FAQ
Questions, answered.
What this is, where to start, and whether any of it asks you to believe anything.
What is this site about?
A working notebook at the intersection of spiritual practices, science of mind, and quantitative finance. The recurring thesis is that several traditions — scripture, contemplative practice, neuroscience, and quantitative finance — are describing the same operations in different vocabularies. Start with the Foundations reading path or browse the full archive.
Where should I start?
Depends on what you came in for. There are eight curated reading paths — Foundations (frame first), Practitioner (action first), Skeptic (peer-reviewed evidence first), In Crisis, Finance crossover, Scripture-first, Body-first, and Counterintuitive. Pick the one that matches why you're here; each is an ordered sequence, not a pile of links.
Is this religious?
No. Scripture is treated as an operational instruction manual rather than as doctrine — the claim is that the texts encode repeatable practices, not that you must believe anything. Every article ends with the same caveat: take nothing literally, subject everything to inquiry, keep what aligns with direct experience, and discard the rest.
What is SATS?
SATS is the State Akin To Sleep — the hypnagogic window at sleep onset and the hypnopompic window at wake-up, when the analytical filter is offline and the subconscious is most receptive to a deliberately held state. It recurs across several articles, including The Biology of Belief and the I AM deep dive.
What is the assumed state or the law of assumption?
Shorthand from Neville Goddard's work: occupying the felt sense of the wish already fulfilled, rather than wishing for it. The breakdown of how a held assumption stabilizes into the body runs through three stages in Belief, Faith, Confidence, with the cellular layer underneath it in The Biology of Belief.
Do I have to believe any of this for it to be useful?
No. The material is operational, not doctrinal. The articles distinguish carefully between established science, frontier interpretation, and contemplative claim — and explicitly invite you to test rather than accept. The practices either produce a felt result in your own direct experience or they don't.
Is the science legitimate?
The articles separate three layers explicitly: established science (e.g., the placebo response, pineal photosensitivity, caffeine's EEG signature), frontier-but-published interpretation (e.g., biophoton coherence, endogenous DMT), and interpretive contemplative claim. Sources are cited inline and listed at the foot of each piece so you can check the originals.
How often do you publish?
Roughly one long-form essay every couple of weeks — written carefully, published sparingly. The archive is open and chronological at /blog/.
Can I get new essays by email?
Yes, free, via Substack. Sign up on the subscribe page or directly at the Substack publication. One careful essay, no spam, unsubscribe whenever.
Who writes this?
The site is published under a pseudonym. The author's background is a decade across management consulting, investment banking, private equity, and startups, with self-taught quantitative research as the throughline. More on the About page.
Glossary
The recurring terms, defined once. Tap any term for its definition; the popover links on to the piece where it does the most work.
Faint coherent light emitted by living tissue, invoked here as the physical layer under scripture's light language. God Is Light. Why quantum effects wash out at body scale. The reason the working mechanism here is classical neuroscience, not a literal quantum mind. Decoherence Without the Mysticism. The brain network behind self-referential mind-wandering, the measurable substrate of the inner narrator. Default Mode Network. Bruce Lipton's cellular framing: a cell directs energy toward repair and growth, or toward defense, but not both at once. The Biology of Belief. Beat-to-beat variation in heart rate, the most accessible objective readout of autonomic state and recovery capacity. Resetting the Nervous System. The self-definition you finish, knowingly or not. The state assumed as "I am ___" is the seed the rest of the mechanism grows from. I AM deep dive. Occupying the felt sense of the wish already fulfilled rather than wishing for it, from Neville Goddard. Belief, Faith, Confidence. Obsessive romantic fixation, read here as the manifestation mechanism run in reverse on a parasitic, childhood-installed predicate. Limerence. The viral manifestation trend, read as an unwitting, stripped-down Law of Assumption. Lucky Girl Syndrome. The body's below-conscious threat detection, which sets autonomic state before you consciously decide anything. Resetting the Nervous System. The brain's capacity to rewire itself in response to attention, repetition, and emotional charge. Neuroplasticity. Yoga-nidra-style guided rest that produces autonomic restoration without sleep. Resetting the Nervous System. Used here for the way sustained attention shapes the body and the observed world, with the quantum term as analogy rather than literal mechanism. The Observer Effect. Stephen Porges' map of the autonomic nervous system as three states, ventral vagal, sympathetic, and dorsal vagal, rather than two. Resetting the Nervous System. The drowsy window at sleep onset and waking, when the analytical filter is offline and the subconscious is most receptive to a deliberately held state. The Biology of Belief. The claim that independent contemplative traditions describe the same operations in different vocabularies. The Convergence. The regulated, socially engaged baseline at the top of the polyvagal ladder, the state a nervous-system reset climbs back toward. Resetting the Nervous System. The Taoist "effortless action," letting the result arrive without grasping, the same lightness the practice work points at. The Convergence.