of restoration.

That is why, in the chapters above, I have used “Golden Elixir” as the simplest name for the substance these texts appear to describe.

The Work Completed

Nearly two millennia after the cycle in Nature first appeared in the alchemical tradition, the core chemistry it described appears to have been realized as a tangible material that can be produced, carried, and applied: a concentrated mineral essence corresponding operationally to the sequence described in The Six Keys of Eudoxus and behaviorally to the properties described in Sternbuchta’s letter.

What had been missing until now was the Rock–Water Circuit Theory, a scientific framework that could integrate deep mineral formation, geodynamic ascent, sulfated weathering, water chemistry, sulfur cycling, mineral lattices, biological uptake, and geologic return into a single coherent process. Once biotite is understood as the imprisoned body, vermiculite as the naturally opened and receptive matrix, sulfur as the activating force, and the mercurial principle as the mediating carrier, the canon resolves without contradiction.

In our reading, neither biotite nor vermiculite is itself the Philosopher’s Stone. In Art, it is the concentrated, multipliable mineral essence the alchemists described as the Golden Elixir and that Shimanishi produced as a rock extract. Although The Emerald Tablet does not name the Philosopher’s Stone, it describes something even more fundamental: a complete generative cycle. In our reading, what the later alchemical texts called the Stone corresponds to that cycle itself.

The ambiguity of the canon preserved the process by requiring that Nature complete the first transformation before Art could continue it. The closed stone, biotite, had to be opened into a receptive body, vermiculite, before sulfuric acid could extract its essence. In that sense, the Stone, in the later alchemical sense of the Golden Elixir, waited to be realized in material form; before that, it could only be named, symbolized, and pursued.

That the puzzle appears to have been solved based on the work of someone entirely outside alchemy leaves the deepest question. How could the alchemists have gained such precise knowledge of both the cycle in Nature and the means of bringing its core chemistry into form?

We will revisit that question later in the book, but for now, the operative core of the Hermetic canon is closed. Rock, water, sulfur, heat, and time remain at work.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Note to readers:

What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, the kind of revered substance described across numerous cultures and traditions as a “Golden Elixir.” Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

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The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

At a recent congressional hearing, RFK Jr. was asked a “burning question” about whether he was responsible for the measles outbreak. His response was piercing and addressed two purported deaths from measles – you should watch it:

To further drive Secretary Kennedy’s point, today, Attorney Aaron Siri and I sent a letter to Congress in which we provided critical information concerning both measles infection and the measles vaccine. We also provided the expert medical record review that I published one year ago on this Substack, which detailed the brazen evidence showing that the deaths of the two children were not from measles.

Instead, contrary to the overwhelming media narratives directed at Secretary Kennedy ever since, the deaths proved to be the consequences of grossly inadequate medical care and treatment, which were unrelated to the children’s prior measles infections.

Below is a full text of that letter. My formal medical record review that we submitted to Congress can be read separately and/or downloaded here:

This article was co-authored.

You can follow each author’s work here:

Pierre Kory's Substack

Aaron Siri's Substack

FULL TEXT OF LETTER TO CONGRESS

May 4, 2026

U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce

2176 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20515

Re: Follow-up Regarding “Examining the Policies and Priorities of the Department of Health and Human Services” and the Two Child Deaths in Texas

Dear Chairman Tim Walberg and Committee Members,

On April 17, 2026, at the above-referenced full committee hearing, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. provided testimony concerning measles cases.[1] During your questioning, Chairman Walberg, you asked Secretary Kennedy a “burning question” regarding whether Secretary Kennedy is “responsible for the measles outbreak.” Secretary Kennedy responded as follows:

The measles outbreak began in January 2025 before I took office. Almost 90% of the people affected are over five years old, so … their decision to not vaccinate pre-dated my occupation of this seat....The measles outbreak is not an American phenomena; it is global. It’s happening all over the world. And we’ve done better under my leadership than any country in the world in limiting it. Last year, we had approximately 2,200 cases. Mexico had more than three times that number and they have one-third of our population. Canada had double that number and they have one-eighth of our population. Europe had almost 10 times that number and they only have double [] our population. Many other countries have lost their elimination status. Canada lost it. Britain lost it. These are countries I haven’t visited in years. Many European countries have lost it. Austria and others.

Two little girls died tragically in the Mennonite community in Texas. Mennonites have not vaccinated since 1796. This had nothing to do with me. I went to the funeral of one of those little girls and I spent a day with the family of the other, and both of them told me that when they took their children to the hospital, they were treated as pariahs. They were shamed. They were not given proper treatments. Both families believe their daughters, and their own doctors believe their daughters could have been saved if the hospital gave them proper treatment. The fact that they did not have a proper treatment to give them is regulatory practice by this agency: this agency has been so focused on a single intervention that it does not advise doctors about how to treat people who are actually sick. There’s a lot of people in this country who for religious reasons or other reasons are not going to vaccinate. And I believe that we need to treat them with compassion and understanding and empathy and get them the treatments that they would get anywhere else in the world except for this country.[2]

We write now to provide a fuller picture of these two tragic child deaths in Texas in the Mennonite community—Kaley and Daisy[3]—and to provide more context about measles and the measles vaccine. To date, most sources that have reported on these unfortunate deaths have focused on the fact that the two young girls were unvaccinated. Some shamed their Mennonite parents for not vaccinating their children. Others wielded their deaths as weapons to frighten other parents as well as generate fear regarding unvaccinated children.[4] The media widely and falsely reported that the deaths were caused by measles. The reality is that their deaths were not caused by measles. We have not seen any reports that have told the truth.

And we are sure you will agree that the truth matters. It matters for science. It matters for public policy. It matters legally. And it matters for these grieving families.

Thus, we now provide the details and larger context about these two tragic instances of the loss of a child far too soon—context and facts that the media has not shared and will not share—and, more generally, about measles.[5]

First, attached is a medical record review conducted by Pierre Kory, MD, MPA of these two tragic deaths. In his review, Dr. Kory expands on the testimony provided by Secretary Kennedy and presents clear evidence of what actually caused the deaths of the two children in Texas, and it was not measles. See Appendix.

As Secretary Kennedy’s testimony and these tragic deaths exemplify, when our health authorities focus solely on a single intervention—here, a vaccine—they tend to focus on its benefits (never its risks) and often fail to recognize, diagnose, and treat unvaccinated children for issues unrelated to the vaccine’s target infection. This leads to more tragedy as can be seen in the cases of Kaley and Daisy where their deaths were unrelated to measles but the hospital’s apparent fixation on measles led to the improper treatment of these children. This also leads to blame being cast where it does not belong. Instead of the medical community learning from these two deaths, blame has been and will be cast on the parents and, even more nonsensically, Secretary Kennedy, when the blame for their deaths falls squarely on the mistreatment of these children by the medical community.

This sole focus on the measles vaccine as the “answer” to measles is largely due to the belief that the vaccine has “saved millions of lives” in our country. While this product can prevent transmission of measles and consequently can save some lives by preventing measles deaths, that is not the entire story.

Americans have been repeatedly led to believe that the reduction in measles deaths in the United States was due entirely to the measles vaccine and, had it not been introduced, Americans would have been dropping dead left and right from measles.

For example, the Washington Post reported in April 2025 that at “current state-level vaccination rates,” which were 92.7% nationally by CDC’s last count, “measles could become entrenched, resulting in hundreds of thousands of cases, where deaths are commonplace.”[6] Prestigious medical journals and publications also fearmonger. For example, in a publication about (ironically) vaccine misinformation, the prestigious Royal Society and British Academy falsely wrote that “at the start of the 20th Century, measles resulted in around 530,217 deaths per year in the United States alone.”^[7]

These claims flow from beliefs that attribute mythical properties to the measles vaccine. The reality is quite different.

Decline in Measles Deaths Unrelated to Measles Vaccine

The core of measles vaccine worship is the belief that it reduced the death rate from measles in the United States; and that, until the vaccine was introduced, children in the United States were dying en masse from measles. The reality is quite different.

The following official United States government chart shows a decline in the measles death rate by over 98% from 1900 to 1960, three years before the first measles vaccine was introduced in the United States in 1963.^[8] Meaning, the measles vaccine had nothing to do with the over 98% reduction in the death rate from measles in the United States from 1900 to 1960.^[9]

This chart comes directly from the official mortality report of the United States government.^[10] We did not create this chart. The United States government created it based on data collected when there was no measles vaccine that influenced the way in which health authorities reported these numbers.^[11]

Taking a slightly closer look, what this chart and official United States government data show is that in 1900, the rate of mortality from measles was 13.3 deaths per 100,000 individuals.^[12] By 1960, it was 0.2 deaths per 100,000 individuals.^[13] The same was true for 1961 and 1962.^[14] Remember, the first measles vaccine came on the market in 1963.^[15]

A similar decline of over 99% in measles deaths occurred between 1900 and 1967 in England and Wales, and it was only after that decline that the first measles vaccine was introduced there in 1968—five years after its introduction in the United States.^[16]

If you can accept the reality that this is what the official federal government mortality data shows, then you have to acknowledge that something other than the measles vaccine caused this reduction in the measles death rate. Was it better health care? Cleaner water? Improved sanitation? Better nutrition? It is probably a combination of these and other factors.

What is certain is that the data show that the measles vaccine had nothing to do with the over 98% decline in measles mortality from 1900 to 1962.

Pre-Vaccine, 1 in 450,000 Americans Died of Measles

Many also find it difficult to accept that in the several years before the first measles vaccine was introduced in the United States in 1963, there was, according to the CDC, a total of around 400 deaths from measles each year.[17] Not millions. Not even thousands.

Putting 400 deaths per year into context: based on the U.S. population in the early 1960s, that amounted to one measles death for every 450,000 Americans at a time when nearly every American got measles.^[18]

Many also cannot accept that the same factors that caused measles mortality to decline by over 98% from 1900 to 1962, no doubt continued to cause a further reduction in the measles mortality rate after 1962. Meaning, at least a portion of the decline in the 400 deaths per year after the vaccine was available is no doubt attributable to the same factors that caused a steady decline in the measles death rate for decades prior to the introduction of the measles vaccine. Therefore, even without the measles vaccine, the death rate would have, no doubt, continued to decline after 1963.

In pockets of the country with poor nutrition, sanitation, and water, deaths from any pathogen, including measles, can occur at a higher rate. Those conditions still existed in some pockets of the United States in the early 1960s. As living conditions in those pockets of America improved with the introduction of clean water, improved sanitation, and better living conditions, deaths from measles declined, which is what typically occurs when these conditions improve.

Let’s also not ignore that health care, especially the management and treatment of acute infections, has vastly improved since the 1960s. Doctors readily concede this point, unless you are talking about vaccines.

That brings us to the next point about measles vaccine. While it can prevent transmission of the measles virus, and therefore prevent some deaths from measles, that is not the whole story. By preventing transmission, the measles vaccine broke the natural ecological relationship humans had developed with measles over millennia; and unlike other pathogens that have come and gone, humans developed this lasting relationship with measles because, as we will discuss, it appears those infected with this virus have a survival advantage over those who did not get infected.

Measles Vaccine Likely Caused More Deaths of Americans Than It Saved

Most people will find what follows difficult to accept. It requires real intellectual rigor because its implications can cause serious cognitive dissonance.

With that, here it is: Studies show that those who have had measles are less likely to die from heart attacks and cancer and are less likely to suffer from various chronic diseases.

The studies supporting this claim were conducted and published after federal health authorities had already committed to the measles vaccine program. This may explain the reluctance to accept these findings and why this is likely the first time you will learn about these studies. But none of that can change the reality of their existence.

In one of these studies, and it was a massive study, the nation of Japan followed over 100,000 of its citizens for approximately 21 years. They found, among other things, that those who had been infected with measles and mumps had a statistically significant lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, strokes, and heart attacks.^[19] For example, men who had measles and mumps (as compared to those who did not have measles and mumps), had a 17% reduction in strokes, 20% reduction in cardiovascular disease, and 29% reduction in heart attacks.^[20] Critically, after 21 years, approximately 7% of the men who had measles and mumps had died of cardiovascular disease while approximately 14% of the men who never had measles or mumps died of cardiovascular disease.^[21] Meaning, the men who never had measles and mumps were far more likely to die. The statistically significant findings in this study remained statistically significant even after adjusting for all kinds of variables (including age; body mass; family history of cardiovascular disease; alcohol intake; energy intake; smoking; walking; sports; mental stress; education; and history of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes).^[22]

Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of Americans, taking the lives of over 900,000 Americans a year.^[23] In contrast, as discussed above, according to the CDC, around 400 Americans died of measles annually in the several years before the first measles vaccine arrived in 1963 (and remember that number was declining without a vaccine), and around 40 Americans died annually of mumps in the several years before the first mumps vaccine was introduced in 1967.^[24]

Putting this together, what this robust and extremely reliable prospective study spanning 21 years with over 100,000 individuals reflects is that the use of the MMR vaccine to prevent measles and mumps may have resulted in multiple times more annual deaths in the United States from cardiovascular disease than it could have possibly saved from measles and mumps.

That is an incredible reality. Even more incredible is that nobody has done any study showing otherwise. The evidence that “health” authorities have messed with nature to save a few but may have caused far more deaths from heart disease is not something they would likely ever acknowledge.

This Japanese study shows why measles, unlike most pathogens, may not have died out over time through natural selection. It is because having measles appears to confer a survival advantage. Meaning, people who had measles were more likely to survive and procreate and not vice versa.

Similar to the finding regarding heart disease, some studies, although not nearly as robust, have found that eliminating measles appears to have caused a measurable increase in certain cancer rates. For example, the International Agency for Research on Cancer found that those who never had measles had a 66% increased rate of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and a 233% increased rate of Hodgkin lymphoma.^[25] These two cancers are expected to kill an estimated 20,540 Americans in 2025.^[26] There are even studies documenting children with Hodgkin’s disease experiencing remission when having measles.^[27]

Likewise, researchers at the Department of Health Care and Epidemiology at the University of British Columbia and the Department of Biology at the University of Victoria found that those who never had measles had a 50% increased rate of ovarian cancer, which is expected to kill an estimated 12,730 Americans in 2025.^[28]

Other studies have reached similar conclusions that measles, as well as mumps, rubella, pertussis, and chickenpox, reduce the rate of various forms of cancers, including a study from researchers at the University of Berne, Switzerland that specifically reviewed these fever-inducing (i.e., febrile) infections and found that the “study consistently revealed a lower cancer risk for patients with a history of FICD [febrile infectious childhood diseases].”^[29] And as an article in The Quarterly Review of Biology explained,

Detailed retrospective and prospective clinical studies … supported the conclusion that frequency of the infectious fever episodes and cancer diagnoses are inversely related (Abel et al. 1986; Mastrangelo et al. 1998; Kleef et al. 2001; Kleef and Hager 2006). For example, Grossarth-Maticek et al. (1987) performed a 10-year prospective cohort study of 1353 patients, concluding that episodes of high fever as a typical reaction to an acute illness during the entire life span are inversely related to later cancer incidence. Kölmel et al. (1992), based on 271 controls versus 139 melanoma patients, demonstrated an inverse relation between the number of febrile infections and the incidence of malignant melanoma. Similarly, Wrotek et al. (2009) have reported a lower frequency of fever in a population of 355 breast tumor patients, compared to 244 healthy women volunteers.[30]

This article also explained how a survey of studies of spontaneous cancer remissions found that “approximately 70% of documented cases [of remission] were immediately preceded by an acute infection associated with high fever” and that this phenomenon has “been reported for centuries.”^[31]

If that were not enough, studies have found that children who have had measles have far fewer allergies and atopic diseases, such as asthma, and adults who have had measles have a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease.^[32]

The bottom line is that, prior to the introduction of the vaccine, measles was considered a mild childhood infection, like chickenpox. The ecological relationship humans developed with measles through millennia did not eliminate measles; and having had measles confers survival benefits that appear to far exceed the infection’s negative effects.

We raised these studies at a court hearing in which we challenged violations issued by the New York City Department of Health to families that refused to give their child an MMR vaccine. The vaccine expert for the health department was a medical doctor and the Director of Epidemiology and Surveillance in its Bureau of Immunizations. When confronted with these studies, she had no retort.^[33] When we reconvened for a second day of hearings in the case, 28 days later, she still had no response to these studies and not a shred of evidence to oppose their findings, nor did the health department offer a shred of evidence to the contrary on appeal despite the fact it offered an extensive affidavit of additional medical information.^[34]

Another Unintended Consequence

Another unintended consequence of the measles vaccine is that for anyone infected today in the United States, it has made measles more of a concern. This is because, before the use of the measles vaccine, mothers who were previously infected with the measles virus provided passive immunity to their babies, and that immunity protected them from measles in the first months of life.^[35] Moreover, adults were protected because they almost always were infected with measles as children. This natural protection was critical, since measles poses the greatest risk to infants and adults.

The measles vaccine, however, does not afford the same protection as having had measles. A mother who has only had the measles vaccine, as opposed to the natural infection, will confer only limited protection to her baby.^[36] As for adults, 2% to 10% of them, depending on which study you look at, will not develop immunity even after two doses of measles vaccine.^[37] And for those who develop immunity from the vaccine, a joint CDC and FDA study found that the vaccine immunity wanes over time. ^[38]

The measles vaccine thus reversed the declining virulence of measles, including by making vulnerable groups—infants and adults—who had generally been protected in the pre-vaccine era, now potentially vulnerable to measles. It also upended the natural decline in the virulence of this virus since 1900 and broke the natural ecological relationship humans had developed with measles which, as we reviewed, studies reflect conferred a survival advantage to those who had measles as children.

Belief in Measles Vaccine Runs Deep

The simple statistical reality laid out above causes incredible turmoil to many people. Some get angry, while others simply cannot accept reality.

Even some of the most prestigious publications in the world rely on religious beliefs, not evidence, when writing about this product. For example, BMJ, a leading international medical journal, published an article by a distinguished Oxford professor who wrote “Vaccination is a miracle of medicine,” described “vaccine disinformation” as “incorrect beliefs,” and argued that anyone holding incorrect beliefs should be criminally prosecuted.^[39] Ironically, under this Oxford professor’s own standard, she would have to be criminally indicted. This is because in her article about vaccine misinformation, published by The Royal Society and The British Academy, she asserts on the very first page that “at the start of the 20th Century, measles resulted in around 530,217 deaths per year in the United States alone.”^[40] Looks like it is time for handcuffs because this statistic is categorically false.

According to CDC data, approximately 10,150 Americans died from measles in 1900.^[41] That is obviously far fewer than the article’s claimed 530,217 deaths. Compounding this falsehood, the article then attributes the annual decline in measles deaths since 1900 to the measles vaccine.^[42] This is also categorically false for reasons you now know. The article also ignores the impact eliminating measles may have had on mortality from heart disease, cancer, and other health issues. Ironically, under the Oxford professor’s own standard, she should be criminally prosecuted for this plainly false information about the measles vaccine.

Critically, overstating the benefits of the measles vaccine can be dangerous. It deprives medical professionals and individuals of their ability to weigh the benefits against the risks for each patient of a given medical intervention. But overstating the benefits of the measles vaccine is the norm. Just as understating its risks is the norm.

Safety of the MMR Vaccine

As for the safety of the MMR vaccine, Merck’s MMR vaccine in use today (MMR-II) was licensed in 1978 based on a clinical trial with 834 children, no control group (let alone a placebo control), and only 42 days of safety review after injection.[43] During the trial, approximately one-third of the participants developed gastrointestinal issues and one-third developed respiratory issues but without a control group, these and other reactions were written off.[44] This means that even if this trial did have enough children (which it didn’t) and reviewed safety long enough (which it didn’t), without a control group, it was useless for determining the vaccine’s actual safety profile.

Just to be clear, MMR-II’s clinical trial did not even use another vaccine as a control. It simply had no control group. To be clear, it did not even test against the first MMR vaccine.

The importance of a proper trial to study the safety of MMR-II also cannot be overstated. This was a novel product. For example, unlike any prior measles-containing vaccine, in the vial of every dose of MMR-II there are, according to the data and even Dr. Stanley Plotkin, hundreds of billions of pieces of human DNA and cellular material from the cultured cell line of an aborted fetus.[45] But even without this novelty, a proper safety trial should have been conducted prior to licensing MMR-II. That never happened.

Over the years, as liabilities from harms related to measles-containing vaccines piled up, the number of companies making and selling this product dropped from at least six companies in the 1970s to only one company by 1986—Merck selling its MMR-II. Remember, MMR-II was one of only three routine vaccines at the time that led to the passage of the 1986 Act which gave Merck immunity from liability for harms caused by this product.[46] It needed this immunity, no doubt, including because after passage of the 1986 Act, the CDC published the Vaccine Information Sheet for this product and admitted that “after MMR vaccination, a person might experience” “seizure,” “deafness,” “long-term seizures, coma, or lowered consciousness,” and/or “brain damage.”[47] As an aside, after Dr. Plotkin was deposed by the undersigned, his subsequent herculean efforts to cover up vaccine harms included having “brain damage” removed from MMR’s Vaccine Information Sheet.[48]

In any event, decades later there was a clinical trial that included Merck’s MMR-II vaccine as a control. It was a trial for a new MMR vaccine to be sold by GSK called Priorix, licensed in 2022 (MMR-RIT). This trial had 6 months of safety review after injection. So, what did this trial find? Sadly, both vaccine groups had a high rate of serious adverse events, emergency room visits, and new onset of chronic diseases (e.g., autoimmune disorders, asthma, type I diabetes, vasculitis, celiac disease, thrombocytopenia, and allergies) as reflected in the chart below which was buried in the supplemental information for this clinical trial:[49]

The damning findings in this clinical trial, showing an incredibly high rate of serious adverse events and new chronic health conditions after receipt of an MMR vaccine in previously healthy children, should have raised alarm bells. Instead, MMR-RIT was deemed safe by the FDA because it had the same level of harm as the control group receiving MMR-II. But to any thinking, breathing, caring person, certainly not safe.

Worse, these serious harms were not disclosed in the package insert given to medical professionals, parents, or the public. Nor were they mentioned in patient-facing materials. Instead, GSK buried them in a supplemental table in a journal article.[50]

* * *

In sum, given the above, it should be patently clear that the decision of whether or not to inject a measles vaccine into oneself or one’s child is an important one and one that is entitled to informed consent. And there undoubtedly will be individuals who decide that, for them or for their child, the risks outweigh the benefits. These people are equally as deserving of respect, adequate medical treatment, and the truth.

Thus, we ask, first, that you immediately cease spreading, or allowing to be spread, the false claim that these two young girls died “from measles” as that is not the truth (see Appendix), and, second, that you acknowledge that a singular focus on vaccination to the exclusion of other preventatives and treatment is inappropriate and inadequate. It might be great fodder for fear mongering but the American public and these two grieving families deserve better—they deserve the truth.

Very truly yours,

Aaron Siri, Esq.

Elizabeth A. Brehm, Esq.

Expert Medical Review by Pierre Kory, MD, MPA

I have long reviewed medical records of patients harmed by poor medical care. Here, I expand on the testimony provided by Secretary Kennedy and I present clear evidence of what actually caused the two girls’ deaths in Texas and. It wasn’t measles.

I obtained and conducted a thorough review of the medical records of the two girls. Both of the girls died in an ICU of end-stage lung failure. As a pulmonary and critical care specialist who has researched and managed lung failure for my entire career, I am highly qualified to serve as an expert reviewer for these cases.[51] I served as the Chief of the Critical Care Service and Medical Director of the Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin for over 5 years.

While drafting this expert summary report, I aimed for a sober, objective, and professional approach to be read (and likely heavily critiqued) by the public, but also added extensive “rolling” commentary for the layperson so that my evaluation is understandable.

To be clear, it is my professional opinion that neither child died of measles. It’s not a close call; they did not die of measles.

CASE #1 - Kaley, Age 6

The records and findings related to Kaley’s case are straightforward.

Kaley was a six-year-old, previously healthy girl who contracted measles along with her four siblings (all of whom weathered the illness just fine under the care of Dr. Ben Edwards). As her rash was clearing, she began to develop signs and symptoms of “secondary bacterial pneumonia,” a not uncommon complication of almost any viral infection. To wit, one of my three daughters fell ill with the same after she contracted influenza at age 14; however, in her case, she recovered from it two days after receiving an appropriate antibiotic.

In Kaley’s case, her worsening respiratory status led her parents to bring her to Providence Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, on February 22, 2025 at 12:08 PM.

The hospital correctly diagnosed her with secondary bacterial pneumonia and then treated her with two antibiotics, ceftriaxone and vancomycin. This was a blatant deviation from the standard of care in treating hospitalized patients with “community-acquired pneumonia (CAP),” the guidelines for which have long recommended a different combination, e.g., ceftriaxone and azithromycin (or a quinolone).

Only azithromycin and quinolones cover mycoplasma pneumonia, a prevalent cause of community-acquired pneumonia (which is why the guidelines recommend them). Neither ceftriaxone nor vancomycin will treat mycoplasma because they work by disrupting the cell walls of bacteria. Mycoplasma does not have a cell wall.

Vancomycin, the antibiotic they chose instead of azithromycin, is used to treat “hospital-acquired pneumonia” as it is one of the only antibiotics that covers MRSA (methicillin-resistant staph aureus). This common organism inhabits hospitals and medical facilities. Kaley was from a rural Mennonite community and had not been in any hospital.

Despite her persistent and increasing deterioration in respiratory status, which eventually led to requiring intubation and mechanical ventilation, this deviation from the standard of care went unnoticed and uncorrected until just over a day before she died, when the test for mycoplasma returned as “positive.”

Azithromycin was then immediately ordered. However, from the chart, it appears it took ten hours before she received her first dose (documentation of the exact time may be missing). She passed away less than 24 hours later, 4 days after being admitted. The time of death was 06:43 on February 26, 2025. My opinion as to the cause of death is that it was from an overwhelming lung injury called Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) caused by mycoplasma pneumonia. The sole reason why she died from mycoplasma was because the initial antibiotic regimen violated the standard of care in the treatment of hospitalized community-acquired pneumonia because they neglected to treat her upon admission with azithromycin (i.e., a “Z-Pak deficiency”).

Note that azithromycin has excellent penetration into lung tissues and is highly effective at treating mycoplasma. Again, had they started azithromycin on Day 1, as has been recommended for decades, she would still be alive today.

The above findings were articulated by me in an interview on March 19, 2025,[52] but were subsequently ignored and/or distorted by the mainstream media. A reporter from USA Today reached out to Rebuild Medicine (my non-profit[53]) with questions. This is the exchange between my Executive Director, Steve, and the reporter, Eduardo:

From Eduardo: Good morning, Steve! Yes, we were more so looking for proof around the determination of medical error. Are any of these records being inspected elsewhere? Or is there litigation on this?

From Steve: …Dr. Kory, a pulmonologist and former ICU doctor, refers to the attending physician not following the guidelines of the major medical societies for treating mycoplasma pneumonia. Two examples of guidelines are Table 4 of the American Academy of Family Physicians guidelines for Community-Acquired Pneumonia. And the Infectious Disease Society of America Guidelines: Dr. Kory also discusses the errors in more detail in this interview. I recommend watching this if you haven’t seen it. It is about 15 minutes long. We don’t know if others have reviewed the records. The girl’s family has said that they intended to allow CHD access to the records and make the conclusions public so others could learn of the errors and ensure they are not made again. We are not aware of any litigation plans. I’m glad to arrange a conversation with Dr. Kory if you’d like.

The above text also included links to several CAP guidelines, yet, in the USA Today article subsequently published about the case,[54] the reporter 1) attacked my credibility by stating that I “spread[] misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic”, 2) did not even mention the treatment guidelines for community-acquired pneumonia that we had sent him, and 3) included parts of this below statement that the hospital released in response to my video interview. The mendacity of the below statement is astonishing:

“A recent video circulating online contains misleading and inaccurate claims regarding care provided at Covenant Children’s. Patient confidentiality laws preclude us from providing information directly related to this case. What we can say is that our physicians and care teams follow evidence-based protocols and make clinical decisions based on a patient’s evolving condition, diagnostic findings, and the best available medical knowledge. Measles is a highly contagious, potentially life-threatening disease that often creates serious, well-known complications like pneumonia, encephalitis and more.”

In sum, Kaley did not die of measles but rather because of the gross negligence of the hospital to properly diagnose and treat a very common cause of bacterial pneumonia.

CASE #2 - Daisy, Age 8

Daisy’s medical records that I reviewed totaled 291 pages and came in 6 separate PDF files, none of which were in chronological order. It represented the total record for two separate admissions to the ICU of University Medical Center and one to Providence Covenant Children’s Hospital, all located in Lubbock, Texas.

My assessment here begins with my determination of the cause of death during Daisy’s last admission. Then, I will provide details of the multiple poorly managed hospitalizations (understatement) that she suffered over the 4 weeks leading up to her death.

Cause of Death

Daisy’s cause of death was ARDS secondary to hospital-acquired pneumonia caused by a highly antibiotic-resistant E.Coli “superbug.” Based on the progression and trajectories of Daisy’s illness, I believe that she contracted the infection from her first ICU admission, which is what caused her to return to the ICU 2 days after that discharge.

Although the ER physician started Daisy on antibiotics (again with ceftriaxone and vancomycin – but here, the vancomycin was a good choice because she just got out of an ICU), however the admitting ICU team discontinued them.

One of the tragedies (there were multiple) of this case is that the ICU team in charge of Daisy’s care when she was re-admitted never considered the possibility of hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP) until day 6 of 8. For an adult ICU specialist admitting a patient with an infection who was just discharged from an ICU, empiric treatment for hospital-acquired organisms is so basic and routine that it is shocking that they failed to do this.

In a minor defense of the pediatric team caring for Daisy, there are no published national treatment guidelines in pediatrics with specific antibiotic recommendations for the empiric treatment of hospital-acquired pneumonia (there is one from the University of North Carolina (UNC) however). The first adult guidelines for HAP were published by the American Thoracic Society in 2005. Here we are 20 years later, and, aside from UNC, the field of pediatrics has not gotten around to doing the same. I found a paper by the Cochrane Library that proposed the methodology for creating one, but although published in 2019, it has not yet been completed. The American Academy of Pediatrics should be ashamed.

The problem for the hospital in Daisy’s case is that the absence of a treatment guideline is not why she died. Their error was much more basic. They simply failed to send a sputum culture on admission. Had they done so, they would not only have identified the organism by Day 3 but also would have learned the antibiotic it was sensitive to and thus could have started appropriate antibiotic therapy immediately. Her death on Day 8 would have likely and easily have been prevented. Although they did send a urine culture, a blood culture, a viral PCR respiratory panel, and a PCR for MRSA and Staphylococcus (all of which were negative), they did not send a sputum culture—for a child with pneumonia.

For the sake of brevity, each time I detail a deviation from the standard of care in the below review of all three hospital stays, rather than explaining why it violates the standard in depth (and because I trust it will be evident to even laypeople), I will call it a failure. The failure to send a sputum culture in a patient with pneumonia who recently spent days in an ICU is Failure 1.

The failure to send a sputum culture had another tragic consequence - it allowed the care team, based on the viral respiratory panel being negative (which does not include measles PCR, by the way), to instead 1) assume that measles was the underlying cause on Day 2 and then, 2) immediately stop antibiotics in a seriously ill and infected child. Failure 2.

In the 8 days of her second hospital admission, Daisy only received 5 days of antibiotics, and that is because, despite a rising white cell count in her blood, they did not restart antibiotics until Day 4, when she spiked yet another fever. Failure 3.

Further, during the three days Daisy received no antibiotics, she was given high-dose steroids. Please note that steroids, when paired with appropriate antibacterials, improve outcomes in pneumonia, but giving them without appropriate antibacterials worsens outcomes. They presumably did this because their working diagnosis was “measles pneumonitis,” not bacterial pneumonia. The doctor in charge kept writing things like: “severe pulmonary sequela of measles infection around 3 weeks ago” and “we are concerned that the true extent of her lung injury due to measles is unknowable and it may be an end-stage process given the span of illness and the fact she truly is an outlier.” I don’t know what that last part means except that the clinical reasoning is unclear, and a broader “differential diagnosis” was not generated—at all.

I have long taught my ICU residents and fellows the two guideposts that governed my care plans for critically ill patients. The first is, “If what you are doing is working, keep doing what you are doing.” This means that if their clinical trajectory was one of slow or steady improvement, sending endless diagnostic tests or adding therapies just because they were still ill is most often unnecessary.

The second is, “If what you are doing is not working, change what you are doing.” In this situation, I would re-review all the clinical data and further explore any causes I might be missing, or I would add on treatments that, although not standard, might offer benefit. I would try anything that might turn someone around, as long as the risk/benefit profile was favorable (when someone is persistently deteriorating, risk/benefit ratios change rapidly such that almost any treatment that holds the possibility for benefit is worthwhile to prevent death).

With the above in mind, I was encouraged by the one instance in which I found the team “thinking outside the box” and trying a somewhat experimental treatment. They decided to give Daisy intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG). One trial from China in 2015 found that IVIG improved outcomes in children with severe pneumonia (not measles-specific),[55] and another study found that IVIG batches tested in 2021 contained measles-neutralizing antibodies.[56] While I respect that they tried something “off protocol,” the problem was that they did not give her the IVIG until Day 7, one day before death, and further, it was a treatment for the wrong disease.

Also, it was not until one day after re-starting antibiotics (Day 6) that they sent a sputum culture (Failure 4 - standard practice is to send a culture at the same time you start antibiotics). This was also the first time that the thought that she might have HAP appeared in the record. This thought led them to then change her antibiotic to one that is routinely used for possible HAP (ceftazidime). Problem: The adult guidelines would have dictated that they start Imipenem or Meropenem, but since they don’t have a pediatric guideline published yet, I will not count this as another failure.

Two days later, on Day 8, Daisy died of refractory hypoxemia - they could no longer get oxygen into her blood via her lungs despite numerous heroic mechanical ventilation maneuvers.

A few hours after Daisy’s death, the results from the sputum culture they sent on Day 6 was reported in the record and they were jaw-dropping: they showed 4+ growth of “E.Coli,” a nasty bug generally found only in our GI tract. If you are not familiar with what 4+ means, see this chart below, which explains the “semi-quantitative growth scale” for bacterial cultures:

It gets worse: next came the panel of susceptibilities to a slew of antibiotics: Ampicillin - Resistant, Ampicillin/Sulbactam - Resistant, Aztreonam - Resistant, Cefazolin - Resistant, Cefepime - Resistant, Cefoxitin - Resistant, Ceftriaxone - Resistant, Cefuroxime- Resistant, Ciprofloxacin - Resistant, Levofloxacin - Resistant, Piperacillin - Resistant, Tetracycline - Resistant, Tobramycin - Resistant, and finally and tragically, Ceftazidime- Resistant.

Daisy’s infection was sensitive to only a handful of antibiotics, one of which was meropenem, which is what would have been recommended by the Adult HAP Guidelines. Daisy had numerous risk factors for HAP (previous antibiotics, previous ICU, immunosuppressed, really sick, mechanically ventilated). In conclusion, an appropriate differential diagnosis for Daisy’s pneumonia did not occur until Day 5, and a sputum culture was sent too late for them to discover that the organism that Daisy was dying from was resistant to the antibiotic they had selected.

In the two hospital admissions Daisy underwent the week before the above “final” admission, the same pattern of error-prone care and missed opportunities to save her life was present.

Hospital Admission At UMC 2 Days Before Daisy’s Final ICU Stay

In this hospitalization, which began on March 21, 2025, 6 days before the above admission, Daisy presented with typical symptoms of pneumonia along with a chest x-ray showing a left lower lobe process, classic for bacterial pneumonia. Her admitting diagnosis was “viral illness with probable secondary bacterial pneumonia.” Just as in Kaley’s case at Covenant Hospital, UMC also decided to treat Daisy with the same inexplicable and standard-violating combination of ceftriaxone and vancomycin. Failure 1. However, Daisy did not suffer the same fate as Kaley because whatever bug was making her ill at this point appeared to be sensitive to this combination, plus her mycoplasma test later turned out to be negative. This was a near miss though.

Although the mother was unaware that Daisy had a subtle rash on her back on admission, the ER physician suspected it was measles and sent off a PCR test, which returned positive on the day of discharge. Daisy had measles too.

She was pretty sick lung-wise at first because she required admission to the ICU for oxygen support. However, her oxygen requirements decreased pretty quickly, her appetite improved, her rash began to “heal and fade,” and she was discharged home on oral antibiotics on Day 4. They prescribed her oral cefdinir, which was a fine choice, because she had responded to ceftriaxone in the hospital (a similar antibiotic).

Problem: in the discharge note, the doctor documented that “the parents appeared concerned” with the discharge and then reported that he/she had “reassured them.” Privately, Daisy’s father told me that was the same day her measles test came back positive, and he thinks that is why they sent her out so quickly. He felt she “didn’t look too good” and was concerned. It seems her father was correct based on the fact that she quickly began to get worse after arriving home such that, 2 days later, on March 26, 2025, she had to return to the ER to be readmitted with what turned out to be the fatal E.Coli pneumonia episode detailed above. It appears to me that Daisy was beginning to fall ill with E.Coli pneumonia as she was being discharged (resistant to the cefdinir she left with).

Admission to Covenant Hospital Two Days Prior to the Above UMC Admissions

I will now go back in time so I can provide the timeline from the beginning of Daisy’s illnesses.

Daisy had a history of chronic tonsillitis and was being scheduled for a tonsillectomy. A month before her death, as per Dr. Richard Bartlett, Daisy was diagnosed with mononucleosis and developed persistent fevers, which continued throughout the month, including during all her hospital admissions. Daisy’s father told me that at one point in the first few weeks, she was also diagnosed and treated for strep at another facility. Then, late in the third week of her illnesses, she was admitted to Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, stayed one night, and was discharged. Two days later, she was admitted to UMC for the first of her two hospital admissions there.

The reason her one-night stay at Covenant prior to her UMC admissions is relevant is because had she been appropriately treated there, she would never have ended up at UMC, and all of the above would have been avoided.

Briefly, on March 18, 2025, Daisy was at a community health clinic where they found her to require oxygen, so she was sent to the ER. She complained of difficulty breathing, abdominal pain, nausea, and inability to eat and was found with thrush on exam. She had a recent Tmax of 103.7. A CT scan of the abdomen and chest was done, which found splenomegaly and a left lower lobe pneumonia surrounded by a small amount of fluid (e.g., a pleural effusion).

Daisy was given IV ceftriaxone (no azithromycin), corticosteroids, a breathing treatment (albuterol), and a painkiller (Toradol). This occurred in the ER and I have not had access to the records from the ER, only the hospital stay. Daisy was then admitted to Covenant Children’s Hospital with the diagnosis of pneumonia with a “plan to transition to oral antibiotics in the a.m.” Failure 1 for the absence of azithromycin in her regimen. (Note: this is the third hospital at which this failure has happened in my reviews of these cases). No sputum culture was ordered, although a blood culture was. Failure 2.

Daisy was given oral amoxicillin and IV ceftriaxone (unnecessarily redundant coverage but not a failure), Motrin, and Tylenol (although not ideal, this is not a failure because, although the literature strongly supports the fact that fever reducers are harmful in children with infections, their use is so ubiquitous, it is unfortunately “the standard of care” and has been for decades). By the next day, Daisy’s oxygen levels had improved, and she was eating decently, so Covenant Children’s discharged her. The problem is that the only medication she was discharged with, per the record, was the anti-fungal drug nystatin for the thrush—no antibiotics for her pneumonia, despite the note in her record from the previous day clearly stating that the plan was to “ transition to oral antibiotics in the a.m.” Failure 3.

It is unclear to me what Daisy’s healthcare providers were thinking. The only possible defense is that someone forgot or was unaware of what the CT showed (it appears the ED is separate from the hospital), and instead went by the chest X-ray (CXR) they did in the hospital, which, tragically for Daisy, did not reveal the pneumonia, which is not surprising because CT’s are far superior at diagnosing pneumonia than CXR’s. It is also unclear why one would do a CXR on Daisy the same day she had a CT.

I suspect the CXR caused the problem because it only revealed bronchial wall thickening. It missed the lower lobe process seen on CT. The radiologist stated in his report that “bronchial wall thickening can be seen in asthma or viral illnesses.” This was likely the reason they did not discharge Daisy on antibiotics.

Summary Of All That Happened to Poor Daisy

Daisy became ill with mononucleosis a month before her death, soon followed by a strep infection and then thrush. Fevers persisted throughout, and then three weeks after the mono diagnosis, she was admitted to Covenant Children’s, diagnosed with left lower lobe pneumonia, and treated successfully. However, she was sent home without oral antibiotics. Unsurprisingly, two days later, she was admitted to UMC’s ICU with measles and a worsening of her left lower lobe pneumonia, which was again, despite errors in antibiotic selection, successfully treated; she was then discharged (on an appropriate antibiotic) despite concerns by her parents over her condition. The measles rash was clearing at this point. Then, two days after discharge, Daisy was re-admitted to UMC’s ICU with a worsening CXR (now involving her right lung) and severely worsened oxygenation. Although the ER gave Daisy broad antibiotic coverage, instead of suspecting a severe hospital-acquired bacterial pneumonia and sending a sputum culture, the ICU team’s presumptive diagnosis was that her lungs were failing from measles pneumonia, and so her antibiotics were stopped. She was instead given corticosteroids for “measles pneumonitis.” She continued to deteriorate despite their re-starting antibiotics on Day 4 and giving IVIG on Day 7. She died on Day 8 from what a few hours later was discovered to be a large amount of E.Coli in her sputum that was highly resistant to the antibiotics she was on.

I largely (and atypically for me) left out the many strong emotions I felt while writing this review. However, these cases are being widely and repeatedly portrayed as “measles deaths” by a biased press in an attempt to regenerate enthusiasm for vaccines by instilling exaggerated fears of measles which is, in most cases, benign and most complications can be easily treated with competent medical care. If the media continues this fear-mongering by using cases of non-measles deaths, public trust will plummet even further than it already has post-Covid.

Pierre Kory, MD, MPA

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[1] See https://edworkforce.house.gov/calendar/eventsingle.aspx?EventID=413207.

[2] See first embedded video in this Substack.

[3] Both of the children’s names have previously been made public prior to this letter.

[4] See, as only a few examples, Youri Benadjaoud et al., 2nd Child with Measles Dies in Texas, According to State Health Officials, ABC News, (Apr. 7, 2025), https://abcnews.com/Health/child-measles-dies-texas-hospital-officials/story?id=120539137 (“A second child in Texas has died of measles, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services, in a growing outbreak that has infected hundreds of people, the vast majority in unvaccinated communities in Texas…An unvaccinated school-aged child also died of measles in Texas in late February, according to the Texas Department of Health Services – the first measles death in a decade in the United States.”); Chantelle Lee, After Hundreds of Infections and Two Deaths, Texas Declares End to Its Measles Outbreak, Time Magazine (Aug. 18, 2025), https://time.com/7310528/measles-texas-outbreak/ (“Texas health officials declared on Monday that the measles outbreak that has sickened more than 700 people in the state and killed two children is over—though they warned that the threat posed by the disease is not…Two unvaccinated girls in Texas died of measles-related causes earlier this year.”); Stephanie Soucheray, Texas Announces Second Measles Death in Unvaccinated Child, CIDRAP (Apr. 7, 2025), https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/measles/texas-announces-second-measles-death-unvaccinated-child (“Texas officials yesterday announced the second death in its ongoing measles outbreak. The patient was an unvaccinated school-aged child who had been hospitalized in Lubbock…This marks the third death in the United States this year in patients with measles, with two fatalities confirmed in Texas children and one suspected death in an adult from New Mexico. All three patients were unvaccinated against the virus....”); Devi Shastri & Amanda Seitz, RFK Jr. Visits Epicenter of Texas Measles Outbreak After Death of Second Child Who Was Infected, AP News (Apr. 6, 2025), https://apnews.com/article/measles-texas-rfk-death-vaccine-4e28b0edf5cab47980b40b2d47f0ec50 (“U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited the epicenter of Texas’ still-growing measles outbreak on Sunday, the same day a funeral was held for a second young child who was not vaccinated and died from a measles-related illness....The second young child died Thursday from ‘what the child’s doctor described as measles pulmonary failure’, and did not have underlying health conditions, the Texas State Department of State Health Services said Sunday in a news release.”); Erika Edwards, Second Measles Death Reported in Texas Amid Fast-Growing Outbreak, NBC News (Apr. 6, 2025), https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/second-measles-death-texas-child-kennedy-rcna199882 (“‘The child was receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized,’ the statement said. ‘It is important to note that the child was not vaccinated against measles and had no known underlying health conditions. This unfortunate event underscores the importance of vaccination.’ It is the second pediatric death in a fast-growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in Texas alone since January.”); Parents of Unvaccinated 6-Year-Old Killed by Measles in Texas Speak out. They Still Are Anti-Vax, Yahoo News (Mar. 20, 2025), https://www.yahoo.com/news/parents-unvaccinated-6-old-killed-174054140.html (“The parents of an unvaccinated child who died in the Texas measles outbreak appeared in a video produced by the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense, where they continued to urge others to avoid vaccinating their kids.); As Measles Takes Toll on Kids, Anti-Vaxxers in US Have Change of Heart, The Straits Times (Apr. 20, 2026), https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/as-measles-takes-toll-on-kids-anti-vaxxers-in-us-have-change-of-heart (“Ms Katie Jennings was scrolling on her phone in April 2025 when a headline stopped her cold. A second unvaccinated child had died of measles in her home state of Texas. It was a tipping point for the 40-year-old stay-at-home mum….”).

[5] The Appendix provides the medical context surrounding these two specific deaths, whereas this letter provides the broader context about measles and the measles vaccine.

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/04/24/measles-cases-deaths-vaccine-rates-rfk-jr/; https://www.cdc.​gov/schoolvaxview/data/index.html (https://perma.cc/F5ZZ-MY72).

[7] https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/set-c/set-c-vaccine-deployment.pdf (https://perma.cc/8B2K-2QRW).

[8] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsrates1940_60.pdf (https://perma.cc/ADA2-EALC).

[9] Id.

[10] Id.

[11] Id.

[12] Id.

[13] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/VSUS_1962_2A.pdf (https://perma.cc/C86V-77GM).

[14] Id.

[15] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html (https://perma.cc/53PN-TWJK).

[16] https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20160111174808/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-215593 (https://perma.cc/ZCV9-DHR4).

[17] https://web.archive.org/web/20190615081539/https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/e/reported-cases.pdf (https://perma.cc/7GPK-32AC).

[18] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/compendia/statab/83ed.html (https://perma.cc/LH8X-EA4M).

[19] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26122188/ (https://perma.cc/6TJD-5FNZ).

[20] Id.

[21] Id.

[22] Id.

[23] https://www.cdc.gov/heart-disease/data-research/facts-stats/ (https://perma.cc/Q97R-PEAD).

[24] https://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/cdc-reported-cases-and-deaths-m-vaccine-preventable-diseases​-3.pdf (https://perma.cc/CY6Z-BLN3).

[25] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16406019/ (https://perma.cc/RHD3-986B). See Table 2 and in the Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NHL) column divide the odds ratio 1 (never had measles) with .6 (had measles) which results in a 66% increased risk, and in the Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (HL) column divide the odds ratio 1 (never had measles) with .3 (had measles) which results in a 233% increased risk.

[26] https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/hodg.html (https://perma.cc/2EAC-QQ36); https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/​html/nhl.html (https://perma.cc/HP59-5T3F).

[27] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4574047/ (https://perma.cc/4425-2ME4).

[28] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16490323/ (https://perma.cc/B64P-YRV3); https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html​/ovary.html (https://perma.cc/MP42-HMUM).

[29] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9824838/ (https://perma.cc/Y7BM-JK5W).

[30] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/699409.

[31] Id.

[32] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19255001/ (https://perma.cc/FZ5Q-74MY); https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov​/16854347/ (https://perma.cc/D9L7-NX5W); https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4061437/ (https://perma.cc/J329-YLH8).

[33] https://icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Berkowicz-Art78package_rr.pdf (https://perma.cc/U32Q-RJEG).

[34] Id.

[35] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29398276/ (https://perma.cc/CZ2B-YENJ).

[36] Id.

[37] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23256739/ (https://perma.cc/BAX9-5H42).

[38] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17339511/ (https://perma.cc/9AME-3V7P).

[39] https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n272 (https://perma.cc/5BKU-E2WU).

[40] https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/set-c/set-c-vaccine-deployment.pdf (https://perma.cc/X5LH-H2HV).

[41] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsus/vsrates1940_60.pdf (https://perma.cc/J3MU-N9UP) (measles death rate in the U.S. in 1900 was 13.3 per 100,000 individuals); https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/‌1900/​volume-1/volume-1-p5.pdf (https://perma.cc/G3UH-BMYW) (total U.S. population in 1900 was 76,303,387). These figures result in approximately 10,150 deaths from measles in the U.S. in 1900.

[42] https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/set-c/set-c-vaccine-deployment.pdf (https://perma.cc/X5LH-H2HV).

[43] https://sirillp.com/MMR-clinical-trial (https://perma.cc/RRE8-WDQ5).

[44] Id.

[45] Because viruses multiply in cells, living cells are used to grow viruses for vaccine production. The rubella virus used in MMR-II is grown on the cultured cell line of an aborted fetus, listed as “WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts” in the ingredients of MMR-II as portions of these cells end up in each vial of MMR-II. https://web.archive.org/web/20241120002123/https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines‌/pubs/pinkbook/downloads/appendices/b/excipient-table-2.pdf. As explained by a company that sells this aborted fetal cell line: “WI-38 cell line is the first human diploid cell line to be used in human vaccine preparation. WI-38 cells were isolated from the lung tissue of a 3-month-old, female, embryo.” https://www.atcc.org/products/ccl-75 (https://perma.cc/H6XR-QFXN). During Dr. Plotkin’s deposition, I asked: “Isn’t it true that MMR II contains approximately 150 nanograms cells substrate double-strand DNA and single-strand DNA per dose purposefully fragmented to approximately 215 base pairs in length?” Dr. Plotkin answered: “Yeah, that’s probably correct, yes.” https://icandecide.org/plotkintranscript/ at p. 328 (https://perma.cc/7WCZ-G2TC). See also https://soundchoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/epidemiologic-molecular-relationship-vaccine-manufacture-autism-prevalence.pdf (https://perma.cc/2E38-QEYA); https://pubmed​.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26103708/ (https://perma.cc/E6TH-2LK8) (See Table 3, reflecting an average of 142 nanograms of single-stranded DNA and 35 nanograms of double-stranded DNA in the rubella vaccine component of each dose of MMR-II). Doing the math, 150 nanograms of double-stranded DNA broken down into 215 base pair fragments equals approximately 646 billion pieces of human DNA from an aborted fetal cell line in each vial of MMR-II. https://www.technologynetworks.com/tn/tools/copynumbercalculator. Doing this same math for 150 nanograms of single-stranded DNA equals 1.3 trillion pieces inside each vial of MMR-II. Id. In addition to the human DNA, there is also an unspecified amount of human cellular debris in each dose of MMR-II. See also https://thehighwire.com/ark-videos/aborted-fetal-tissue-in-vaccines/.

[46] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/images/schedule1983s.jpg (https://perma.cc/FL6E-6PSZ).

[47] https://web.archive.org/web/20180627180022/https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/vis/vis-statements/mmrv.pdf

[48] https://www.sirillp.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2018-MMR-VIS-9623e9fb15ea27e5d007df8a106e1f79.pdf (2018 version) (https://perma.cc/XU2X-ZZY4) compared to https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/current-vis/downloads/mmr.pdf (current version) (https://perma.cc/HY67-Z2BA).

[49] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7192400/#sec20 (https://perma.cc/JA5Y-Y94M); https://pmc.ncbi.​nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/7192400/bin/piz010_suppl_supplementary_materials.docx.

[50] Compare Section 6.1 of MMR’s package insert https://www.fda.gov/media/189623/download?attachment with Table 6 in the Supplementary Materials https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7192400/#sec20 (https://perma.cc/JA5Y-Y94M); https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/instance/7192400/bin/piz010_suppl_supplementary_materials.docx.

[51] See

Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings

Credentials And Curriculum Vitae of Dr. Pierre Kory, MD, MPA

BRIEF OF EVIDENCE - PIERRE KORY…

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a year ago · 43 likes · 13 comments · Pierre Kory, MD, MPA

[52]https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/shows/good-morning-chd/breaking-news-doctors-review-texas-measles-medical-records/.

[53] https://www.rebuildmedicine.com/.

[54]https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/03/21/measles-death-parents-child-vaccine/82588858007/.

[55]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6659095/.

[56]https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/pediatrics/articles/10.3389/fped.2021.762793/full.

My exploration of the ancient texts has changed how I think about Asao Shimanishi.

At first, I went into the texts looking for insights into rock, fire, water, dissolution, and extraction, suspecting that a material operation was hidden within symbolic language. But as I moved deeper into The Six Keys of Eudoxus, I uncovered another set of descriptions that did not relate to process, but instead to the person. The text outlined the steps to follow, but it also described the character of someone capable of completing them.

That is what this post is about. I will not be attempting to decode another text from antiquity, and will instead be taking a closer look at the places where the ancient portrait of the “Wise Artist” seems to describe Shimanishi with unusual precision: his privacy, persistence, reverence, failures, and willingness to submit himself to a long, hidden discipline.

One of the most striking passages in all of The Six Keys occurs in the Second Key:

“He who knows how to sublime the Stone philosophically, justly deserves the name of a philosopher, since he knows the Fire of the Wise, which is the only instrument which can work this sublimation. No philosopher has ever openly revealed this Secret Fire, and this powerful agent, which works all the wonders of the Art: he who shall not understand it, and not know how to distinguish it by the characters whereby it is described, ought to make a stand here, and pray to God to make it clear to him; for the knowledge of this great Secret is rather a gift of Heaven than a Light acquired by the natural force of reasoning; let him, nevertheless, read the writings of the philosophers; let him meditate; and, above all, let him pray: there is no difficulty which may not in the end be made clear by Work, Meditation, and Prayer.”

I have read this passage many times, and it moves me more deeply each time because it points to a part of the journey that work or study cannot overcome. Yes, one must read, work, meditate, observe, and remain devoted to the work. But Eudoxus says openly that knowledge of the Secret Fire can only come as “a gift of Heaven.”

The Sixth Key then shows what that truth looks like inside the work itself:

“The Sixth Key teaches the Multiplication of the Stone, by the reiteration of the same operation, which consists but in opening and shutting, dissolving and coagulating, imbibing and drying; whereby the virtues of the Stone are infinitely augmentable.”

“I should much bewail, if, like me, after having known the true matter, you should spend fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation, without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice which it encloses in its bosom, for want of knowing the secret fire of the wise . . .”

“But I give you notice, moreover, that even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career.”

“. . . which makes to run out of this plant (dry and withered in appearance) a water which wets not the hands, and which by a magical union . . . is dissolved into a viscous water—into a mercurial liquor, which is the beginning, the foundation, and the Key of our Art.”

The work succeeds only through repetition, patience, failure, return, and a willingness to remain with the same rock long after partial successes have failed.

Reading that, I began to think of the text as a description of a journey that selects for only a certain type of man. Those who lack patience abandon the work. Those who stay are changed by it.

The writings can point, warn, and test, but they do not carry the practitioner to the end. He has to handle the materials, get them wrong, return to them, and remain humble enough for insight to be received.

The Wise Artist

What affected me most is the extent to which the text’s portrait of the “Wise Artist” appears to describe Shimanishi. Everything I have learned about him seems to fit: intensely private, never seeking recognition, prayerful, and almost unimaginably persistent.

Eudoxus knows what it takes and expresses pity, “I should much bewail,” for a man who, after discovering the correct starting rock, “having known the true matter,” then “spent fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation,” “without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice,” for lack of knowledge of the “Secret Fire.”

Shimanishi lived almost that exact pattern. He worked with rock, heat, water, and acids through repetition, failure, refinement, and return for nearly fifteen years. He had one stone, one challenge, and, like Eudoxus, the discipline to remain with it until it was overcome.

Other aspects of Shimanishi’s journey deepen the resemblance. I have repeatedly been told that Shimanishi spoke of his discovery with reverence, not ownership, describing it as “a gift from our Creator.” At the only international conference he attended that I know of, during a lecture, he is said to have remarked, “Working with this material is like working with the Angels,” which is not the language of a typical scientist.

If the Great Work is, as Eudoxus says, “a gift of Heaven,” then The Six Keys is describing not only a sequence of operations, but also the sort of person who can carry such a sequence through to completion: one marked by discipline, reverence, and a willingness to labor for years without recognition.

By that measure, Shimanishi character astonishingly fits. Even more striking is that he never publicly revealed his “Secret Fire,” as the operational details remain known only to the men of the Shimanishi-Kaken company he left behind. That fact, too, places him within the circle that the 17th-century Eudoxus describes: “No philosopher has ever openly revealed this Secret Fire. “And that is only the first convergence.

Another is the path he describes. Given that The Six Keys was never translated into Japanese, Shimanishi could never have used it as a guide, let alone understood it if he tried. He instead began with nothing more than a basic understanding that acids could dissolve certain minerals from rock and a hope that those minerals could be rendered active in water. From there, he worked alone, without a theory and without any assurance that the work would succeed. If these texts describe real processes, and I believe they do, then Shimanishi appears to have arrived at them independently, through experiment, devotion, and sustained attention to a single rock.

The Six Keys of Eudoxus describes the procedure. Shimanishi independently devised one that matched it.

Sternbuchta’s Letter on the True Stone of Wisdom describes the properties of a substance. Shimanishi produced a substance with those properties.

Both Eudoxus and Sternbuchta describe the character of a practitioner who might succeed, one shaped by long obscurity, long labor, and long attention to a problem that refuses an easy solution. Shimanishi’s life fits that description with extraordinary precision.

Any one of these points could be questioned in isolation, but taken together, they add up to something much harder to dismiss.

What makes this even more striking is that the other insights and convergences we identified moved in two directions. Our scientific research helped us progress through the ancient texts, while the texts themselves suggested connections that shaped our understanding of modern science. Even now, I am not sure I could fully separate which parts of the final Rock–Water Circuit Theory came from the modern scientific literature and which from the texts of antiquity.

At this point, I do not think these convergences can be argued as forced connections, a retrospective construction, or a self-reinforcing interpretive framework. The consistency with which the texts describe the science, the process, the product, and the person points to something way more powerful. It suggests that these texts documented real knowledge of a material operation, what it produces, and the type of person required to bring it to completion, even if it was preserved in symbolic and guarded form.

That, to me, is the true significance of what has happened on this journey. I do not know how often, or if ever, history has presented a reciprocal illumination between ancient writing and modern practice. I only know that these documents appear to be real records of a scientific and material understanding that long predated the language we would now use to describe it.

What these chapters suggest is that “the labyrinth” described in alchemy has, in fact, been successfully navigated before, both in the older world and in modern times. But there is something even more powerful than these convergences: at one point, one of the ancient texts altered the course of MB’s life.

When the Text Entered the Work

Long before I entered this work, MB had once attempted to solve the same problem Shimanishi had already solved. He was introduced to Themarox in 2004, and soon after, he started a business selling it to farmers and at health and wellness events.

Soon after, he was forced to make a decision that put his business in peril. He cut off contact with his only source of Themarox because he could no longer tolerate the man’s dishonesty and unreliability. As a result, MB found himself with little choice but to attempt the extraction himself.

Working with vermiculite sourced from Canada, he applied the same general principles and succeeded, at least in part, in producing an aqueous mineral extract viable enough to sustain his business.

However, there were discrepancies he could not ignore. The color was different. The behavior was different. Most importantly, it did not clarify water as the original. He initially understood these differences as due to variation in mineral composition, especially iron, and continued because what he had made was real, useful, and, often enough, validated by others.

Then, almost two years later, an acquaintance showed him The Six Keys of Eudoxus.

He told me that as he started to read it, the First and Second Keys immediately struck him as describing a real process, one he recognized as corresponding to both Shimanishi’s work and his own efforts. But there was one line that cut through everything else with unusual power: “one must make use of the citrine Mercury,” together with the warning “not to be deceived on this point.”

That word—citrine—stopped him. The color of what he had made was clear. And he knew the color of Shimanishi’s extract: golden-yellow. He understood the passage to mean that, among the possible liquors or “Mercuries,” one had to begin with the correct one, and that it had to be golden-yellow.

Another line struck him just as strongly: “even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career . . .” He read those phrases as warnings—not simply about error, but about direction.

In that moment, although he knew his extract was useful, he began to doubt its truth.

He concluded that what he had produced, however real and however effective, was a partial approximation of the substance described in the texts, and that it was not the one he should commit his efforts to. Out of conviction, he stopped selling it.

What makes MB’s story especially striking is that his trajectory runs in the opposite direction from the one in The Six Keys. The Keys are written for someone trying to discover the “Secret Fire.” MB, by contrast, had first come into contact with the true substance through Shimanishi’s work, knew what the Secret Fire was, and then he attempted to reproduce it himself. In that sense, the text did not lead him toward the Golden Elixir. It led him back to it.

The author, in that Sixth and last key, as he reminisces on his life, describes the same situation;

“But I give you notice, moreover, that even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career.”

Even after the practitioner comes to know something of the Secret Fire, he will fail in his “first career.” MB had decided to stop working with the material rather than attempt to refine his method further. That is when he reached out to Shimanishi Kaken in Japan. From the outside, that decision could have looked like a retreat. In reality, it was realignment: a willingness to accept that he had come close to the process described in the texts, but had not yet arrived at the true substance.

That decision brought MB back to the original source. He reached out to Shimanishi-Kaken, began importing Themarox directly from Japan, and for a brief period the work seemed ready to enter the world more widely. Then came the next echo.

The Fifteen-Year Echo

What first appeared in Shimanishi’s life began to echo again in MB’s life.

Soon after he began importing Themarox directly from Shimanishi Kaken, MB enjoyed immense early success. Then, suddenly, in 2010, his business was nearly destroyed by the launch of a coordinated disinformation campaign. What followed, in his own words, were fifteen years of obscurity, the same obscurity that befell both Eudoxus and Shimanishi: years of persistence, study, and quiet labor.

He was able to make a living, and the business grew modestly over that period, almost entirely within Amish farming communities across the Midwest, where farmers came to value Rock-Water for what they saw it do in their fields: stronger crops, less pest pressure, and a resilience they considered essential to their agriculture. But he never regained the wider distribution and awareness that he had once achieved.

Similarly, the figure described in the Six Keys was not a man at the center of things. By the nature of the work, he was set apart, working outside recognition, outside status, and often in prolonged isolation. This recurring pattern in the lives of Eudoxus, Shimanishi, and MB seems, within these texts, a requirement of the work itself.

The same is true of companionship. Sternbuchta states it plainly:

“. . . to maintain you and your companion (because one alone cannot do the Work) then the thing becomes idle.”

That line immediately made me recall a moment in the first months of our collaboration, when MB told me that a few years earlier, he had told a colleague he needed someone who could help him move the work forward, someone, interestingly enough, whose background and character were nearly identical to mine. Our first meeting together, a dinner, ran for hours. Since that first meeting, we have been connected daily, if not several times daily.

Later, as the work deepened in complexity, breadth, and difficulty, I came to feel the same thing from the other side. One day, after calling him to discuss a highly nuanced and esoteric connection to a scientific mechanism we had recently discovered, a sudden insight came upon me that I shared with him: there was no other person in the world I could have had that conversation with.

MB laughed, reminding me that for almost the entire twenty years before our collaboration, he, too, had had no one who could truly engage with the material at the level his work had brought him to. We came to this from different directions, with different training and different instincts. Yet as I write these words, I cannot help feeling that the paths leading to our eventual intersection had been set long before.

Our work did not move in one direction. He would pour out decades of accumulated observations, intuitions, and partial syntheses, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in fragments, and they would immediately trigger questions that sent me into both modern and ancient literature. What I found there would then force us to clarify, defend, expand, and ultimately connect the insights that he had long held, while at many other moments my research would uncover a missing link that fit directly into one of his older lines of thought.

As the book drew toward its close, I was struck to find that this kind of partnership is also stated in The Six Keys: “without the help of a faithful friend, one remains undoubtedly in this labyrinth.”

Both the Letter from Sternbuchta and The Six Keys suggest that, at some point, the work may require another person—someone capable of seeing, clarifying, or correcting what the solitary practitioner cannot.

MB then recalled an old line from Proverbs that he had long held: “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” The word "iron" hit hard for me, literally, not metaphorically, because it described a foundational aspect of our work. We had already spent months tracing the centrality of iron in the Rock–Water Circuit, from Earth’s core to ISAW, and in the deep-to-surface gradient that feeds life through mineralized water, so to encounter that same word at the point where the texts speak of companionship and sharpening again struck me as more than incidental.

Then there is a coincidence that MB and I both found amusing: my name, Pierre, literally means rock, while his, Matthew, means gift of God. Forgive me for pressing the connection too hard, but I get a kick out of the fit between our names and two conditions that seem to recur throughout The Six Keys: a source rock and something received.

When I Entered the Pattern

I should say something here that I am not entirely comfortable saying, but I do think the path I have found myself on bears mentioning, because it now seems to me to repeat, in its own much smaller way, the same pattern I have been tracing in the lives of Eudoxus, Shimanishi, and MB.

By the time I reached this chapter, I had spent nearly nine months almost entirely inside this work. What began as an intrigue with Shimanishi’s extract widened into a much larger journey through mineral science, water, agriculture, geology, and hydrology, and only then narrowed into alchemy, where the work became more demanding still—an extended cycle of reading, failed interpretations, returns to the same passages, and a kind of fixation on a single problem that did not release its hold.

What is relevant here is that this stretch of work has been unlike any other period in my life. I do not think I can assert that strongly enough. I have already lived through a highly demanding academic and medical career—two decades in one of the most intense specialties in medicine, years of teaching, writing, publishing, and working at a pace that even my ICU colleagues and superiors remarked on. That was followed by five years of uninterrupted pressure during Covid, trying to save lives while fighting institutions that weren’t, and who paid me back by ending my “system career” and revoking my three specialty certifications.

Yet, these nine months required an unprecedented amount of labor and concentration. Outside of seeing patients and trying to preserve time with my wife, I was almost continuously at my desk, reading, researching, writing, and returning to the same material. It was narrower, more isolating, and, in many ways, far more consuming than anything I have done before.

Another aspect of this labor is that it wasn't driven by speed, cleverness, or by expertly reading, understanding, and organizing information, as my typical work has unfolded in the past. For this, I was forced to stay with the material for a long time, asking the same questions again and again, reconstructing collapsed theories and failed interpretations. The easier readings and early theories came together quickly. Only then did deeper meanings and more sound theories begin to emerge. From Volcanoes to Vitality is undergoing its 5th revision currently, driven by the iterative developments of its core conceptual framework.

What I am trying to say is that, at a certain point, I began to feel trapped in the same pattern of work that the work itself was describing.

I am not claiming equivalence with Shimanishi, nor with the author of The Six Keys. But the path described in these texts—prolonged effort, isolation, and repeated failure before finally emerging—began to look like a requirement for the work itself.

Note to readers:

What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, the kind of revered substance described across numerous cultures and traditions as a “Golden Elixir”: rock opened, minerals rendered mobile, and water transformed through contact with that chemistry.

Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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We now arrive at the third and final alchemical text in this series of posts. For those unsettled by this brief foray into the Hermetic canon, take heart: this is the last stop before we turn toward Scripture, which, I suspect, will prove to be the deeper well.

Before we continue, a brief clarification. Many of the Western alchemists who preserved and worked with these texts, some of whom went on to become founders of modern science, were themselves deeply Christian and saw no contradiction between their faith and the study of nature in this way. They saw Hermes as a symbolic or historical voice rather than a figure of worship (just as I do). They thought of him as one who might preserve observations about creation. Their work, as I see it, was not an attempt to replace God, but to better understand what He had made.

With that said, let's move forward.

If The Emerald Tablet gave the symbolic picture of the cycle on Earth, and the Letter from Sternbuchta gave the portrait of the essence brought forth within it, The Six Keys turns to the work itself: the sequence of openings, dissolutions, and separations through which that essence is brought forth from stone.

These posts have been trying to bring a single structure into view: the recursive, generative process by which mineral chemistry and water produce, sustain, and renew life on Earth. It is the same process that powers biology in all its forms, the same process at work in Nature and, when understood, in Art. Each text approaches that process from a different angle. In this post, we enter the labyrinth as deeply as we can, because The Six Keys is where the sequence itself is most carefully hidden: the Work in Art, described in guarded symbolic language.

The First Key: The Trap of Literal Reading

Although presented last in this series, The Six Keys of Eudoxus proved to be exactly what its title suggests: not just a key, but the key through which the rest of the Hermetic canon began to resolve for me.

A brief note on the history of The Six Keys of Eudoxus. The text appears to date to the late seventeenth century, and scholars have long noted its resemblance to writings attributed to Eirenaeus Philalethes, the alchemical pseudonym widely associated with George Starkey.

Starkey was an American born in Bermuda, educated at Harvard, and later active in London in the 1650s. Notably, he was there during the same period as Robert Boyle, of Boyle’s law, one of the founders of modern chemistry, and a central figure in arguing that scientific inquiry and theology were not in conflict but deeply aligned. I bolded that point, given some of the concerns readers have raised about my exploration of alchemical texts.

While no definitive attribution can be made, the text most likely emerged from the same Western European alchemical world, carrying the same preoccupation with guarding the method using symbolic compression and deliberate misdirection that defines that period of the Hermetic tradition.

What cost me a long time to figure out was that, despite its title, The Six Keys are not six steps in a procedure. They are instead six symbolic vantage points onto one underlying process, repeating it in shifting language so the reader cannot lock onto it too cleanly.

For that reason, I will not walk through all six Keys in equal detail. I will begin by moving slowly through the First Key, with our role-grammar already in place and with a quick review of Shimanishi’s method.

Shimanishi’s process began with vermiculite, a weathered form of biotite, or “black mica” — an iron-rich mineral known to contain an unusually broad range of elements. In Nature, sulfate-bearing rainwater slowly transforms biotite into vermiculite, making it more porous, hydrated, and reactive than its parent stone, whose minerals remain tightly bound within stacked aluminosilicate sheets. Shimanishi then dried the vermiculite to remove residual moisture before exposing it to sulfuric acid under carefully controlled conditions, a method that took him nearly fifteen years to perfect. The result was a golden-colored, mineral-dense aqueous solution he called Themarox or “Rock Extract.”

For brevity, I include only the First Key below; for the complete document, readers can consult the text here.

THE FIRST KEY

1. The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up: this is it which knows how to extract the seed out of the body, and which forms the Stone of the philosophers by the conjunction of the spirit with the body—of sulphur with mercury.

2. Hermes has manifestly demonstrated the operation of this First Key by these words: In the caverns of the metals there is hidden the Stone, which is venerable, bright in colour, a mind sublime, and an open sea.

3. This Stone has a bright glittering: it contains a Spirit of a sublime original; it is the Sea of the Wise, in which they angle for their mysterious Fish.

4. But the operations of the three works have a great deal of analogy one to another, and the philosophers do designedly speak in equivocal terms, to the end that those who have not the Lynx’s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost in this labyrinth, from whence it is very hard to get out. In effect, when one imagines that they speak of one work, they often treat of another.

5. Take heed, therefore, not to be deceived here; for it is a truth that in each work the Wise Artist ought to dissolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven’s head, whiten the Black, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven.

6. Hence, Hermes says, What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art. Consider that it is by separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that our astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at this shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.

The Key to The Six Keys

Recall that in Chapters III and IV, I introduced the core scientific insights into iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) chemistry—the chemistry that powers the Rock–Water Circuit. That framework describes a planetary energy system that is self-renewing: a process that generates, sustains, and continually recreates the conditions for life. It was a detailed understanding of that chemistry and how it cycles through the Earth that allowed us to construct an interpretive key for decoding these texts.

To interpret The Six Keys, one crucial aspect of the relationship between the two mineral forms at the center of the Rock–Water Circuit must be understood: only Nature can transform biotite into vermiculite over geologic time; no human can. It is only after that transformation—after black mica has been weathered into vermiculite—that the broad range of minerals it contains can be released. If an alchemist—referred to in the text as a philosopher—began the Work with black mica itself, he would never succeed.

That point matters because, across centuries of Hermetic alchemy, no universally recognized instance of the substance described in The Six Keys or Letter from Sternbuchta has ever been established. It is my belief that this failure was not accidental, but the result of deliberate misdirection in The Six Keys.

This text cost me months because it appears simple, but it defeats anyone who reads it as such. To wit, the First Key begins with a brazen deception in the first line:

“The First Key is that which opens the dark prisons in which the Sulphur is shut up.”

Here, the text suggests that the alchemist should aim to open black mica, “the dark prisons,” in order to access the reactive, redox-capable mineral chemistry locked inside, “the Sulphur.” But that first opening is humanly impossible. It belongs to Nature alone.

“This Stone has a bright glittering.”

At first glance, this line seems to point toward a lustrous mineral—something like black mica with its characteristic shimmer. But that reading does not hold cleanly as the passage develops. Vermiculite, especially when exfoliated or reduced to finer particles, also presents as a glittering, gold-white material. The ambiguity is not accidental. The text shifts its referent, allowing the same word— “Stone”—to point to different forms at different stages of the work. What appears to be a simple description begins to function as a moving target, one that resists a fixed, literal reading.

“But the operations of the three works have a great deal of analogy one to another, and the philosophers do designedly speak in equivocal terms.”

Although this line announces that there are three steps in the process, “the operations of the three works,” the steps will be difficult to interpret because the descriptions overlap. In my reading, this is an explicit admission that the same process will be described in shifting language, and that the ambiguity is intentional.

The warning then sharpens:

“To the end that those who have not the Lynx’s eyes may pursue wrong, and be lost in this labyrinth, from whence it is very hard to get out. In effect, when one imagines that they speak of one work, they often treat of another.”

“Lynx’s eyes” in alchemy refers to those with the ability to discern what is true from what is false. Without that capacity, the reader cannot tell which step is being described, what material is being acted upon, or when the text has shifted from one operation to another. That is how an alchemist reader can quickly become “lost in this labyrinth.”

The text then returns to again deceptively suggesting the alchemist begin his work with black mica, all the while warning him not to be deceived, yet stating it is a truth:

“Take heed, therefore, not to be deceived here; for it is a truth that in each work the Wise Artist ought to dissolve the body with the spirit; he must cut off the Raven’s head, whiten the Black, and vivify the White; yet it is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven.”

Read this way, the passage appears, for the first time, to encode—however cryptically—the three distinct and sequential steps in the process:

(1) The weathering of biotite (black mica) into vermiculite—“cut off the head of the Black Dragon.”
(2) The separation of the stone from its mineral essence using sulfuric acid—“whiten the black.”
(3) The emergence of that essence in active aqueous form—“vivify the white.”

“It is properly in the First operation that the Wise Artist cuts off the head of the Black Dragon and of the Raven.”

Just as it warned it would, the text repeats the misleading instruction that the Artist must begin by opening the closed mineral body himself, while naming it in overlapping forms, “cuts off the head of the Black Dragan and of the Raven,” which can make the reader think two different starting materials are required.

Again, any alchemist who began the work with black mica, trying by Art to perform what only Nature can do, would fail every time. Shimanishi did not. He began with vermiculite, starting only after Nature had completed the first step in the process.

Although the First Key contains a good deal of deliberate misdirection, the later Keys start to offer clearer and more faithful guidance. From the Third Key:

“Hence, Hermes says, What is born of the Crow is the beginning of this Art.”

This is a clear instruction that the Artist must begin not with black mica itself, but with what is “born of the Crow”: vermiculite weathered from black mica.

In one instance, the connection to Shimanishi’s method is unusually precise. When the text speaks of a “Secret Fire” that dissolves the Stone “without violence,” it mirrors his discovery that vermiculite must first be air-dried; if sulfuric acid is applied while moisture remains, the material shatters violently.

Later in the Third Key, the clearest illustration of the first step appears:

“But, further, that you may not be deceived with the terms of the Compound, I will tell you that the philosophers have two sorts of compounds. The first is the compound of Nature, whereof I have spoken in the First Key; for it is Nature which makes it in a manner, incomprehensible to the Artist, who does nothing but lend a hand to Nature by the adhibition of external things, by the means of which she brings forth and produces this admirable compound. The second is the compound of Art; it is the Wise man who makes it by the secret union of the fixed with the volatile, perfectly conjoined with all prudence, which cannot be acquired but by the lights of a profound philosophy.”

Here, the text more clearly points to the rock the Artist must start with. “The first is the compound of Nature,” suggesting that the Artist leave that to Nature, and instead start with vermiculite, the rock weathered from black mica, “in a manner incomprehensible to the Artist.” “The second is the compound of Art,” describing the mineral essence produced when the alchemist takes the vermiculite and then applies “the volatile,” i.e., sulfuric acid.

Each time I return to the final line of that passage, it resonates more deeply. I cannot help but see in it a description of Shimanishi—the “Wise Artist”—whose determination and persistence kept him working alone for fifteen years until he could “perfectly conjoin” sulfuric acid with vermiculite, arriving at a method that, in the text’s words, “cannot be acquired but by the lights of a profound philosophy.” We will return to what is meant by the “lights of a profound philosophy” in the next post.

Now to the First Key, to one of its most beautifully symbolic passages:

“Consider that it is by separation of the black, foul, and stinking fume of the Blackest Black that our astral, white, and resplendent Stone is formed, which contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican. It is at this First Purification of the Stone, and at this shining whiteness, that the work of the First Key is ended.”

The “blackest black” corresponds to what is driven off or separated during the process, while the “white and resplendent Stone” is the extracted essence itself—clarified, active, and no longer confined within the mineral lattice. For the first time, a hint of the mineral composition it will contain appears: “It contains in its veins the blood of the Pelican.”

In ordinary life, blood is inseparable from iron, which gives it its redness and underlies its power to carry oxygen. In alchemical imagery, the pelican is a figure of nourishment through blood. Thus, the phrase naturally points to an iron-rich, life-bearing essence: a mineral extract whose redox-active core helps explain why the alchemists spoke of it in terms of blood, nourishment, and vitality.

That suggestion becomes even more striking when set beside Shimanishi’s extract. After sulfur, iron is the second-highest concentrated active mineral in Themarox. Shimanishi appears to have understood that iron was central to many of the properties the extract displayed, as he reportedly spent twenty years searching across multiple continents for the most iron-rich mica he could find. In the end, the richest source he identified lay not halfway across the world, but in Japan, within two hours of his home, in Fukushima Prefecture.

A Second Reading

As in the last chapter, I will leave the reader with a cluster of repetitive descriptions appearing throughout The Six Keys, all circling one of the “three works” or steps. By this point, they should begin to sound less like separate instructions than like recurring views of the same operation.

For instance, there are numerous descriptions of a liquid solution of dissolved minerals being extracted from vermiculite via the actions of sulfuric acid; here, I include only three of the many I found:

• “Extract the seed from the body”
• “Ought the Wise Artist dissolve the Body with the Spirit”
• “Dissolution of the Body into its water”

Then:

“This is the Secret Fire which forms the Stone of the Philosophers by the conjunction of the Spirit with the Body, of Sulfur with Mercury.”

For MB and me, the phrase “of Sulfur with Mercury” was the most difficult line we encountered in alchemy. We initially read “Sulfur” and “Mercury” as materials: first as sulfated rainwater acting on black mica, then as sulfuric acid acting on vermiculite. Both readings worked locally but failed as we carried them forward.

The difficulty resolved only when we stopped treating these terms as substances and began reading them as functions.

In that framework, “Sulfur” does not name sulfuric acid itself, but its activating function—its capacity to penetrate, react, and transform. “Mercury” does not name a separate material, but its mediating function—its capacity to dissolve, mobilize, and carry.

Read this way, the phrase no longer describes two substances joined together, but two roles performed by the same agent. It is sulfuric acid acting simultaneously as activator and mediator, “the Spirit” working upon the “Body” to release the mineral essence.

Our understanding of that line is what ultimately led us out of the labyrinth.

When the Three Came Into Focus

At the outset of this sequence of chapters, I proposed that these three texts were not saying the same thing in the same way, but rather describing the same underlying chemistry and process from different angles. Having now walked through them one by one, that conclusion can be stated more definitively.

The Emerald Tablet gives the larger natural order: the recurring cycle by which mineral chemistry, water, energy, and life remain linked across ascent, descent, nourishment, and return. Letter from Sternbuchta gives the portrait of the essence once brought forth: its value, its multiplication, its restorative power, and the kind of language required to describe it without exposing it too openly. The Six Keys of Eudoxus gives the guarded work itself: the sequence, misdirections, and operations by which that essence is brought forth from stone.

Taken together, the three texts do not merely echo one another. They form a coherent structure. The Tablet gives the cycle in Nature. Sternbuchta gives the essence in view. Eudoxus gives the steps in Art. That was the interpretive framework I proposed at the outset. What these chapters have attempted to show is how and why that reading holds.

But now that the chemistry in these texts has been decoded, it is time to turn to another kind of knowledge they preserve: not about minerals, water, and extraction, but about the human beings drawn into such work, shaped by it, and, in rare cases, those who brought it to its end. Seeing that side of the texts hit me harder than I was prepared for, just as their insights into chemistry had. It mapped first onto Shimanishi, the modern figure I had already come to regard as a man of historic importance whose achievement history had largely missed.

And then, more disturbingly, it began to map onto MB and, however reluctantly I say it, onto me as well.

Note to readers: What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, what these texts described centuries ago. Aurmina (“golden mineral essence”) is a diluted form of that extract, and part of my effort to bring this mineral chemistry into practical use. For those interested in encountering the work beyond the page, Aurmina is its modern expression.

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Yesterday, I introduced The Emerald Tablet as a record of Nature’s cycle. What follows is the next step in that sequence.

Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom by Theosophia Sternbuchta gives a portrait of the essence brought forth from within that cycle. Her letter does not primarily describe how that essence is extracted. It describes what it is like once brought forth: a hidden thing drawn from stone, activated, multiplied, and rendered capable of restoration.

The letter appears to originate in the late seventeenth century and was later printed in Berlin in 1779. MB first encountered it in 2006, when an acquaintance passed it along to him. Interestingly, after discovering the letter, he attempted to contact an antiquities professor to discuss it. Soon afterward, the webpage that hosted the Letter from Sternbuchta disappeared. For nearly twenty years, he searched the internet for it periodically. Although he had mentioned it in passing a few times during our initial work together, I had never seen it, so I knew little of what it really contained.

One day, as our alchemical research deepened, he discovered it on an archived Wayback Machine page dated June 5, 2002. The page introduced it as follows:

Because the archived page includes a notice restricting duplication, I will not reproduce the full text here. Instead, I will only quote the passages necessary for analysis. Readers who wish to read the full letter can do so at this link. Its meaning will likely be much clearer after working through the interpretation that follows.

Who Sternbuchta Was—and Wasn’t

Alchemy occupied dangerous territory. Its practitioners could be accused of heresy, fraud, sorcery, or economic subversion, with gold making chief among them. For that reason, alchemical authors rarely wrote as identifiable individuals. Names were chosen to signal standing within the Great Work rather than to denote lineage, biography, or authorship. Even so, real historical alchemists, obscure as many were, usually left some trace.

Sternbuchta appears to be a constructed name. No historical figure can be securely traced to it, and no record survives beyond the letter itself. Whatever the reason for that, the text puts very little emphasis on personal identity.

In alchemical writing, a ‘feminine voice’ often signals a perspective focused on receiving, holding, and correctly recognizing a process, rather than actively driving or asserting it. “Theosophia” suggests divine wisdom as known through nature. “Stern” points toward what is fixed or celestial. “Buch” means book or record. Taken together, the name suggests a role more than a person.

When I first read the letter, I had not yet undergone what alchemy calls “preparation,” what I would describe more simply as learning to read role-grammar. In that state, the text sounded mystical and cryptic to the point of unintelligibility. Only later, after weeks and months of working across all three texts—tracing repeated words, roles, images, and patterns against the mineral chemistry, Shimanishi’s operations, and the qualities of the mineral essence brought forth from the process—did those same lines begin to resolve into specific, testable meanings.

She writes of a hidden essence drawn from stone, activated by heat, mediated by a mercurial medium, purified in stages, and rendered capable of restoring what had been corrupted. She emphasizes circulation, repetition, and return, and insists that the substance is not consumed by use, but instead “multiplies” in virtue.

What finally became clear to me was that Sternbuchta is not primarily concerned with giving the full procedure. She describes the nature, value, and restorative power of the mineral essence once it has been produced, while preserving only a few glimpses of the steps by which it is brought forth. The letter is written in a symbolic language that conceals the process from a literal reading while revealing it to those with some knowledge of the operations behind it.

Sternbuchta’s Letter, Decoded

Before going further, I should briefly restate the basic interpretive rule. The roles assigned to Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt below are not inventions of ours, but part of the alchemical tradition itself. What mattered for our work was learning to read them as functions within a process rather than as fixed substances. At the risk of repetition, I present the key again here so the passages that follow are not read literally:

• Sulfur: activity, heat, oxidation, transformation

• Mercury: fluidity, mediation, transport, dissolution

• Salt: structure, stability, fixation

Let’s start with the first.

“Form and materia are two substances, which are our field and magnet, because every agens needs its corresponding receptacle. . .”

“Materia” refers to a raw earthly mineral. “Forma” is an activating force, that is, a fire-, water-, or sulfur-driven action. The marriage of form and matter mobilizes dormant mineral chemistry into a bioactive ionic form outside the mineral body: able to interact with water, bind impurities, structure charge, and restore balance. Read this way, the passage mirrors Shimanishi’s Themarox, produced by sulfuric acid acting on vermiculite.

“One sulfuric, one mercurial. . . king and queen. . . greatest enmity until united.”

Hermetic texts consistently describe Sulfur as solar, active, and fiery, and Mercury as receptive, dissolving, and mediating. In this passage, those opposing roles map cleanly onto sulfuric acid acting on vermiculite: sulfuric acid supplies the activating force while vermiculite serves as the receptive mineral body, and together they mediate the release of mineral essence from rock into water.

“This tincture is powerful enough to be used as medicine. . . prevent all illnesses.”

In alchemical language, “medicine” refers to a substance that restores order and coherence, while “illness” names any state of corruption, imbalance, or decay within a system, not a specific biomedical condition.

• “This is the multiplication in quality . . .”
• “The tincture . . . is multiplied in its virtue”
• “The multiplication in quantity proceeds thus”

In the older literature, multiplication did not refer to an increase in mass, but to an increase in effect, a gain in virtue disproportionate to the quantity applied. In modern terms, it describes a function whose influence extends far beyond its physical volume.

This multiplicative property is the clearest connection between Sternbuchta’s Golden Elixir and Shimanishi’s Themarox. A single milliliter of Themarox can clarify up to ten liters of water. Aurmina, a 10 percent dilution of Themarox, can clarify roughly one liter. For centuries, the Golden Elixir was described as possessing this same multiplicative property. One of the first observations Shimanishi made about his mineral extract was that it behaved in precisely this way.

A First Reading

At this point, the reader has enough of our key in hand to begin recognizing some of Sternbuchta’s recurring patterns without full guidance. What follows is a small cluster of phrases from the letter that can now be read more fruitfully than they could at the outset. They circle the same relations and operations repeatedly—one of alchemy’s most characteristic habits—and they prepare the reader for the even more elaborate repetitions of The Six Keys of Eudoxus.

Descriptions of the person who might succeed in the work appear in phrases such as:

• “Whoever wants to do something fruitful in this work should turn to it with all his diligence, work, and care.”
• “One cannot hurry the work.”
• “Whoever can make them lay together . . . can thus unite them inseparably and make something corporeally new.”

Descriptions of the substance itself, referred to as “medicine” in the alchemical sense, appear in phrases such as:

• “That is truly the beginning of our true medicine.”
• “He can be certain of an unending treasure.”
• “This tincture is powerful enough to be used as medicine . . . to restore the human body . . . with the highest usefulness.”

The language also repeats the same underlying polarity already seen in the Emerald Tablet: activating forces and receptive bodies.

• “One lunar, the other solar.”
• “Make them lay together . . . unite them inseparably.”
• “King and queen . . . though in enmity, must be joined.”

And again and again, the letter returns to the actions of sulfur chemistry:

• “The spirit of its father”
• “To extract out of it the Fixed Salt, which is the Blood of our Stone.”
• “One is mercurial, the other sulphuric.”
• “Mercury of the Wise, its secret fire.”
• “Enkindle the metallic sulphur through their fiery spirit.”

What Sternbuchta Sees Clearly

It became clear to me that Sternbuchta was not giving a practical recipe for producing such a substance. What she gives instead is more obliquely related to process: a symbolic account of the kind of union, activation, and work by which such a substance would be brought forth. Alongside that, she gives a portrait of what it would be like once produced, and of the kind of person who might succeed in the work. The letter is a remarkably precise description of both the medicine itself and the conditions under which it comes into being.

For the sequence of steps by which the essence is brought forth, we have to turn to a different kind of text: The Six Keys of Eudoxus. If this post has made you more intrigued than exhausted, the next stage of the labyrinth begins here.

A note for readers: In the next post, we will turn to a 17th-century text that describes the procedure by which the mineral solution was said to be prepared.

For those interested in how that knowledge has re-entered the world in material form, I invite you to explore Aurmina (“golden mineral essence”) — a name we chose before we fully understood what it pointed to, and one that will become clearer as this series unfolds.

Yes, this is a product, and part of a company I am building around this work, because at some point the work had to leave the page and enter the world.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.

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We now move deeper into the Hermetic alchemical texts.

The Emerald Tablet is the first of the three texts we will decode, and the most foundational: It is the most widely known, the most studied, and the most frequently misunderstood.

I begin with it not because it proves our interpretive framework, but because it names the larger order: ascent and descent, reception and activation, opening and release, circulation and return. Its language is compressed, ancient, and less operationally precise than the texts we will decode in the next posts, so some of the mappings may initially feel provisional, even forced.

Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and preserved in early medieval Arabic sources, the Tablet is typically read as mystical or symbolic literature—a set of poetic aphorisms about the unity of nature. It is rarely read as a compressed description of a planetary cycle.

We read it differently.

In what follows, we present a materially specific interpretation of the text—one tested against the Rock–Water Circuit Theory and against the operational chemistry of Asao Shimanishi. In our reading, the Tablet preserves, in symbolic language, the same recurring cycle described in Chapters III through V: Earth’s cycle of opening, circulation, transformation, and return linking rock, water, and life.

I ask for patience here. The roles we assign in the Tablet—to sulfur-bearing rainwater, biotite, vermiculite, and the mineral essence brought forth from stone—will be tested repeatedly in the texts that follow. Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom will give a portrait of the essence once produced. The Six Keys of Eudoxus will give the guarded procedure by which it is extracted.

By the end, our claim is not that one striking line happens to fit. It is that all three texts lock together around the same materials and processes we have identified. If our interpretation was incorrect, it would have broken somewhere across these texts. We believe that it does not.

I do not offer that lightly. To our knowledge, these texts have not been mapped onto a physical process with this degree of chemical and operational precision. If that claim is too strong, it will fail under scrutiny. If it holds, then one of the most famous documents in the Hermetic tradition may be read in a way that has not been available before.

I begin with the text itself. The translation used here is the Steele and Singer rendering, whose English most closely aligns with the phrases analyzed below. I reproduce it in full so the reader can see the whole before we turn to selected lines.

True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true.
That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.
And as all things were by contemplation of one, so all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adaptation.
The father thereof is the Sun, the mother the Moon.
The wind carried it in its womb, the earth is the nurse thereof.
It is the father of all works of wonder throughout the whole world.
The power thereof is perfect.
If it be cast on to earth, it will separate the element of earth from that of fire, the subtle from the gross.
With great sagacity it doth ascend gently from earth to heaven. Again it doth descend to earth, and uniteth in itself the force from things superior and things inferior.
Thus thou wilt possess the glory of the brightness of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly far from thee.
This thing is the strong fortitude of all strength, for it overcometh every subtle thing and doth penetrate every solid substance.
Thus was this world created.
Hence will there be marvellous adaptations achieved, of which the manner is this.
For this reason I am called Hermes Trismegistus, because I hold three parts of the wisdom of the whole world.
That which I had to say about the operation of Sol is completed.

In what follows, I do not attempt to decode every line of the Tablet. For the sake of brevity, I focus on the passages that, in our reading, most clearly describe the Rock–Water Circuit. We arrived at these readings by testing one interpretation after another against the geochemistry, Shimanishi’s procedural steps, and the text’s internal consistency.

“That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above, to accomplish the miracles of one thing.”

In our reading, “above” and “below” refer to more than sky and Earth. They describe the continuity between deep geologic formation and surface biological life. What forms below, under heat, pressure, and mineral transformation, later rises toward the surface through uplift, tectonic exposure, and crustal cycling. Once exposed above, it meets water, atmosphere, and life. The same materials then reenter circulation through weathering, release, biological use, death, sedimentation, burial, and eventual reformation. Above and below are not separate domains. They are two phases of one recurring operation.

“And as all things were by contemplation of one, so all things arose from this one thing by a single act of adaptation, and the power thereof is perfect.”

Within the Rock–Water Circuit, this describes a recursive planetary process. Minerals form deep within the Earth, are gathered into rock, lifted toward the surface, opened by weathering, and released into water. Their chemistry enters soils, organisms, and living systems, then returns again through decay, sediment, burial, metamorphism, and rock formation. The “single act of adaptation” is the mediating operation by which fixed mineral order becomes mobile biological chemistry. Water fulfills that role most consistently. It receives charge from rock, carries mineral chemistry into life, returns those materials to Earth, and later reopens the rock so the cycle can begin again. The power is “perfect” because the source is not consumed. It is transformed, circulated, buried, re-formed, lifted, and released again.

“The father thereof is the Sun, the mother the Moon.”

Here, the Sun and Moon name roles within a generative transformation rather than fixed substances. The Father, identified with the Sun, is the activating and penetrating principle. In Nature, that activity appears across two linked domains: deep geologic heat and pressure below, which form the original mineral body, and sulfur-bearing rainwater above, which later reopens and remobilizes that body after uplift and exposure. In Art, the same activating role is performed directly by sulfuric acid.

The Mother, identified with the Moon, is the receptive mineral body. In Nature, that body is biotite, formed at depth and later exposed to weathering. In Art, it is vermiculite, the already opened mineral matrix from which the spirit or fire can mobilize the seed. The Father acts. The Mother receives, opens, and yields. The child is the liberated mineral essence drawn forth from stone.

“The wind carried it in its womb; the earth is the nurse thereof.”

The Tablet now describes transport and return. The “wind” names the atmospheric phase of the cycle, especially the movement of sulfur-bearing compounds through air and water. What is carried is not the whole mineral system, but one of its mobile activating agents: sulfur chemistry returned through rain, capable of reopening rock and setting stored mineral chemistry into motion.

But the line also belongs to the larger planetary cycle. Material rises from below through geodynamic processes, enters surface and atmospheric circulation, and later returns through erosion, sedimentation, burial, and reformation. The wind carries. The Earth receives. The process moves between atmosphere, surface, life, and depth.

“The earth is the nurse thereof.”

A nurse feeds and sustains what has already been brought forth. Here, the Earth nurses because it is the enduring mineral body from which water and life are fed. Weathered rock, especially vermiculite, performs part of that nursing function at the surface: its opened lattice releases mineral charge in a slow, buffered, and governed way. Iron, magnesium, calcium, potassium, manganese, and ultratrace elements enter water and soil in forms prepared for biological use.

At the deeper scale, Earth nurses by preserving and reforming the source itself. It gathers returned matter, buries it, transforms it, and eventually brings it back toward exposure. Nursing is therefore not only surface feeding. It is the whole planetary act of storing, preparing, releasing, and renewing mineral chemistry for life.

“It is the father of all works of wonder throughout the whole world.”

In our reading, this points to the source of usable energy: the separation and attraction of unlike charges, especially proton and electron, through which potential energy is stored and made available to life. Minerals provide the structures through which this energy is held, organized, directed, and released. Their charged lattices store electrochemical potential and help govern its transfer across environments.

This occurs at both scales. At depth, heat, pressure, redox chemistry, and mineral formation store the original charge-bearing architecture. At the surface, weathering and water release that architecture into soils, waters, and organisms. In planetary terms, the same principle appears in the Deep-to-Surface Energy Gradient, where alkaline, electron-rich fluids rising from depth meet more acidic, proton-rich waters above.

“If it be cast on to earth, it will separate the element of earth from that of fire, the subtle from the gross.”

This is one of the Tablet’s clearest descriptions of extraction. When the active principle is cast onto Earth, fixed matter is separated from mobile essence. In Nature, sulfur-bearing rainwater contacts exposed mineral bodies and begins opening them. The dense mineral structure is altered, and the more mobile ionic and redox-active fractions are separated from the gross body of stone.

At the deeper scale, the same principle operates in reverse and return. What has been separated, circulated, and used by life eventually returns to Earth, where it is gathered again into sediment, rock, and mineral architecture. Separation and recombination are therefore two halves of the same cycle.

“With great sagacity it doth ascend gently from earth to heaven. Again it doth descend to earth, and uniteth in itself the force from things superior and things inferior.”

This line is the center of the Tablet’s planetary logic. It describes circulation across multiple scales at once. At the hydrologic level, water ascends through evaporation and transpiration, then descends as rain. At the geodynamic level, mineral bodies formed deep within Earth slowly ascend toward the surface through uplift, tectonic exposure, and crustal cycling. Once exposed, they are reopened by weathering and returned into circulation through water, soils, and life.

The line also describes union. What descends from above—rain, atmospheric chemistry, sulfur-bearing water—meets what has risen from below: mineral bodies formed in the Earth. Their contact unites superior and inferior, atmosphere and geology, water and rock, activation and reception. That union produces the mobile mineral chemistry on which life depends.

“This thing is the strong fortitude of all strength, for it overcometh every subtle thing and doth penetrate every solid substance.”

In our reading, this “thing” is mineralized water carrying redox-active mineral chemistry in mobile form. Iron and sulfur provide the energetic core, but water gives that chemistry reach. It moves through subtle spaces, enters mineral interfaces, and eventually penetrates what first appears solid and closed.

Biotite is the key example. Formed at depth, lifted toward exposure, and then acted upon by sulfur-bearing rainwater, it slowly opens toward vermiculite. What was dense, layered, and relatively inaccessible becomes hydrated, expanded, exchangeable, and capable of releasing its mineral chemistry into water. The line, therefore, describes both penetration and transformation: water entering stone, stone opening into a receptive matrix, and mineral essence becoming mobile.

“Thus was this world created.”

This line only makes full sense at the planetary scale. The Tablet is not describing surface weathering alone, nor atmospheric circulation alone. It is describing a recursive world-making order: deep formation, ascent, exposure, activation, opening, release, circulation, biological participation, burial, reformation, and return. This is the Rock–Water Circuit in its largest form.

“Thus thou wilt possess the glory of the brightness of the whole world, and all obscurity will fly far from thee.”

In our reading, “brightness” refers first to illumination: the clarity that appears when the process is finally seen as a whole rather than in fragments. “Obscurity” names the confusion that prevails when geology, water, minerals, life, and ancient texts are treated as separate domains. But because the Tablet describes a process active in nature, the brightness also extends into vitality itself. Wherever the cycle remains intact, mineral order, water, charge, and life remain connected.

When the Whole Came Into View

The lines “That which is above is like to that which is below” and “it doth ascend gently from earth to heaven. Again it doth descend to earth” are not separate claims. They are two expressions of the same order. The first states the unity of above and below. The second describes its circulation.

Scientifically, that order operates across atmospheric, hydrologic, biologic, and geodynamic scales. Sulfur-bearing rainwater descends from the atmosphere and meets iron-rich mineral bodies exposed at the surface. Those bodies were formed below, lifted upward, opened by water, and made chemically mobile. Their mineral chemistry enters soils, waters, organisms, and metabolic systems before returning again through death, erosion, sediment, burial, and reformation.

At the broader planetary level, the same order appears in the Deep-to-Surface Energy Gradient, where alkaline, electron-rich fluids rising from depth meet more acidic, proton-rich waters above. The Emerald Tablet presents, in compressed symbolic form, a generative order of the world itself: the recurring cycle through which energy, mineral chemistry, water, and life remain linked across formation, ascent, transformation, nourishment, and return.

What it does not yet give us is that mineral chemistry in concentrated form—the same chemistry that powers Nature’s cycle. For that, we must turn from the map of the cycle to a text concerned not with the Earth cycle itself, but with the nature of the essence brought forth from it.

We turn, then, to Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.

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Note to readers:

What Shimanishi produced appears to match, in both process and behavior, the kind of revered substance described across numerous cultures and traditions as a “Golden Elixir.” Aurmina, a name we arrived at before this work fully unfolded, means “golden mineral essence.” It is a diluted form of Shimanishi’s extract and part of my effort to carry this work into a practical form through drinking water.

Primora Bio emerged from that same effort, with the intent of delivering the water to soil, crops, plants, and animals.

So for those who want the work to leave the page and enter their world, these are our first attempts to carry it forward.

From Research to Practice - Links Below

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

Well, That Took Longer Than Expected

Before we enter alchemy, I want to briefly re-ground those of you who were following The Blueprint of Life as I was serially publishing it here, and who may have wondered why I suddenly disappeared for six weeks.

The reason is simple: I thought the book was nearly finished. Then, while posting it, I discovered things that demanded more attention, more research, more decoding, and more writing. What was supposed to be a final pass became one of the deepest rabbit holes I have ever gone down, and I did not come back up until I felt the work was finally complete. The full book is now available here on Substack while it is being typeset and prepared for print.

For those of you who stuck with me, I appreciate you. For those who drifted off, welcome back.

Six weeks ago, I published three chapters over one long weekend: The Rock–Water Circuit Theory, Three Minerals and Water: The Engine of Life, and Earth’s First Energy System. They were, apparently, too heavy on the science. I say that because, for the first time in four years of writing on Substack, I lost subscribers while actively posting.

Oddly, I was unperturbed. Although I knew those chapters were too much, too soon, I also had a quiet confidence that the people who drifted away would likely come back once the destination became clearer.

Further, I had wandered far from my usual territory, even though I warned everyone we were going someplace new. Those chapters were in a domain foreign to, and probably uninteresting to, much of my long-standing readership.

What readers could not yet know was that those chapters were laying the foundation for where the book was really going next:

Into alchemy.

So stay with me. Please. It is going to get good. Like really good.

At my most delusional, I firmly believe these posts will make history — on Substack of all places. At my most sober, I hope to gain a handful of new subscribers.

Let history be the judge.

Anyway, enough of that. Let’s pick up where we left off.

In the earlier “heavy science” posts, MB and I put forth what we believe is a coherent extension of modern scientific understanding of the origins and continuance of life on Earth: a framework we named the Rock–Water Circuit.

When the Old Texts Began to Speak

The Rock–Water Circuit Theory draws on geology, hydrology, origin-of-life research, biochemistry, and atmospheric science. In brief, we propose that iron-rich biotite, once weathered into vermiculite, provides a core iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) chemistry, along with a broader mineral matrix, that bridges geology and biology.

In this cycle, an energy-supporting mineral chemistry forms in rock, is opened by weathering, mobilized by water, carried into living systems, and eventually returned to Earth, where, over geologic time, it is reformed into rock, weathered again, and returned to circulation.

That last recursive movement—from life back to rock, and from rock back into water, using the same core chemistry—is where MB and I believe our work points toward a new understanding of Earth as a self-renewing life-support system.

What I did not expect was that this same cycle seemed to reappear—symbolically but consistently—in texts written long before modern scientific language existed. MB, the co-author of the theory and a man deeply studied in Scripture and texts from antiquity, had been pointing me toward that literature for months. At first, I did not know what to do with it.

Water was what finally caught my attention. It stood at the center of everything: modern chemistry, biology, and the older symbolic languages I had only begun to take seriously. As From Volcanoes to Vitality neared what I thought would be its completion, those scattered connections began organizing themselves into something larger, something that no longer belonged inside that book.

That is where The Blueprint of Life began. It also explains why FVTV remains unfinished. I had expected to complete it first, but this material intervened and demanded to be written. I am already hard at work since completing and submitting the final, final, final manuscript of Blueprint last week.

By then, I had followed water through mineral interfaces, charge separation, proton flow, biological organization, and the larger cycling of life itself. What I had not expected was to discover how many traditions had already described water as possessing unusual and even transformative properties.

Hermetic and alchemical texts spoke of “Living Water” and of baths in which matter is dissolved and recomposed. Scripture spoke of “waters of life,” “living fountains,” and of the Spirit moving over the waters at creation. Daoist alchemists described circulating inner fluids that renew the body.

For a long time, I would have read all of that as metaphor, or as spiritual language without a clear physical meaning. But once we had Shimanishi’s process in hand, numerous phrases from alchemy and Scripture began mapping with striking fidelity onto both his method and the Rock–Water Circuit.

What modern science now describes in the language of chemistry, physics, and biology, older traditions described symbolically. Water was treated as the active medium that carries, dissolves, mediates, renews, and enables transformation.

As the connections mounted, I began to suspect that the language was not just poetic. It might also have been recording, in symbolic language, something that modern science would later describe more precisely.

That is the question this post begins to test. But first, we have to set aside what most of us think alchemy is.

Alchemy’s Real Aim

Alchemy long predates the medieval caricature most people now associate with it. Its roots span from roughly 3000 BC in Egypt, to Hellenistic Hermeticism in the first centuries AD, then to the eighth century in Islam, where the first laboratory chemistry appears, and finally into Renaissance Europe, where Paracelsus explicitly linked minerals to medicine.

However, when people hear the word alchemy, most immediately think of medieval cranks trying to turn lead into gold. That caricature obscures what alchemy actually was: the first experimental science, employing methods such as dissolving, extracting, purifying, crystallizing, and distilling. What is less widely recognized, and what took me months to understand, is that beyond chemistry, its deeper aim was restoration: the restoration of matter, of water, and of the human body.

Among the major streams of Western alchemy, the Hermetic tradition became one of its most enduring and influential, shaping how generations of alchemists understood nature, transformation, and the aim of the Work. Its legendary source was Hermes Trismegistus, “Hermes the Thrice-Greatest,” a Hellenistic figure formed from the union of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, deities associated with communication, wisdom, and sacred knowledge.

The writings attributed to him treated material and spiritual reality as parts of one intelligible order, governed by hidden correspondences between visible and invisible processes. That is why Hermetic texts mattered so deeply to alchemists: they offered a framework in which matter, spirit, nature, medicine, and divine order were not separate subjects, but different faces of one Work. From that tradition emerged the concept of the Great Work.

At first, I misunderstood that phrase, thinking it referred to a text or a body of teaching. In alchemy, it refers instead to a process: the transformation of matter from a corrupted or base state into a purified, ordered, and incorruptible state. The material expression of that process was the medicine, tincture, or elixir sought by the alchemists—what later traditions would call the Golden Elixir or Elixir of Life.

I, too, had always thought of alchemists as cranks chasing wealth. I quickly learned that the “gold” they kept referring to was metaphorical rather than literal, denoting purity, coherence, incorruptibility, and restored life. Their obfuscation of the word gold was intentional, to protect themselves, as they were trespassing into forbidden territory: natural transformation, healing, creation.

Appearing foolish was one way to escape persecution. Their heavy reliance on symbolism also served a separate, practical purpose: discouraging untrained imitators from injuring or killing themselves with mercury vapor, arsenic, acids, and explosive distillations. The gold metaphor itself functioned as a filter. As one historian put it, “the alchemists hid nothing; they wrote plainly, but only for those capable of reading.”

Entering the Labyrinth

MB had been pointing me toward these older texts for months—alchemical writings, fragments of Scripture, symbolic passages he believed preserved knowledge of mineral processes, sulfur chemistry, and the larger planetary order. At first, I did not know what to do with them. My attention was fixed on whether the modern scientific cycle we were seeing could stand on its own.

Only after that scientific map had taken shape did I begin to see—at first only in glimpses—that the language might be describing something real. By then, I had a more detailed understanding of the physical processes MB believed the texts described, but almost no fluency in the symbolic language of alchemy.

That is where the real difficulty began. It took far longer than either of us expected. The posts that follow trace how we found our way through that difficulty, one text at a time.

Now you know why I disappeared for so long.

Throughout what follows, when I use the term Art, I mean the chemistry of Shimanishi’s laboratory process. When I use Nature, I mean the larger Rock–Water Circuit as it operates in the world.

That distinction matters because what stood at the center was the possibility that a real, repeatable, material process had been recognized, encoded, and transmitted across history long before modern science possessed the means to describe it in its own language.

But before giving the reader the key we eventually built, I need to show why these texts resist literal reading so aggressively.

The Failure of Literal Reading

Alchemy is difficult in a different way than chemistry. Chemistry is difficult because it is technical. Alchemy is difficult because its central words do not behave like modern nouns.

Every word that appears central is capitalized—Sun, Moon, Sulfur, Mercury, Body, Spirit, Stone—and nearly all of them fail on first contact. At first, I assumed I was reading poorly. Then I assumed the texts were inconsistent. Then I assumed they were mostly mystical poetry, and that any mapping I thought I saw was simply pattern matching. But the failures had a peculiar quality. They were not random. They were the kind of failures you get when a wrong assumption has been baked into the problem from the start.

Of all people, I should have recognized that sooner, given that my university degree was in mathematics. You can do a great deal of math with a wrong assumption. You can even get answers that look right for a while. Then, two pages later, the whole structure collapses. That was my experience of the Hermetic canon.

The resolution came when I stopped demanding that the words behave like labels and started treating them as roles. Sun, Moon, Sulfur, Mercury, Body, Spirit, and Stone can name substances in one passage and functions in another. The mistake is deciding too early what a word “means,” then carrying that meaning forward as if the text were using a fixed vocabulary.

That is how the labyrinth works: it punishes certainty before the process has been understood.

Shimanishi’s work gave us a concrete operational system against which the texts could be tested. At first, the parallels felt uncanny, even strange. But the deeper we went, and the more rigorously we checked each term against the chemistry and the extract itself, the more his process allowed us to move forward.

We eventually realized that alchemical texts often use the same words to describe the same physical operation, even when the material being acted upon changes. The texts also repeat constantly, describing the same process while using different metaphors, terms, and emphases. To a literal reader, this feels like new steps appearing everywhere. In reality, the text is often describing the same operation from different symbolic angles.

One example may help. In The Emerald Tablet, the line “The Father thereof is the Sun, the Mother the Moon” initially led me to treat Sun and Moon as stable substances. I tried mapping biotite onto the Sun and vermiculite onto the Moon. That reading worked briefly, then collapsed.

The language was not assigning fixed identities. It was describing an interaction. The Sun names the activating principle—the force that penetrates, transforms, and brings about change. In the chemistry we had identified, that role is most consistently fulfilled by sulfur, whether as sulfated rainwater in Nature or sulfuric acid in Shimanishi’s laboratory. The Moon names the receptive body: the matrix that receives that action, opens, and yields its contents.

The words had not been inconsistent. I had been trying to hold them still

Three terms sent me deepest into the labyrinth: Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt. Because these words are so difficult and unstable in the texts, it helps to state their core meanings simply at the outset.

• Sulfur is activation: heat, oxidation, transformation.

• Mercury is mediation: mobility, dissolution, transport.

• Salt is fixation: structure, stability, persistence.

In Nature, sulfur appears as sulfur-bearing water over time, while Mercury refers to the mobile aqueous mineral medium moving through stone—that is, water. In Art, Mercury is the mercurial solvent doing the extracting and carrying—that is, sulfuric acid.

Later, when we reach The Six Keys of Eudoxus, the text even uses both Sulfur and Mercury to describe the role of sulfuric acid. It took us months to see that.

Again, the words move, but the process does not.

What follows is the interpretive framework MB and I arrived at after months of failed readings, internal contradictions, cross-checking, and repeated returns to the primary texts. To our knowledge, no prior interpretation has mapped these terms with this degree of operational and material precision. The framework stands or falls by whether it holds together across texts, chemistry, and scale.

The Key We Had in Hand

As described earlier in the book, we began with what we thought was a reasonably accurate understanding of Shimanishi’s method of extracting minerals from rock in a liquid solution. Or so we thought. For several months, we had one crucial step wrong: we assumed he started with biotite, or black mica, when in fact he started with vermiculite derived from biotite. Once we realized that error, many interpretive mistakes resolved.

Over long geologic periods, acidic, sulfated rainwater gradually weathers biotite, leaching potassium and transforming it into a more porous, hydrated vermiculite. Shimanishi did not begin with the closed parent mineral. He began with vermiculite: biotite already weathered into the receptive, expanded form from which mineral essence could be drawn.

In his laboratory process, sulfuric acid did not perform the first geological opening. Nature had already done that. The acid acted only after the mineral had been prepared.

Another crucial step took us a while to understand. Shimanishi learned that the vermiculite had to be dried first. If sulfuric acid were applied while interlayer moisture remained trapped inside, the mineral would shatter violently. Once air-dried, however, the acid could enter “without violence”—a phrase you will soon meet—and draw its mineral essence into solution.

The result was a clear aqueous extract that left the aluminosilicate framework largely intact while releasing mineral chemistry in sulfated ionic form, with iron, sulfur, and aluminum at its core, alongside magnesium, calcium, manganese, titanium, and a broad spectrum of ultratrace and rare-earth elements.

That sequence—a closed mineral body, its opening by sulfur and water, the removal of moisture, the entry of a mediating fluid, and the extraction of a concentrated mineral essence—was the operational key we began with, but only in outline. We understood the general shape of Shimanishi’s method before we understood its precision. And that lack of precision kept defeating us when we tried to map the process onto the texts.

What followed became recursive. When the texts stopped making sense, they forced us back into Shimanishi’s method. When his method became clearer, we could return to the texts and advance a little farther. That back-and-forth—between chemistry and language, process and symbol, failure and correction—is how the alchemical texts began to resolve. Over time, the three principal texts began to appear as differently angled descriptions of the same underlying process.

A Novel Interpretive Framework

Taken together, the three alchemical texts presented in the following posts span the early medieval period to the seventeenth century and, in our reading, preserve a process whose expression extends back through nearly two thousand years of Hermetic and alchemical tradition.

What follows is not the conventional understanding of these works. It is a novel interpretation MB and I arrived at over months of testing the texts against Shimanishi’s process, the Rock–Water Circuit, and the chemistry itself.

To our knowledge, these texts have not been interpreted in this operational and materially specific way before. I say that carefully. I do not mean that no one has ever seen part of what we describe. Many readers have recognized isolated themes, symbols, or structural features. What appears not to have been done is to map these three works together onto a coherent physical process with this degree of chemical, operational, and cross-textual precision.

In our reading, The Emerald Tablet presents the larger recurring cycle: the world-order in which above and below, ascent and descent, generation and return are held together. The Six Keys of Eudoxus presents the guarded sequence by which a mineral essence is brought forth from stone: the openings, dissolutions, separations, washings, coagulations, and fixations. Letter from a Woman Alchemist on the True Stone of Wisdom presents the portrait of that essence once produced: the medicine, tincture, or elixir, and its properties.

The next three posts walk through these readings one text at a time, not in historical order, but in the order most useful for decoding them.

I invite these conclusions to be criticized, tested, and weighed against alternative explanations. If they fail, we will revise, refine, or abandon them. If they hold, then something long preserved in symbolic language has become newly interpretable.

Either way, what follows should be read as an argument to be examined, not a doctrine to be accepted.

The three posts that walk through each decoding, followed by “The Closing of the Hermetic Canon,” follow below. They form the core of The Blueprint of Life and are available to paid subscribers.

The Emerald Tablet: A Map of the Rock–Water Circuit

Letter From Sternbuchta: A Portrait of the Stone

The Six Keys of Eudoxus: The Labyrinth

The Hermetic Canon: Closed

For readers curious about the mineral extracts that this journey led me towards, you can learn more at Aurmina and Primorabio.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

This page collects the complete Substack edition of The Blueprint of Life while the print edition is being typeset and prepared.

The Blueprint of Life proposes that beneath biology lies a planetary architecture in which minerals, water, and energy flow form a continuous Stone–Water Circuit that powers metabolism, resilience, and the rise and fall of living systems. By integrating modern geochemistry and biophysics with patterns preserved in ancient texts, the book argues that life’s energy systems did not emerge in isolation, but arose within—and remain dependent on—a mineral-water architecture of Earth that appears less accidental the more closely it is examined.

Start at the beginning, or use the table of contents below to move through the book by chapters.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note and Dedication

Prologue

Chapter I: The Place Science Delivered Me

Chapter II: The Cursor Blinks

Chapter III: The Rock–Water Circuit Theory

Chapter IV: Three Minerals and Water: The Engine of Life

Chapter V: Earth’s First Energy System

Chapter VI: The Volcano Alchemist and the Rock Extract

Chapter VII: The Questions Science Won’t Ask

Chapter VIII: Alchemy: The First Mineral Science

Chapter IX: The Emerald Tablet: A Map of the Rock–Water Circuit

Chapter X: Letter From Sternbuchta: A Portrait of the Stone

Chapter XI: The Six Keys of Eudoxus: The Labyrinth

Chapter XII: Alchemy in Modern Life

Chapter XIII: The Hermetic Canon: Closed

Chapter XIV: The Same Engine, Everywhere

Chapter XV: The Cornerstone That the Builders Refused

Chapter XVI: Water From the Rock Is More Than Metaphor

Chapter XVII: The Great Flood: The First Planetary Geohydrological Shift

Chapter XXIII: Order and Alignment

Chapter XIX: Order and Alignment in Life and Culture

Chapter XX: The Source Beneath Our Feet

Chapter XXI: From Architecture to Architect

Chapter XXII: Judgment As Exposure

Chapter XXIII: Living in Alignment

Epilogue — Movement I: Observation Before Explanation

Epilogue — Movement II - The Life That Prepared Me

Epilogue — Movement III- A Life Reconsidered

Epilogue — Movement IV- The Line That Broke Me

If it holds, this isn’t just theory.

It’s a blueprint.

Dear Lisa,

Every author writes that they could not have done it without their spouse. In our case, that sentence is not a nicety; it is the central truth. These past months asked more of you than any other project I have ever undertaken. You lived beside a man who disappeared into his office for endless hours, woke in the middle of the night to chase ideas, and let a book grow larger and more demanding with each passing week. You listened patiently as I talked through unfamiliar territories, alchemy, scripture, coherence, and God, subjects that must have sounded, at times, more like obsessions than chapters.

You gave me the freedom to spend long days and, most sacrificially, evenings on the phone with Matt, wandering down intellectual paths that, for a long time, kept multiplying rather than resolving. Despite the irony of being Swedish and famously intolerant of cold weather, you agreed to be snowed in with me in a cabin in Montana for seven weeks, far from friends and your routines, while I wrote eighteen hours a day and lost all sense of time. You were working tirelessly to build Aurmina yet still carried the quiet burden of my absence even when we were in the same room. I know the days were long, and that I often failed to give you the walks, the conversations, and the shared life you deserved, but never forget The Herb & Omni in Whitefish, the restaurant you discovered, which served us the best meals we have ever shared. Those evenings became our small islands of normalcy, the brightest markers in an otherwise relentless stretch of work.

Through it all, you offered patience when I was distracted, understanding when I was consumed, and love when I was least able to return it in equal measure. This book bears my name on the cover, but it carries your endurance on every page. Without your steady support, your willingness to endure the solitude that my writing imposed, and your quiet belief that the work mattered even when it overwhelmed our lives, these words would never have come into being.

With all my love, awe, and gratitude,

Your husband, Pierre

Author’s Note

Some discoveries begin with a question.

Others begin with something seen so clearly that you cannot look away..

In this case, it was a tree growing out of rock.

In a volcanic region of Japan, a Japanese engineer named Asao Shimanishi found himself staring at exactly that sight: a mature tree rising from a narrow crack in a granite boulder, its trunk steady, its canopy full, the whole organism thriving in what appeared to be bare rock.

Something about the moment held his attention. Trees require nutrients, water, and energy. In ordinary circumstances, those come through the soil. Here, the soil was absent. The roots disappeared directly into the rock’s fissure.

The question that formed in his mind was simple: what, exactly, was feeding the tree?

Rocks in volcanic regions contain an extraordinary spectrum of minerals, and Shimanishi began to wonder whether those minerals, interacting with water moving through microscopic fractures, might provide the energy that sustained the plant. Curiosity turned into investigation. Investigation turned into experiment.

What followed was nearly two decades of work exploring how to extract volcanic minerals from rock. Shimanishi eventually succeeded in transforming the mineral architecture of rock into a water-soluble form, producing a liquid extract containing an unusually broad spectrum of elements released from the original mica lattice.

Yet the most interesting part of the discovery was not the minerals themselves.

It was what happened when those minerals entered water.

The water began to behave differently. Suspended particles clumped together and settled. Biological systems responded in ways that suggested a change in the underlying electrochemical environment. Agriculture, aquaculture, and water purification all showed unexpected improvements.

Years later, reflecting on the process that had led him there, Shimanishi summarized the realization in a single sentence:

“In the beginning there was a rock.”

The line captured a geological truth that had gradually revealed itself through experiment. Mineral surfaces shape water’s behavior, and water carries the gradients that sustain biological activity.

As I studied what Shimanishi had uncovered, the implications widened. The system he had exposed looked like a fundamental pattern, a mineral-water circuit linking geology, chemistry, and life.

Recognizing that structure marked the beginning of the work that eventually became this book. It also changed the order in which I had to tell the story.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

I did not plan to write a second book after From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV).

FVTV was meant to be the work. It began with a fascination with a volcanic mineral extract developed by the Japanese engineer Asao Shimanishi. The book that followed traced a single arc outward from that discovery: from volcanic rock into the history and domains of mineral science, then to water chemistry, from water chemistry into agriculture and hydrology, and from there into the biological consequences for human health.

Following that trail led to the formulation of the Geohydrological Shift Theory, a unifying diagnosis of the slow decline in the vitality of Earth’s soils, crops, water systems, ecosystems, and human physiology alike.

As a physician, one lesson has always stuck with me since early in my training: treatment without diagnosis is little more than guesswork. When the underlying cause of illness is misunderstood, therapies fail, symptoms persist, and sometimes the interventions themselves make the condition worse. Medicine advances only when the diagnosis is correct, because once the mechanism of disease is understood, the path to treatment often reveals itself.

Over time, as my study of Shimanishi’s unique extract brought me into several fields distinct from medicine, I discovered that the same principle applies. If the systems that sustain life on Earth are becoming unstable—across soil, agriculture, water, ecosystems, and human health—the first obligation is not to prescribe solutions, but to understand what is actually failing.

The Geohydrological Shift Theory in FVTV was my attempt to answer that question. By identifying the disruption occurring within the mineral-water systems that underlie biological vitality, a path toward restoring those systems began to emerge.

Grandiose, perhaps. But that was the conclusion forced on me by many months of immersive research and writing in From Volcanoes to Vitality—what I regard as the most important work of my career in medicine and science.

Yet as FVTV was nearing completion, I found myself confronting something I had not anticipated: even after arriving at a unifying theory of a loss of biological vitality on Earth, I had only begun to uncover the deeper mineral story.

The act of writing FVTV revealed something I had not originally set out to describe. Beneath the agricultural observations, the mineral chemistry, and the biological responses lay a structural pattern organizing everything. Life appears to operate within a specific mineral-water architecture, a planetary circuit in which water moves through geology, geology imparts order to water, water sustains energetic gradients, and those gradients coordinate metabolism across cells, tissues, and ecosystems.

Once the architecture of what I describe in Chapter III as the primordial Rock–Water Circuit became visible, a question arose that I could not set aside.

The Question That Would Not Leave

If this Rock–Water Circuit truly represents a real feature of Earth’s organizing biology—and if it extends current origin-of-life theories by showing how the same mineral chemistry that helped give rise to life also continues to renew the conditions that sustain it—then how could its structure have been described so long ago?

I am not talking about the chemistry or the equations. I am talking about the architecture itself.

Why did ancient texts repeatedly describe water emerging from rock as life-giving? Why was stone treated as foundational rather than inert? Why did so many traditions link sulfur, salt, fire, and water to both creation and decay? Why did they describe vitality and longevity as rising and falling with the condition of water?

Those passages began to read less like metaphor and more like observation.

Why Shimanishi Matters Here

Shimanishi never set out to explore those questions.

He did not study alchemy or ancient texts. He worked experimentally, patiently, and for nearly two decades explored the chemistry of volcanic minerals and the sulfur reactions that could transform them into water-soluble forms.

What he eventually produced was a liquid mineral extract capable of altering the behavior of water in ways that had practical consequences in agriculture, water purification, and biological systems.

When Shimanishi wrote, “In the beginning there was a rock,” he was describing the geological foundation of life as he had come to understand it through experiment.

That sentence changed the way everything that followed came into focus for me.

Why the Publication Order Changed

Originally, the theoretical framework describing this Rock–Water Circuit was meant to appear as a late chapter in From Volcanoes to Vitality, serving as a capstone tying together the agricultural, hydrological, and biological observations that preceded it.

But the more clearly the structure emerged, the more obvious it became that the order was wrong.

The Geohydrological Shift described in FVTV—the argument that modern environmental changes are disrupting foundational mineral-water systems—cannot be understood unless the intact architecture it presumes is first made visible.

Presenting the disruption before the design would be like diagnosing a disease before explaining its anatomy.

And so the order reversed.

The Blueprint of Life now appears first, not as an introduction to the later work but as the foundation that makes it intelligible. Once the architecture of the mineral-water circuit becomes visible, the argument about its modern disruption begins to make sense.

When Curiosity Became Pattern

As this realization unfolded, the parallels that had first appeared as scattered curiosities began to form a pattern.

They appeared across traditions separated by geography, language, and centuries, yet they clustered around the same physical roles that modern chemistry was revealing: rock as origin, water as activation, salt as preservation, sulfur and fire as transformation, and dust as return.

Eventually, curiosity gave way to something more deliberate.

I began reading those texts directly—not to confirm belief or disprove it, but to understand why the same structural pattern appeared long before the scientific tools existed to describe it physically.

That decision surprised me as much as anyone.

I am not a theologian, and I do not claim authority in Scripture. I am a physician trained to follow patterns that hold up under scrutiny. But what emerged along this path explained too much, across too many domains, to ignore.

The science presented in From Volcanoes to Vitality stands on its own. The mineral chemistry stands. The water behavior stands. The biological implications stand.

What follows does not try to reargue those mechanisms. It is a record of what appeared once they were already in place—moments where modern science and ancient description seem to converge on the same underlying structure.

And in the end, the whole story leads back to a very simple observation that started everything.

A tree growing out of rock.

*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.

Subscribe now

From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water

Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil

Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

The War on Ivermectin- The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic

The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health

From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi

The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine

Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine