I grew up inside spiritual practice. I went into physics because I wanted to know what was actually true.

I was six the first time I meditated. My dad sat me down on the couch in his room and gave me his own Transcendental Meditation mantra. I closed my eyes and dropped into something I still call the Void. No thought. No fear. Peace beyond understanding.

When he brought me back, I didn't want to come back.

At fifteen I made a vow. I'd go into physics to understand the mysteries of the universe, the mind of God if you like, and someday I'd meet a physicist named Roger Jones, whose talks on physics and spirituality my dad had come home buzzing about.

In high school my family practiced Sukyo Mahikari, and in 1987 we spent a week at its main shrine in Takayama, Japan. I fell in love with the culture.

Through all of it, one thing kept bothering me. Meditation, visualization, Kriya, teachings about energy and past lives: the experiences were real to me, but the claims around them were just claims. Nobody could show me how they knew. I didn't want to stop practicing. I wanted to understand it more deeply, and physics was where claims get tested.

At Illinois I studied engineering physics and, honestly, mostly forgot the mission. Lacrosse (club MVP my last year). Fun. Studying, some. One summer I worked at Fermilab on the top-quark experiment, with Ryuji Yamada as my advisor, and I got my first taste of a real particle-physics collaboration. After that I knew one thing: graduate school in elementary particle physics. I picked the school with real funding for it. The University of Minnesota.

First day of teaching-assistant orientation, fall 1992. I sat down next to the professor I'd be working for and asked his name.

“Roger Jones.”

About twenty minutes later it landed. “Did you give a talk at the Theosophical Society about ten years ago?” He had. Nine years after the vow, I was sitting next to him.

I was his TA for two or three years while he finished Physics for the Rest of Us. He turned out to be a regular guy who loved science and spirituality, like me. That was its own lesson: you can will yourself toward something, but you can't script what you'll find when you get there. His book stayed with me. Hard physics in plain language, for everybody. That became part of my work too.

Light & Sound

In January 1995 I took initiation into the Light & Sound with Science of Spirituality. That September my dad and I spent three weeks at Kirpal Bagh, the ashram in Delhi. The target was six hours of meditation a day; my best was about five. After three weeks the noise finally dropped, and I found a peace inside me that could never be taken away.

Only covered up.

The ring

In graduate school I helped build the lead/scintillating-fiber electromagnetic calorimeters for Brookhaven's muon g−2 experiment, E821: the detectors that counted the decay electrons around the ring. We published the design in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in 2000. At the same time, my advisor, Priscilla Cushman, was carrying that detector know-how to CERN, testing photodetectors on a prototype calorimeter for CMS (Cushman et al., 1997). CMS tried sampling designs in its test beams before choosing lead-tungstate crystals, and in 2012 it was one of the two experiments that found the Higgs boson. So my line to the Higgs is short and honest: I trained in the lab of a physicist who helped build the detector that found it. E821 went on to measure how a muon wobbles in a magnetic field to about half a part per million. My own dissertation measured the muon's electric dipole moment with the same experiment, work the collaboration cites in its 2009 limit. I finished my Ph.D. in experimental high-energy particle physics in 2004.

Twenty-two years later, that measurement, carried forward by thousands of physicists at CERN, Brookhaven and Fermilab, was honored with the 2026 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. I'm one of its co-laureates, with the Muon g−2 Collaboration.

In 2004 I left research physics. I couldn't see a postdoc getting me to what I'd come here to do, and I knew there was more for me than one more paper. For years I was a science advisor in intellectual-property law. Good work. Not my work.

Around 2012, on a bus, it became obvious: I needed to serve humanity. I went back to school in counseling psychology to become a marriage & family therapist.

On February 27, 2013, I walked into a demonstration of Higher Brain Living®. Within minutes a voice inside said: pay attention, this is going to change the entire trajectory of your life. What I saw wasn't a better method on the same line as everything else.

Not optimization. Evolution.

The next day, in my first session, I saw the inner light I'd been promised at my initiation eighteen years earlier. Brilliant specks of light, dancing. That was my first real taste of something I teach every week now: the ecstasy is inside.

A year later, at Dr. Michael Cotton's Kosmic Consciousness Retreat, I had what we call a Transcendent Awakening. Here's the strangest sentence a particle physicist can write: I traveled outside the universe and saw its container. I'd spent my career measuring things inside spacetime. Now I was outside it, looking back. And then the real surprise, right under my nose the whole time: the Godhead is ever-present.

I opened a practice in New York, came home to Chicago to work alongside Michael Cotton as a trainer and retreat facilitator, and in 2021, when PraxisAletheia formed, became Director of Education at The New Human University. That's where you'll find me now, building the curriculum and the measurement for IOTA, a new category of human evolution.

I took the long way around, so you can take a shorter one.

My work is to help people wake up, grow up, clean up & show up (Ken Wilber's map), and to evolve into the new human that's already waiting underneath the noise. You're not finished. Neither am I.