Epilogue — Movement II: The Life That Prepared Me
A fractured life, a broken system, and a long return to spiritual order. Before I could recognize the hidden architecture beneath life, I first had to live through disorder in my own.
Now that I have gone this far into creation, order, and the reality of God, I also have to tell the truth about the life that brought me here.
Let’s start with the fact that I was a foul-mouthed kid (still am) from Long Island who nearly died of a drug overdose in his early twenties. The only reason I survived is that other human beings happened to be awake and close enough to save me.
That was not brilliance. That was mercy.
Soon after, at the age of twenty-three, in an attempt to repair my life—or, as I would now say, reorder it—I made a connection, or perhaps a connection was made for me, to a man who had learned to repair his own disordered life fifteen years earlier. He began teaching me what he himself had been taught. He began showing me how to live according to a set of spiritual principles. He did not present them as doctrine, and there was no formal religious structure around them. They were simply offered as a way of living that, if practiced, might change the trajectory of my life.
Principles like honesty, humility, responsibility, accountability, perseverance, forgiveness, gratitude, and fellowship. We worked through them slowly, over years. From the start, he suggested that I begin forming some concept of God that I could speak to—not a fixed idea, but something I could reach toward. He even told me to pray, something that initially made me very uncomfortable, as I had never really prayed before. Heck, I had never even thought seriously about God before in any meaningful way. My parents, two of the best people I have ever known, never went to church and never spoke of God.
I should also be honest about where those principles came from. The man who taught them to me had learned them in a twelve-step framework, and for nearly twenty years I remained connected to that world. I went to meetings regularly. That was where I found guidance, grounding, and, in some form, faith.
My problem in those early years was not alcohol. It was drugs, and it was serious. I was able to leave that behind, and I never returned to it. Alcohol was not something I was drawn to then, and for much of my life, it played little role.
That changed later, during the period when my children became ill. I began drinking in a way that was new for me, at times in ways I am not proud of. Over time, that, too, became more contained.
What I am saying is narrower than any of that and, to me, more important: those principles took hold. They formed the man I became, even when I did not live them perfectly.
When I first learned how to pray in my early twenties, I did it almost mechanically. I did it because I was told it would help. But there was no real conviction in it. I was not sure anyone was listening. It felt as though it might be meaningful, but it also might not be. At that stage, prayer felt more like a prescription than a connection.
However, what I could not ignore was how quickly things began to change in my life.
In a marked departure from my teenage years and early twenties, my life began to take a different direction. I became more focused, more disciplined, more capable of sustained effort. I always wanted to be a doctor, but I had effectively closed that path myself. My academic record had deteriorated badly, and I had been rejected repeatedly. Even when I secured an interview through my father years later, I was turned away.
So at twenty-nine, I left the country and went to St. George’s University School of Medicine in Grenada, a place that had become known for giving people like me a second chance—late bloomers, strivers, people whose records did not tell the whole story but who could still demonstrate commitment, sincerity, and capability. I will always be grateful to that school for seeing something in me that others did not, and for giving me the chance to become the physician I had wanted to be.
From there, things built: training, work, marriage, children, a life that, for the first time, felt grounded and stable. My career advanced quickly. I moved early into leadership, teaching, and research, and rose through academic medicine with a speed that, looking back, still surprises me.
Looking back, I can see that the relationship between living those principles and the improvement in my life was unmistakable to me. I could feel it. I could see it. But what had not yet taken hold in the same way was the role of prayer.
The way I understood it at the time was much simpler, almost mechanical. When I began to pray, what changed was not that I became convinced God was answering, but that I stopped looking only to myself for answers. I began looking outward—to my mentor, to principles, to something beyond my own impulses and instincts. And the more I did that, the better things got. My behavior improved. My judgment improved. My life improved.
I did not interpret that then as proof that God was listening. I interpreted it more like a law: if you lift weights, you get stronger; if you stop orienting everything around yourself and begin looking outward, your life becomes more ordered.
For decades, I tried, imperfectly, to live in alignment with all of it.
And then, without warning, it broke.
Fifteen years into my career, first one and later another of my daughters became catastrophically ill with the same disease. The first deteriorated so severely that she spent nearly two months in an ICU and was effectively out of school for almost a year.
What made that first experience intolerable was not simply the severity of her decline, but the way it unfolded: slowly, visibly, and in the face of repeated medical delay. We went through emergency room visits, neurologists, psychologists, pediatricians—one encounter after another—while her condition kept worsening.
I watched her deteriorate while clinicians deflected, minimized, and moved on. They recommended two different inpatient psychiatric settings, both of which were brief because my wife and I knew her disease was neurological and that her care was being led astray. I responded the only way I knew how. I fought. I read late into the night. I challenged every physician she saw—seventeen in total.
Early on, based on our research, we began asking whether this could be PANDAS, and over and over again, we were told no, that it wasn’t.
The disease, PANDAS (now called PANS), was labeled “controversial.” It sat at the margins of medical education, rarely diagnosed and even more rarely treated. What I did not understand then, and only grasped later, was that almost none of the clinicians we were seeing really knew what the disease was. None had ever made the diagnosis. And yet they still minimized, deflected, and redirected us while my daughter continued to deteriorate in front of them. At one point, I came uncomfortably close to violence against a single, willfully obtuse psychiatrist, not out of recklessness, but out of the raw clarity that comes when a father realizes no one else is going to help his daughter.
For the first time in my life, I found myself in direct conflict with a system I had been trained to trust—and I knew, with a clarity I could not shake, that it was failing my child.
After a hard-fought recovery, the second followed with the same disease and the same disabling neurological symptoms. She, too, eventually recovered fully, but her course unfolded differently in one crucial respect: by then, because of what we had already lived through with her sister, we had a physician who recognized the disease and could treat it. The illness was still devastating, and her recovery was long, demanding, and required my wife once again to step away from work and care for her almost around the clock. But the second time, at least, we were no longer fighting in the dark.
That experience did not end when my daughters recovered. For the last decade, I have served on the board of Neuroimmune.org, an organization dedicated to improving awareness, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. Progress has been painfully slow. Success has been hard won. Even now, the suffering of these children and families remains far greater than the system’s willingness to understand or respond.
Only years later, during Covid, did another piece of that history come into focus for me: that their childhood vaccines had effectively caused PANDAS, and that, without knowing it, the illogical, deliberately contrived, and universally recommended American vaccine schedule had profoundly altered both my children’s lives and my own. That realization did not lessen the suffering we had already lived through. It deepened it. It meant that the harm had begun under the cover of something I had once accepted without question.
During that period, something else shifted in me.
I did not abandon the principles I had been taught. I continued to act, to care, to fight. But I stopped speaking directly to God. Not in any deliberate or overt way. It was just that the connection receded. The habit of reaching outward, or upward, simply stopped. At the time, I would have said it was because I was under strain and needed to focus on what needed to be done.
Looking back, I can see it more clearly. I had remained oriented toward action, but not toward source.
Years passed. My life stabilized again, at least outwardly. But something fundamental had changed. I no longer trusted institutions in the same way. I no longer assumed that systems would correct themselves under pressure. I had seen too clearly what happens when they do not.
So when Covid arrived, the recognition came quickly. The same patterns I had seen in smaller form—delay, deflection, institutional self-protection, resistance to correction—were suddenly everywhere. What I had once experienced as scattered failures now revealed itself as the system itself.
This work grew out of that fracture. It grew out of watching institutions break in real time, and out of living through the consequences as my own life broke with them. By the end of Covid, I had lost four jobs before I finally began working for myself.
And that fracture was not only professional, institutional, or philosophical. It entered my home, my marriage, and my family life, and I would be dishonest to leave that out.
My first marriage began across a barrier that, on paper, should have kept us apart. She was three years ahead of me in medicine, finishing residency, having already passed through the older, grueling form of medical training that was still punishing in ways it no longer is. I was just a medical student, older than most, walking around with a reflex hammer in my pocket, still trying to become someone. We were the same age, but in the world we lived in, that did not matter as much as the hierarchy did. What senior resident dates a medical student? And from my side, what medical student asks out a senior resident? As John joked at my wedding, it was “like the dishwasher asking out the chef.” Yet somehow I did, and somehow she said yes.
The first interactions were awkward, but very quickly we connected, and what followed was real and beautiful. We built a life together. We moved in together, survived training and long hours and New York City salaries that barely supported the family we were trying to raise, and over twenty years of marriage we built a home, had three children, and shared a life that, however imperfect, carried real joy, stability, and meaning.
Then Covid arrived, and it did not arrive in calm. It arrived amid our still drowning in our daughters’ illnesses, especially the second, which had come after the first had already reshaped our lives. By then, I had already begun to change. Living through two successive, all-encompassing illnesses in my children had altered me more deeply than I understood at the time. I began turning to alcohol as a comfort in a way I never had before.
The sobriety and order she had married were no longer intact in me. Distance had entered the marriage as well. Although I believe she was patient and supportive, she required a kind of disciplined fidelity to a life I was no longer able to maintain. I had broken in ways I did not fully understand at the time, and I had begun reaching for comforts.
Soon after, I was drawn into what felt to me like a world war.
I was suddenly thrust into a national and then global role, speaking, warning, traveling, organizing, trying to answer what I believed was a coordinated and evil assault on truth and on human life. There were not many voices willing to do that work, and somehow I had become one of them. I gave myself to it. And in giving myself to it, I rationalized something that I can now only describe more sadly and more honestly than I did then: I allowed the needs of my wife and children to become secondary.
At the time, I told myself that the moment was unique, unprecedented, and morally clarifying. I told myself that if I stepped away from what I was being called to do, the cost to the world might be greater than the cost to my family, and that they, because they loved me, would have to bear that sacrifice for a time. Whether that was noble, deluded, or some mixture of both, it is how I understood it then.
What I know now is simpler.
My marriage weakened. My children received less of me than they should have. The life I had built, the happiness and joy that had been formed over two decades, began to fracture under the combined force of who I had become and what I was giving myself to. And as I continued, and then strayed further, the harms amplified. Even when I later tried to reorient, recommit, and return to the order and alignment I had once lived inside more naturally, it was too late. The damage had been done. The connections had already been cut or thinned past repair.
I do not blame my wife for that. We did not go to war with each other. The divorce was amicable and collaborative, and even before that, the house was marked much more by distance than by any open conflict.
In some ways, I do not even know how much I blame myself. Life drives us into positions we would never have chosen from the outside, and then asks us to answer for them anyway. But there is one sorrow, and one guilt, that I will always carry: that the family and marriage I had built, however imperfectly, were no longer possible, and that I was not able to save them.
I was still a father. I was still a husband in the outward sense for a time. I was still supporting a family and trying to guide my children. But I was doing so while giving them only a fraction of myself, and it was not sustainable. She had, understandably, withdrawn from me and turned her life toward the children and the structure of the home, while I had become, in many ways, an outsider in the very family I had helped build. I was not wrong to see that. And I was not wrong to understand that I had earned much of it.
In the years that followed, I found myself increasingly on my own. I had left institutional medicine behind, was building a practice outside the systems that had once defined my career, and was continuing the same search that had marked so much of my life: looking for therapies and ideas that actually held up in the real world, even when the institutions around them did not yet know what to do with them. It was late during that period that I first began following the mineral thread seriously. What began as curiosity deepened into research, then obsession, then something much harder to name.
The deeper I went, the more I felt I was uncovering something that was already there. The deeper I went, the more it felt like I was being led. Threads appeared, deepened, connected, and kept resolving into a structure I had not expected and could not explain away.
At a certain point, I had to confront the possibility that this was not originating from me.
If what is in this book is true—and I believe it is—then I am simply the latest in a long, unlikely line of receivers, a flawed person who followed a mineral thread down into the bedrock where geology, biology, physics, and theology meet, and found something that looks very much like proof of God overseeing the Earth.
It did not come from my cleverness. I believe it came from the same Architect who whispered to Hermes, to the prophets, to the alchemists, to Shimanishi, and somehow, in this strange and broken age, to me.
But even then, I could not fully accept what those words implied. I still kept returning to the same question:
Why me?
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