Fulcrum Farms.

The people I most want to reach are the ones at the leading edge of technology. They build the tools everyone else will use. Many of them feel the pull to go deeper, into meditation, into contemplation, into whatever it is that's waiting inside them. And they can't leave. There's a launch, a team, a mortgage.

So they get two bad choices. A retreat that asks them to disappear for a week and come back to a flooded inbox. Or a job that never leaves room for the inner work at all.

I want a third option. Not a retreat from life, but a fuller engagement with every part of it: the work, the body, the land, the people around you and the inner life. The point is to stop reducing a person to any one of those parts.

You come to the campus and you bring your work with you. During the day you have everything you'd want in a good office and more: fast, redundant internet over Starlink, plenty of power, screens, devices, quiet rooms and a coworking hall built for people who build things. You stay on your calls. You ship.

Mornings and evenings are different. That's when you receive Inner Organic Technology® Activation (IOTA), developed by Dr. Michael Cotton and taught at The New Human University, where I'm Director of Education. There's deep meditation, the self-amplifying practice we now call IOTA Infinity, and the Nine Summits of Transformation. In between there's the forest, for walking and recharging.

The premise is simple. You don't have to choose between your career and your evolution. You can carry both, in the same week, in the same place.

Here's one way a day might go. It's a sketch, not a schedule.

• Early morning: IOTA activation and deep meditation, together.
• Workday: your normal job, in the coworking hall or your cabin. A full day, uninterrupted.
• Late afternoon: about two hours on the land: the garden, the farm, a building project. Hands in the dirt, side by side with the rest of the group.
• Evening: a shared meal from the farm, then IOTA Infinity, the Summits, or just the fire and good conversation.

People would come as a small cohort, a handful at a time, arriving and leaving together. Small enough that everyone knows everyone. Long enough, a week or a few, for the practice and the friendships to take root.

Farming, building and repair might look like a detour from awakening. They aren't. Food, shelter, competence and self-reliance are the ground every later stage of development stands on. In the Nine Summits, Summit 6 is about reclaiming that whole foundation instead of leaving it behind. At Fulcrum Farms you reclaim it with real soil and real consequences.

That's the pattern I keep coming back to as a physicist. You don't throw away the old plane when you rise to a new one. You carry it with you.

Most places that set out to help people grow end up shrinking them down to one piece. Some get stuck in achievement: the rational, results-first mindset that drives most of today's technology. Some get stuck in a cause, social or ecological, until the cause is the whole of who you are. Some reach backward, read old stories literally and decide the ancients knew more than we do. And almost all of them reduce a person to one domain: only the mind, only the body, only relationships, or only the environment.

Fulcrum Farms is meant to hold all of it. Achievement is real. Care for people and the planet is real. The old traditions carry real wisdom. Mind, body, relationships and the land are one life, not four projects. Evolution means including what came before without getting trapped in it, and a place built for that has to make room for every part of a person at once.

The first version of this idea wasn't a campus. It was a party. Back in 2004 I wanted to make art in every medium and had nowhere to do it, so I built the place myself in my basement. A few friends became packed nights, free to anyone. People picked up whatever called to them, lost track of time, and everything they made went on the walls. I learned that if you build the room and remove the friction, people find their own way in. Read about the Art House →

To be clear about where this is: Fulcrum Farms is an idea, not an operating campus. There's no land yet and no opening date. I've written a founding charter and thought hard about how it would work, and I'm putting it in public view because a place like this can't be built by one person.

Longer term, I see the same idea at a larger scale: an integrally informed neighborhood, and maybe one day a small city-state. Like the Art House, it started as what I needed. I suspect it's what the world needs too.

I'm looking for collaborators. That means people already running land-based retreats, homesteads or residencies who see a kinship here, builders and farmers, people who know off-grid power, people who'd want to be among the first to live and work on it, and people who could help fund it or offer land. If you're doing something similar, I'd love to compare notes. Maybe the first version grows inside a place that already exists.

IOTA, the Nine Summits and Source Code Meditation belong to The New Human University. Any campus would teach them under license from NHU.

Get in touch about Fulcrum Farms →

IOTA sessions are not medical or psychological care and don't replace it.