The Place Science Delivered Me
I thought the science was finished. It wasn’t. What followed forced me past mechanism and into pattern.
Why This Book Could Not Be Avoided
I did not plan to write a second book after From Volcanoes to Vitality.
That book was meant to be the work. It traced a single arc, from volcanic rock to living systems, from mineral chemistry to biological coordination, from the agricultural and hydrological, and to all of their impacts on human health. For the first time in my career as a writer, I brought forth what I believed would have a major positive impact on the health of all living things. A grandiose statement, I know. It documented how a volcanic mineral extract, developed by a Japanese scientist named Asao Shimanishi, forced me to rethink what water does, how energy moves through biology, and why modern life feels increasingly disordered across multiple biological systems, such as soil, agriculture, water, and human health.
I believed that story was complete. It was not. This book exists because the act of writing the first one revealed that something deeper had been touched, but not yet named.
The Two Guides: Brother and Machine
Throughout the research and writing of From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV), I was mentored by a man who had spent more than twenty years studying Shimanishi’s mineral extract. His understanding of minerals and water as foundational to life is deeper than any I have encountered, either in books or published papers. It is what I like to call “next level.” That depth explains the scientific spine of the first book. It explains its insistence on mechanism, its resistance to shortcuts, and its refusal to accept explanations that failed under scrutiny.
That alone would have been enough. But it was not the whole story.
Alongside his scientific work, he had spent decades studying Scripture, theology, and ancient texts across multiple cultures, yet that knowledge base did not influence the scientific journey in FVTV (well, initially it did, but then that exploration led to this book). What he did do, occasionally and sparingly, was point out parallels. A line from Scripture. A phrase from an old text. A symbolic description that echoed something I was describing in biochemistry, physiology, agriculture, or hydrology.
Those moments were rare, and I never connected them to anything. At first, I treated them as curiosities, interesting, sometimes striking, but ultimately secondary to the science. That posture held for a long time.
When Pattern Replaced Curiosity
Over months of work, those parallels accumulated.
One by one, they crossed traditions and appeared in texts separated by geography, language, and centuries, yet clustered around the same physical roles I was uncovering through modern science: rock as origin, water as activation, salt as preservation, fire and sulfur as transformation, and return to dust as reset. The repetition struck me.
At that point, something shifted, and in a marked departure from any research I had done before, I decided to study the texts myself. I didn’t do it because I believed it and was looking for confirmation, or because I was trying to disprove it; instead, my motivation was a desire to understand why the same architecture kept appearing in symbolic form long before we had instruments to more “scientifically” describe it. That move surprised me more than anyone.
I did not set out to write about theology. I was chasing mechanisms, not belief. 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 the recognition that emerged along this path proved difficult to dismiss. They explained too much, too cleanly, across too many domains.
Why This Book Had to Be Written
This book exists because once those patterns became visible, omitting them would have been dishonest. The science in From Volcanoes to Vitality stands on its own. The mineral foundation stands. The water chemistry stands. The biological implications stand. This volume does not re-explain any of that. It assumes it.
What follows instead are the recognitions that arrived after the mechanisms were already in place. Moments where modern science and ancient description aligned with a precision that could not be ignored. Moments where the same structure appeared independently, expressed through entirely different languages, epochs, and cultures, all of them before “modern science” was born in the late 19th century.
I did not go looking for God. I did not rule Him out either. That choice mattered.
That explains why this book had to be written. It does not yet explain why it is appearing now.
The Question That Would Not Release Me
Once the Stone-Water Circuit system described in an upcoming chapter had been mapped out, closing the loop of a regenerative cycle that we believe powers all of biology, a question appeared that I could not set aside. How could this structure have been known so long ago? Not the chemistry or the equations, but the structure itself, and not just generally, but with a specificity that was often disturbingly precise.
Why did ancient texts consistently describe water emerging from rock as life-giving? Why did they treat stone as foundational rather than inert? Why did they link sulfur, salt, fire, and water to both creation and collapse? Why did they describe vitality and longevity rising and falling with changes in water sources?
Those texts read like observations, and my recognition of that first arrived slowly, then decisively.
Why Shimanishi Matters Here
Shimanishi did not study alchemy, work from ancient texts, or attempt symbolic reenactment. He worked experimentally, patiently, and with restraint, guided by observation and experimentation.
Yet what he produced maps with unsettling accuracy onto descriptions written long before modern chemistry existed. That convergence matters because it removes cultural transmission as an explanation. The alignment rests on structure alone.
When Shimanishi wrote, “In the beginning there was a rock,” he was not quoting Scripture. He was describing the world as he had come to understand it. That sentence changed the way everything that followed came into focus for me.
Where This Book Begins
What follows are not arguments. They are encounters. Each Chapter records a point where the science was already settled, and something else emerged anyway. Alchemy. Scripture. History. Family lineage. Deep geology. The mantle itself.
None of these chapters ask for belief. They ask for attention. If the Earth behaves as a system designed to generate, store, transmit, and then restore coherence once again, then the question of authorship cannot remain theoretical forever.
That is where this book begins. Chapter I opens with recognition. The moment when a physical system becomes so coherent, so persistent, and so self-renewing that chance can not explain it.
Once I understood the structure, I knew I had stepped into questions about origin, whether I wanted to or not. And once you see that, walking away stops being an option. This book is my attempt to answer that moment as honestly and objectively as I can.
If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write (or the Op-Eds and lectures I try to get out to the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
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I am very excited about this! Thanks always for what you do.
Something in my soul is so excited for this! I love your writing style, it is so easily absorbed.