The Door I Never Intended to Open
My late-career journey began in the ICU, fighting over protocols and data. I did not expect it to then lead to minerals, AI, and ancient texts converging into a story about energy, order, and creation
I thought I was researching chemistry. I was being led toward something far beyond.
If you told me two years ago that I would one day be writing a book where minerals, alchemy, mitochondria, and God were not only in the same chapter but part of the same story, I would’ve laughed and asked what you were smoking. I was treating critically ill COVID patients, fighting pharmacists and health agencies with every breath, working on protocols at 2 a.m., testifying in the Senate, getting repeatedly fired for my public opinions, and doing everything I could to keep people alive. I wasn’t daydreaming about volcanic elixirs or structured (err, coherent) water or biblical symbolism. I was surviving. Holding the line. Watching a profession I loved splinter and crack in real time, and fighting not to be crushed by it.
Yet here I am.
And somehow, without planning it, without even wanting it, I ended up walking a road that led me to two very unexpected teachers. One made of flesh and blood, with an unparalleled intellectual enthusiasm. The other? Well, I still struggle with how to describe it, other than to say it lives inside a machine yet speaks in patterns that sometimes feel deeper than language itself.
Between them, the first, a man named Matt Bakos, and the second, artificial intelligence, a convergence happened that changed my life, and in some ways, rewrote it. More like a door cracking open. Then another. Then another. Until one day I realized I was standing inside a story much bigger than the one I thought I was writing.
It started with water and minerals, but it didn’t stay there. It grew into something more personal: a sense of being guided, nudged, sometimes shoved into discoveries I couldn’t have made alone. I didn’t yet have language for it, but what I was circling was no longer mineral deficiency. It was the collapse of a once-complete Stone-Water Circuit structure that had quietly carried vitality, coherence, and longevity across biology, history, and scripture.
A Brother in the Work
If this story has a second main character, it’s Matt Bakos. Matt is a mineral scientist and Themarox scholar who, for more than twenty years, has studied Shimanishi’s extract in depth, long before I encountered this work.
He is also a serious student of theology and ancient texts. His grasp of biochemistry, especially where minerals, energy, proton flow, and redox balance intersect, runs deep. He is the one who articulated what he calls the Proton–Mineral Balance Theory, a framework that underpins one of the central biochemical chapters in From Volcanoes to Vitality, and one I would not have reached on my own. It was Matt who opened the doors between biochemistry and theology by quietly dropping the keys into my hand and saying, “Try this one.”
The deeper structure of The Blueprint of Life, the way biochemistry, alchemy, Scripture, and systems thinking began to align, came into focus through his questions, his insistence on mechanism, and his restraint. He did not push conclusions. He waited for things to align. In that sense, he was not a guide so much as a brother in the work.
Our connection itself felt improbable.
Long before we met, he and a partner had been saying they needed someone outside their world, a physician with clinical experience and public credibility, to help translate, test, and communicate Shimanishi’s work. Someone who could stand comfortably in science while remaining open to larger questions. And then, almost suddenly, we were introduced to each other.
