Process Notes

Where it started

The trilogy began as a question that wouldn't go away.

I have spent twenty-four years as a hospitalist and primary-care physician at the Boise VA — a Veterans Affairs medical center serving the men and women who fought America's wars across half a century. The work has been the privilege of my professional life. It has also been a long apprenticeship in the cases medicine doesn't quite know what to do with.

Patients whose neurological deterioration cleared in the hours before death. Patients whose cardiac arrests left them with verifiable accounts of conversations held in other rooms. Patients who, after head injury, could suddenly do mathematics they had never been trained in. Patients whose comfort and lucidity seemed to depend on whether their wives sang to them. The textbook explanations covered some of this. They did not cover all of it.

I am not the first physician to notice that the production model of mind has gaps. What I noticed, slowly, was that the gaps were patterned. The phenomena that the standard story could not absorb did not look like random anomalies. They looked like exactly the phenomena one would expect if the standard story were missing a fundamental ingredient — if consciousness were not produced by the brain but received through it. That hypothesis had been sitting in the contemplative literature of every continent for thousands of years. Around 2010, it began to sit in the physics literature as well.

Anima is what I wrote when the question stopped being possible to set aside.

The reading years

Before there were books, there were the reading years.

Roughly fifteen years of nights and weekends spent following one thread of inquiry into the next. The mystics first — Teresa, John of the Cross, Eckhart, Rumi, the Upaniṣads. Then the philosophers — Chalmers, Nagel, Kastrup, Hoffman. Then the physicists — Bell, Aspect, Bohm, Penrose, Rovelli, Susskind, Maldacena, more recently Arkani-Hamed. Then the biologists who turned out to have been quietly converging on the same picture — Levin, Pollack, Bandyopadhyay. Then the contemporary theorists who had built the formal scaffolding: D'Ariano, Faggin, Strømme. Then Kashmir Shaivism, which turned out to have anticipated most of it a thousand years before.

The Reading page is the bibliography of those years. It is not exhaustive — no bibliography ever is — but it is honest about what the trilogy is standing on. I have made no claim in the books that does not have a citation somewhere in that list.

What is real in Anima

Readers often ask which of the clinical scenes are based on real cases. The honest answer:

None of the specific patients in Anima is a single real patient. All of them are composites — built from elements of cases I have seen, read about in the medical literature, or had described to me by colleagues, with names, demographics, and specific identifiers changed to protect anyone who might be identifiable. The Mr. Martinez scene is not a single Mr. Martinez. The Mary Parker chapter is not a single Mary Parker. Lucía Reyes is fictional.

But the phenomena are real. Terminal lucidity is a documented clinical phenomenon — Nahm's 2012 review systematized over a hundred case reports; Batthyány's 2023 book expanded the series to hundreds. Veridical near-death experiences under monitored cardiac arrest are documented in the AWARE studies. Reincarnation-type cases with verifiable identifying marks are documented in Ian Stevenson's forty-year program at the University of Virginia. The cases in Anima are fiction; the kind of case is not.

This is the discipline I have tried to maintain throughout the trilogy. The framework is speculative; the evidence it stands on is real.

How the books were written

The first book, Anima, was written over roughly three years, mostly in the early hours before clinic — five or six in the morning, with a cup of coffee and a single window. The second book, Numen, came faster, written in something like fifteen months over 2024–25. Limen required the most reading and the slowest writing: it is the cosmology underneath the first two books, the place where the fictional framing gives way to the actual argument. Fragile Light, the standalone, was the easiest to write — I had been carrying Luz Paz's voice for years before I knew what to do with it.

The books were written in English, in Boise. The Spanish editions are not translations in the conventional sense. They are my own re-writings of each book in my native language. Many of the phrases land differently in Castilian than they do in English; sometimes I have changed the phrase to fit the language. The Spanish editions are companions, not translations.

The music

I am not a musician. I am a listener.

The music that ended up in the trilogy — the unresolved augmented chord, the φ-tuned C, the spectral and microtonal works on the Watch & Listen page — found me before I found a framework for it. I noticed years before Anima was begun that certain pieces of music seemed to organize my body in ways other pieces did not. Buckley's Hallelujah. Górecki's third symphony. Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel. The slow movements of Beethoven's late quartets. Scriabin's Vers la flamme.

It was years later that I came across Helmholtz, then Doczi, then cymatics, then Catherino, then the spectral school. The framework caught up with what the body had already been telling me. The chord chapters of Limen are partly an attempt to articulate what I think the body has been listening for. The recent pitch analysis we did of Buckley's Hallelujah — finding that across his recordings his C-tonic averages out to the φ-tuned C — is the kind of confirmation I had stopped expecting. The geometric center of the recorded life of the song is φ-C.

What I owe the patients

The trilogy is, in its way, a thank-you note.

Every patient who let me sit by their bedside and ask one more question is in this work. Every veteran who told me what they saw during their cardiac arrest, who described what their wife's hand felt like in the last hour, who wanted me to know about the conversation they had with someone who could not have been there — all of them are in this work. The medical chart is one record of those encounters. Anima is another.

My discipline as a physician is to keep an open mind without abandoning rigor — to let what the patients tell me alter my picture of what is possible, while remaining honest about what the evidence does and does not yet show. The trilogy is that discipline turned into fiction.

What's next

The trilogy is finished, but the framework is not. New evidence continues to arrive — the 2022 Bandyopadhyay microtubule measurements, the 2025 Strømme Φ-field paper, the 2024 Levin anthrobot results. New explainer pages will continue to appear on this site as the literature develops. The Reading page will continue to grow. If a piece of work belongs in this framework and you don't see it on the site yet, write to me.

I will also keep writing. The most important variable in the equation, in the framework's own vocabulary, is what each localized mode of the field chooses to render next. That includes mine.

For readers who want to follow the trail further: Where to Start is the navigational page; the Synthesis is the argument; the Reading page is the citations. For correspondence, see About.