Chapter XII: Alchemy in Modern Life

The chemistry in the three Hermetic texts was only the beginning of what they contained.
 I realized this only very late in my reading of The Six Keys . I had spent an immense amount of time on the first three Keys because that was where most of the procedural detail lay. Only when I neared completion of the prior chapter did I give sufficient attention to the later Keys.
 What I found was that the author’s perspective began to shift. He moved from cryptic instruction into something more personal: a description of the conditions under which the work could actually be completed. I began to feel that he had lived through the work, suffered through it, and was writing from the other side.
 One of the most striking passages in all of The Six Keys occurs in the Second Key:
 “He who knows how to sublime the Stone philosophically, justly deserves the name of a philosopher, since he knows the Fire of the Wise, which is the only instrument which can work this sublimation. No philosopher has ever openly revealed this Secret Fire, and this powerful agent, which works all the wonders of the Art: he who shall not understand it, and not know how to distinguish it by the characters whereby it is described, ought to make a stand here, and pray to God to make it clear to him; for the knowledge of this great Secret is rather a gift of Heaven than a Light acquired by the natural force of reasoning; let him, nevertheless, read the writings of the philosophers; let him meditate; and, above all, let him pray: there is no difficulty which may not in the end be made clear by Work, Meditation, and Prayer.”
 I have read this passage many times, and each time it lands with the same force. It is pointing to the part of the path that no amount of technique can guarantee. The reader must read, work, meditate, observe, and remain devoted to the work in front of him. But Eudoxus says plainly that even this is not enough. The knowledge of the Secret Fire is “ a gift of Heaven. ”
 The Sixth Key then gives that same truth a lived dimension:
 “The Sixth Key teaches the Multiplication of the Stone, by the reiteration of the same operation, which consists but in opening and shutting, dissolving and coagulating, imbibing and drying; whereby the virtues of the Stone are infinitely augmentable.”
 “I should much bewail, if, like me, after having known the true matter, you should spend fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation, without being able to extract out of the Stone the precious juice which it encloses in its bosom, for want of knowing the secret fire of the wise . . .”
 “But I give you notice, moreover, that even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career.”
 “. . . which makes to run out of this plant (dry and withered in appearance) a water which wets not the hands, and which by a magical union . . . is dissolved into a viscous water—into a mercurial liquor, which is the beginning, the foundation, and the Key of our Art.”
 Here, the Sixth Key is describing the conditions under which the work actually succeeds: the repetition of the same act, the long span of years, the failure even after partial understanding, and the insistence that effort alone does not get you there.
 Those who lack the patience to remain with the problem long enough will abandon it. I began to see the difficulty of The Six Keys itself as a filter for the kind of person who might succeed.
 Although Eudoxus urges the reader to read, to work, to observe, and to persist, he also makes clear that getting through the text is still not enough. The writings can point, warn, and test, but they do not carry the practitioner to the end. He has to remain with the work long enough for something more to arrive.
 And when I strip it down, the instruction becomes almost simple. You have to read. You have to work. You have to handle the materials. You have to get it wrong, again and again, and stay with it long enough to begin to see what is actually happening.
 But that is still not enough.
 Eudoxus describes the conditions under which recognition finally arrives. The moment when the meaning becomes clear is not something the practitioner can force. In his view, it comes only from Heaven.
 The Wise Artist
 What affected me most is the extent to which the text’s portrait of the “ Wise Artis t” appears to map onto Shimanishi. Everything I have learned about him points in the same direction: intensely private, never seeking recognition, prayerful, and almost unimaginably persistent. The Sixth Key speaks of the man who, “ after having known the true matter, ” might still “ spend fifteen years entirely in the work, in study and in meditation, ” unable to extract “ the precious juice ” from the Stone for lack of the “ Secret Fire. ” Shimanishi lived almost that exact pattern. He worked with rock, heat, water, and acids through repetition, failure, refinement, and return for nearly fifteen years. He had one stone, one question, and the discipline to remain with it until it finally yielded its answer.
 Other aspects of his character deepen the resemblance. I have repeatedly been told that Shimanishi spoke of his discovery with reverence, not ownership, describing it as “ a gift from our Creator. ” At the only international conference he attended that I know of, during a lecture, he is said to have remarked, “W orking with this material is like working with Angels, ” which is not the language of a typical scientist. If the Great Work is, as Eudoxus says, “ a gift of Heaven, ” then The Six Keys is describing not only a sequence of operations, but also the sort of person who can carry such a sequence through to completion: one marked by discipline, reverence, and a willingness to labor for years without recognition.
 By that measure, Shimanishi comes astonishingly close. Even more strikingly, he never publicly revealed his Secret Fire, as the operational details remain known only to the men of the Shimanishi-Kaken company he left behind. That fact, too, places him within the circle Eudoxus describes. And that is only the first convergence.
 Another is the path itself. Shimanishi followed it without The Six Keys as a guide. He began with almost nothing: a basic understanding that acids could dissolve minerals, and a question about whether those minerals could be rendered active in water. From there, he worked alone, without a theory and without any assurance that the work would succeed. If these texts describe real processes, and I believe they do, then Shimanishi appears to have arrived at them independently, through experiment, devotion, and sustained attention to a single rock.
 The texts describe a specific process. Shimanishi independently devised one that matched it. They describe the properties of a substance. Shimanishi produced a substance with those properties. They describe the character of a practitioner shaped by long obscurity, long labor, and long submission to a problem that refuses quick answers. Shimanishi’s life fits that description with extraordinary precision. Any one of these points could be questioned in isolation, but taken together they accumulate into something much harder to dismiss.
 What makes this even more striking is the path by which we recognized the convergences. The recognitions moved in two directions. Our modern scientific research helped us progress through the texts, while the texts themselves suggested connections that shaped our understanding of the science. Even now, I am not sure I could fully separate which parts of the final Rock–Water Circuit Theory came from the modern scientific literature and which from the texts of antiquity.
 At this point, I do not think these convergences can be honestly dismissed as forced mapping, retrospective construction, or a self-reinforcing interpretive framework. The consistency with which the texts map onto the science, the process, the product, and the person points to something more serious than loose analogy. It suggests that these texts documented real knowledge of a material operation, what it produces, and the type of person required to bring it to completion, even if that knowledge was preserved in symbolic and guarded form.
 That, to me, is the true significance of what has happened across these chapters. Shimanishi’s modern work has helped make ancient texts interpretable, while those texts, in turn, have helped clarify the scope and meaning of what he appears to have achieved. I do not know how often history presents us with that kind of reciprocal illumination between ancient writing and modern practice. I only know that these documents appear to be real records of a scientific and material understanding that long predated the language we would now use to describe it.
 What these chapters suggest is that the labyrinth described in alchemy has, in fact, been successfully navigated before, both in the older world and in modern times. But even that is not the full extent of the convergences gathered here.
 The Fifteen-Year Echo
 What first appeared in Shimanishi’s life began to echo again in MB’s.
 Soon after he began importing Themarox directly from Shimanishi Kaken, MB enjoyed immense early success. Then, suddenly, in 2010, his business was nearly destroyed by the launch of a coordinated disinformation campaign. What followed, in his own words, were fifteen years of obscurity: years of persistence, study, and quiet labor. He was able to make a living, and the business grew modestly over that period, largely within Amish farming communities across the Midwest, where farmers came to value Themarox for what they saw in their fields: stronger crops, less pest pressure, and a resilience they considered essential to their agriculture. But he never regained the wider distribution and awareness of Themarox that he had once achieved.
 That pattern matters. The figure described in the Six Keys was not a man at the center of things. By the nature of the work, they were set apart, working outside recognition, outside status, and often in prolonged isolation. That recurring pattern seems, within these texts, almost to function as part of the work itself.
 The same is true of companionship. Sternbuchta states it plainly: “. . . to maintain you and your companion (because one alone cannot do the Work) then the thing becomes idle.” That line lands more concretely for me now than it once did. MB spent roughly two years attempting his own extract before abandoning it, and the much longer period that followed the near destruction of his business was, in a different sense, a kind of idleness too—not inactivity, but a prolonged inability to move the work to its next stage.
 That line immediately made me recall a moment in the first months of our collaboration, when MB told me that he had once said to a colleague that he needed someone who could help him move the work forward, someone, interestingly enough, whose background and character were oddly similar to mine. Later, as the work deepened in complexity, breadth, and difficulty, I came to feel the same thing from the other side. One day, after calling him to discuss a highly nuanced and esoteric mapping, a sudden insight came upon me that I shared with him: there was no other person in the world I could have had that conversation with.
 MB laughed, reminding me that for almost the entire twenty years before our collaboration, he, too, had had no one who could truly engage with the material at the level his decades of work had brought him to. We came to this from different directions, with different training and different instincts. Yet as I write these words, I cannot help feeling that the paths leading to our eventual intersection had been set long before.
 Our work did not move in one direction. He would pour out decades of accumulated observations, intuitions, and partial syntheses, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in fragments, and they would immediately trigger questions that sent me into both modern and ancient literature. What I found there would then force him to clarify, defend, expand, or rethread what he had long held, while at other moments my research would uncover a missing link that fit directly into one of his older lines of thought.
 As the book drew toward its close, I was struck to find that this kind of partnership is also stated in The Six Keys : “without the help of a faithful friend, one remains undoubtedly in this labyrinth.”
 MB then recalled an old line from Proverbs that he had long memorized: “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” The word iron hit hard for me, not as a metaphor, but as describing something functional. We had already spent months tracing its centrality in the Rock–Water Circuit, in ISAW, and in the deep-to-surface gradient that feeds life through mineralized water, so to encounter that same word at the point where the texts speak of companionship and sharpening struck me as more than incidental.
 Both the Letter from Sternbuchta and The Six Keys suggest that, at some point, the work may require another person—someone capable of seeing, clarifying, or correcting what the solitary practitioner cannot.
 Then there is a coincidence that MB and I both found amusing: my name, Pierre, literally means rock, while his, Matthew, means gift of God. Forgive me for the forced mapping, but I get a kick out of the fit between our names and two conditions that seem to recur throughout The Six Keys : a source rock and something received.
 But there is something even more powerful than these convergences: at one point, the text itself appears to have altered the course of MB’s life.
 When the Text Entered the Work
 Long before I entered this work, MB had once attempted to engage the same problem Shimanishi had already solved. He was introduced to Themarox in 2004, and soon after, he started a business selling it at health and wellness events.
 His first encounter with an alchemical text occurred afterward when an acquaintance showed him the Letter from Sternbuchta . Given his unusually high level of discernment, he immediately understood it as a serious text, relevant to his work.
 Soon after, he was forced to make a decision that put his business in peril. He cut off contact with his only source of Themarox because he could no longer tolerate the man’s dishonesty and unreliability. As a result, MB found himself with little choice but to attempt the extraction himself.
 Working with vermiculite sourced from Canada, he applied the same general principles and succeeded, at least in part, in producing an aqueous mineral extract viable enough to sell and sustain a business.
 And yet, even in that success, there were discrepancies he could not ignore. The color was different. The behavior was different. Most importantly, it did not clarify water as the original. He initially understood these differences in conventional terms—variation in mineral composition, especially iron—and continued forward because what he had made was real, useful, and often validated by others.
 Then, almost two years later, he encountered The Six Keys of Eudoxus .
 He has told me that the First and Second Keys immediately struck him as describing a real process, one he recognized as corresponding to both Shimanishi’s work and his own efforts. But there was one line that cut through everything else with unusual force: “one must make use of the citrine Mercury,” together with the warning “not to be deceived on this point.”
 That word— citrine —stopped him. The color of what he had made was clear. And he knew the color of Shimanishi’s extract: golden-yellow. He understood the passage to mean that, among the possible liquors or “ Mercuries, ” one had to begin with the correct one, and that it had to be citrine.
 Another line struck him just as strongly: “even after you shall be arrived at the knowledge of the Secret Fire of the Wise, yet still you shall not attain your point at your first career . . .” He read those phrases as warnings—not simply about error, but about direction.
 In that moment, although he knew his extract was useful, he began to doubt its truth.
 He concluded that what he had produced, however real and effective, was not the thing described in the texts, but a partial approximation. Out of conviction, he stopped.
 He ended what the text itself calls a “ first career ” rather than refining it further. That is when he reached out to Shimanishi Kaken in Japan. From the outside, that decision could have looked like a retreat. In reality, it was realignment: a willingness to accept that he had come close to the process described in the texts, but had not yet arrived at the true substance.
 What makes MB’s story especially striking is that his trajectory runs in the opposite direction from the one described in The Six Keys . The Keys are written for someone trying to discover the Secret Fire. MB, by contrast, had first come into contact with the true substance through Shimanishi’s work, and then he attempted to reproduce it himself. In that sense, the text did not lead him toward the Golden Elixir. It led him back to it.
 The Point at Which the Work Became Personal
 I should say something here that I am not entirely comfortable saying, but I do think the path I have found myself on bears mentioning, because it now seems to me to echo, in its own much smaller way, the same pattern I have been tracing in the lives of Eudoxus, Shimanishi, and MB.
 By the time I reached this chapter, I had spent eight months almost entirely inside this material, though that period was not confined to alchemy. What began as an intrigue with Shimanishi’s extract widened into a much larger journey through mineral science, water, agriculture, geology, and hydrology, and only then narrowed into alchemy, where the work became more demanding still—an extended cycle of reading, failed interpretations, returns to the same passages, and a kind of fixation on a single problem that did not release its hold.
 What also struck me was that this stretch of work was unlike anything else in my life. I do not say that lightly. I had already lived through a highly demanding academic and medical career—two decades in one of the most intense specialties in medicine, years of teaching, writing, publishing, and working at a pace that had often felt unsustainable, followed by five years of uninterrupted pressure during Covid, trying to save lives while fighting institutions that refused to look. Yet these eight months imposed a different kind of concentration.
 Outside of seeing patients and trying to preserve time with my wife, I was almost continuously at a desk, reading, researching, writing, and returning to the same material. It was narrower, more isolating, and, in some ways, more consuming than anything that had come before it.
 In another departure from my usual way of working, I did not reach this point through speed, cleverness, or by expertly collecting and organizing information. I got here by staying with the material for a long time, asking the same questions again and again, and working through repeated failed interpretations. The easier readings gave way first. Only then did deeper meanings begin to appear. I wrote this section for one reason: by then, I had begun to feel caught in the same pattern I was trying to describe.
 I am not claiming equivalence with Shimanishi, nor with the author of The Six Keys . But the path described in these texts—prolonged effort, isolation, repeated failure, and eventual recognition—began to look like part of the work itself. At a certain point, the texts changed for me. They stopped feeling like fragmented historical artifacts and began to read as records of something real and still active.

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Summary: The alchemical texts stopped reading like riddles and began reading like records: of a process, a substance, and the kind of long, disciplined life required to bring the work through.


Chapter XIII: The Hermetic Canon: Closed

Up to this point, the focus has been on decoding the underlying operation described symbolically across the Hermetic canon. What follows is the product of that decoding: a set of operational definitions that render the canon legible by anchoring its language to a real material process.
 To our knowledge, this is the first operational reconstruction of the core roles encoded across the Hermetic and alchemical canon.
 At the risk of brief repetition, and because the table that follows requires it, I should restate the basic framework here. The Emerald Tablet , Letter from Sternbuchta , and The Six Keys of Eudoxus describe the same underlying process from three different angles: the order of the cycle, the nature of the essence it yields, and the sequence by which that essence is brought forth. Their language shifts, repeats, and sometimes appears to contradict itself because the process was being guarded. Once that process was reconstructed independently of the texts themselves, the symbols began to resolve into specific meanings.
 For the same reason, I should also restate one interpretive rule before the reader turns to the table. In alchemical texts, terms such as Sulfur, Mercury, Salt, Fire, and Stone do not name fixed substances, but roles within a process. For that reason, the same word may point to different materials depending on the stage, scale, or context in which the operation is occurring, while still preserving the same underlying function.
 The table below does not attempt to catalog every possible referent. It presents one internally consistent mapping of those roles onto a specific, real process: Nature’s Rock–Water Circuit and its laboratory extraction in Shimanishi’s work, as described in Sternbuchta and The Six Keys . In this framework, sulfur-bearing atmospheric chemistry and sulfuric acid are treated as different expressions of the same activating role.
 This is not an arbitrary selection. It is the mapping that allows the texts to resolve coherently across scales while remaining anchored to a process that can be observed, tested, and reproduced.
 Table 1. The Ariadne Key: Role Concordance Across the Hermetic Canon
 Note. The Six Keys of Eudoxus describes the sequence of operations by which a mineral essence is drawn from its rock parent and brought into concentrated form. The Letter from Sternbuchta describes the resulting essence: what it is like, how it behaves, and what it does once produced. The Emerald Tablet describes the natural cycle itself: the planetary order by which the process unfolds in Nature. The table below does not force identical vocabulary across the canon; it shows how the same underlying operation appears under different symbolic emphases.

 Canonical interpreters of alchemy have long agreed on the structural logic of these texts: the Stone is the product of conjunction, not the substrate; Mercury is a principle, not elemental metal; Sulfur is an activating force; and the Secret Fire is a penetrating solvent rather than literal flame. Across psychological, historical, and esoteric schools—Jung, Newman, Principe, Fulcanelli, and Canseliet—there is broad agreement on these points, even where interpretations diverge.
 What our work advances is the material specificity of the terms. The canon was trying to describe a real process, but it did so without naming the substances identifiably. That is why the language stayed open for centuries. Until the process and its product were realized in the world, the symbols could not be fixed to a single meaning. What was missing was the operation itself.
 In 1977, Shimanishi, in our view, supplied that missing reference. Through his work with vermiculite-derived mineral chemistry, he devised an extraction process that produced a substance whose properties correspond strikingly to what the canon had long described under different symbolic names. Once that reference existed in the modern world, the language of the texts could finally be anchored to a working operation rather than to speculation. It was only through Shimanishi’s work that the canon became legible.
 The Three Works
 There is one further feature of this work that must be addressed. We return to a line in The Six Keys that I originally interpreted in Chapter XI as referring to the three steps in the process of producing the Golden Elixir:
 “But the operations of the three works have a great deal of analogy one to another, and the philosophers do designedly speak in equivocal terms.”
 The Six Keys went over these three steps “or works” repeatedly, using constantly shifting language and metaphor: 1) biotite weathering to vermiculite, 2) sulfuric acid penetrating the porous stone, and 3) mineral essence being released. I still think that is the line’s primary meaning. However, as I sat writing this chapter, reflecting upon the coherence of these three texts separated by hundreds or thousands of years, another strange resonance occurred to me: our journey through the Hermetic canon was also confined, almost unbelievably, to just three works.
 The Hermetic and alchemical canon is vast—far beyond the three texts decoded in this book. In fact, neither MB nor I have ever knowingly engaged with any other text from the Hermetic or alchemical traditions. At one point, I tried to get a sense of how much of that literature remained outside our attention, and the scale of it was staggering. And yet the texts that actually entered our lives, held our attention, and ultimately yielded a coherent framework were just these three: The Emerald Tablet , The Six Keys of Eudoxus , and The Letter from Sternbuchta .
 That would not be especially remarkable if these were the three most obvious, most widely read, or most accessible texts in the tradition. But they are not. The Emerald Tablet is foundational and famous, yes. The Six Keys is known only within a small alchemical community. It has no mainstream scientific or academic visibility, is not commonly taught, cited, or discussed, and almost no educated reader has ever heard of it. If that is not obscure enough, it is almost impossible to describe the level of obscurity that has been accorded to Sternbuchta .
 It is so obscure as to be scarcely accessible at all and, in our case, had to reenter the work through an archived trace after more than two decades of inaccessibility. And yet it was precisely this most marginal of the three that proved indispensable. Without Sternbuchta, I do not think we could have defended the coherence of the whole. The Tablet gives the cycle. Eudoxus gives the guarded operations. Sternbuchta gives the missing bridge: the nature, value, and behavior of the essence once brought forth. Remove any one of the three, and the structure weakens. Remove Sternbuchta in particular, and I do not think it holds.
 That leaves me with a question I cannot fully answer. Why these three? Why, out of such a vast literature, did the work remain so narrowly confined? Why did MB and I, coming to this from different directions and at different times, engage no other text—nor ever seek to? And why did it turn out that only when these three were finally placed together did the canon begin to yield a coherent, material, and operational interpretation?
 I will not try to resolve that question here. My understanding of why these texts appeared in our lives comes later in the book, when the work's larger pattern comes into view. For now, I will only record the improbability of it. A line that speaks of “three works” that “ have a great deal of analogy to each other ” and which “ designedly speak in equivocal terms ” now strikes me as providing an uncannily precise description of the journey through the Hermetic canon that we just completed. Perhaps that is nothing. Perhaps it is only one more coincidence in a project already full of them. However, I find it impossible to dismiss it as an accident.
 What the Texts Are Describing
 Although neither Sternbuchta nor The Six Keys of Eudoxus uses the phrase “Golden Elixir,” both texts describe the same class of substance that Western alchemy more commonly called the Philosopher’s Stone, the tincture, the medicine, the Universal Medicine, the Water of Life, or the elixir of life. In Chinese Daoist alchemy, the corresponding idea is named more directly as the Golden Elixir, or jindan . I use “Golden Elixir” here as cross-traditional shorthand, not as a literal quotation from these texts.
 The support for that identification is not the name, but the properties. Sternbuchta calls it a “tincture,” “medicine,” “Universal-tincture,” “true medicine,” and “unending treasure,” and describes its “multiplication in quality” and “multiplication in quantity.” The Six Keys calls it the “Stone of the philosophers,” “Water of Life,” “precious liquor,” “Universal Medicine,” and “precious juice” drawn from the Stone. Across both texts, the same pattern recurs: a hidden essence brought forth from stone, rendered active through the Work, multiplied in virtue, and capable of restoration.
 That is why, in the chapters above, I have used “Golden Elixir” as the simplest name for the substance these texts appear to describe.
 The Work Completed
 Nearly two millennia after the cycle in Nature first appeared in the alchemical tradition, the core chemistry it described appears to have been realized as a tangible material that can be produced, carried, and applied: a concentrated mineral essence corresponding operationally to the sequence described in The Six Keys of Eudoxus and behaviorally to the properties described in Sternbuchta’s letter.
 What had been missing until now was the Rock–Water Circuit, a scientific framework that could integrate insights from geology, water chemistry, sulfur cycling, and mineral lattices into a single coherent process. Once biotite is understood as the imprisoned body, vermiculite as the naturally opened and receptive matrix, sulfur as the activating force, and the mercurial principle as the mediating carrier, the canon resolves without contradiction.
 In our reading, neither biotite nor vermiculite is itself the Philosopher’s Stone. In Art, it is the concentrated, multipliable mineral essence the alchemists described as the Golden Elixir and that Shimanishi produced as a rock extract. Although The Emerald Tablet does not name the Philosopher’s Stone, it describes something even more fundamental: a complete generative cycle. In our reading, what the later alchemical texts called the Stone corresponds to that cycle itself.
 The ambiguity of the canon preserved the process by requiring that Nature complete the first transformation before Art could continue it. The closed stone, biotite, had to be opened into a receptive body, vermiculite, before sulfuric acid could extract its essence. In that sense, the Stone, in the later alchemical sense of the Golden Elixir, waited to be realized in material form; before that, it could only be named, symbolized, and pursued.
 That the puzzle appears to have been solved based on the work of someone entirely outside alchemy leaves the deepest question. How could the alchemists have gained such precise knowledge of both the cycle in Nature and the means of bringing its core chemistry into form?
 We will revisit that question later in the book, but for now, the operative core of the Hermetic canon is closed. Rock, water, sulfur, and time remain at work.

 A note for readers : For those interested in how that knowledge re-entered in material form today, I invite you to explore Aurmina (“golden mineral essence”) — a name we chose before we fully understood what it pointed to, and one that will become clearer as this series unfolds. Yes, this is a product, and part of a company I am building around this work, because at some point, the work had to leave the page and enter the world.

Summary: Three ancient works became one operational key. Anchored to Shimanishi’s process, the guarded language of alchemy began to resolve into rock, water, sulfur, and time.


Chapter XIV: The Same Engine, Everywhere

At a certain point, researching alchemy no longer felt like an esoteric pursuit. Once I began to recognize that the texts were describing the same Rock–Water Circuit we had arrived at through modern literature in geochemistry, cosmology, biology, and physics, I could no longer dismiss them.
 That led to a simple question: if this level of insight was recorded here, where else might it appear? What other traditions, texts, or cultures might contain comparable observations about the processes underlying the Rock–Water Circuit?
 And the oddest part is where that trail led first: straight into the center of mainstream science, to the National Science Foundation, and from there to black mica.
 The Engine Before Biology
 Helen Hansma, a biophysicist at UC Santa Barbara who also served as a program director at the National Science Foundation, proposed something that would have sounded outrageous not long ago: that life did not begin in ponds or vents, but between sheets of mica.
 Her “Mica Hypothesis” suggests that layered silicate minerals formed natural nanoreactors—thin, charged compartments that concentrate ions, structure water, and generate mechanical energy through flexing and shear. These spaces, she argues, could have provided the conditions prebiotic chemistry needed to move toward cellular life, making mica not just a setting for emergence, but part of what enabled it.
 Mica supplies:
● Structured water films
● Potassium-rich lattices that mirror modern cells
● Charge separation and confinement
● Mechanical energy capable of driving polymerization
 In other words, before biology existed, the Earth had already established many of the conditions from which biology could emerge and on which it would later depend. The Emerald Tablet points to the same idea in symbolic form: “And as all things were from one, so all things are born from this one thing by adaptation.” Hansma gives the claim a biophysical vocabulary.
 Then I started to wonder, if modern science could get this close, what would I find in a culture that had lived for centuries among volcanic rock, sulfur springs, and mineral water?
 Japan Never Needed a Tablet
 Around this time, I also began wondering whether Shimanishi’s worldview had been shaped by something analogous to the Emerald Tablet . I knew he had never encountered Hermetic texts, as none had been translated into Japanese at the time of his achievement. So I started to explore how Japanese antiquity and theology spoke about life, matter, and order. I was looking for the assumptions that shaped how the natural world was understood and portrayed in Japanese culture.
 Although I could not find an equivalent to the Emerald Tablet , neither could I find much effort to explain the structure of the Earth or the workings of stone and water. And then it became clear why: Shinto never set out to explain what it already assumed.
 Shinto, the Japanese way of understanding the world—its theology, if the word even applies—begins from a different assumption altogether: that life, order, and vitality already exist within nature.
 In Shinto thought, the divine is already present within water, stone, mountain, and flow. Purification is the restoration of original order. Creation is understood through musubi , a generative process through which form arises from what precedes it.
 In Japan, volcanic landscapes, steam vents, and sulfurous springs are treated as places where the earth’s vitality comes openly to the surface. Onsen culture grows from this assumption: people wash, then enter the mineral springs to soak, warm the body, and let fatigue dissolve in the water. The purpose is quiet restoration, a return to balance in which heat, minerals, and stillness help the body settle back into its own order.
 What struck me immediately was that Japanese thought seemed, from the outset, to begin much closer to the phenomena I had been trying to understand, while modern Western science usually starts by breaking those same realities into parts and working backward. We will return to that idea in the next chapter.
 Once I understood that, I felt that the Emerald Tablet ’s insights would not sound foreign in Japan at all. They would sound like something already assumed.

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 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
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 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

Summary: The Rock–Water Circuit began showing up everywhere: in alchemy, mica origin-of-life theory, and Japan’s instinctive reverence for mineral water, volcanic stone, and natural order.


Chapter XV: The Cornerstone That the Builders Refused

Just as MB had been the one who first led me into alchemy, he had also been doing something else in parallel, almost from the beginning. While I was buried in Hermetic texts, trying to learn their grammar and meaning, he was sending me Scripture—passages and fragments in messages, in side conversations, in the margins of everything else we were doing.
 I resisted going there, not because I dismissed it, but because I was already too deep into alchemy. It had my full attention, and I knew that if I opened Scripture too soon, it would distract me from a path that kept making connections, and I wanted to see how far I could go.
 And yet, even while I avoided it, I started to suspect more and more that it would be fruitful. Everything I was learning to see in alchemy—cycles, materials, purification, collapse, and return—MB kept insisting was already present in Scripture. Not metaphorically. Literally. I knew I would have to face that claim eventually.
 Once we closed the Hermetic canon, I turned toward Scripture. By then, the question was how I could move through that much text without losing the line of inquiry that had brought me there in the first place.
 When the Tool Matched the Question
 This work did not require artificial intelligence to generate ideas or supply conclusions. It required it to hold them in continuity. What made this possible was not speed or cleverness, but the ability to keep following the same question across geology, chemistry, biology, ancient texts, and modern data without losing the thread. Before this, the problem was simple: no human mind could hold all of that at once. AI made it possible to pursue the same line of inquiry across numerous disciplines and thousands of sources without losing continuity. I was able to ask the same simple questions about rock, water, salt, fire, and return without fatigue or forgetfulness. The same relationships that had always been present could finally be seen together rather than sequentially.
 This project was not conceived as an experiment in artificial intelligence. I did not set out to use it to cross boundaries. I used it the way one uses a microscope or telescope: to extend perception beyond the limits of unaided human attention. What surprised me was not what appeared, but how cleanly it aligned once those limits had been overcome.
 One World, Two Archives
 What that continuity made visible was that Scripture and alchemy were never describing different worlds. Once I turned toward Scripture with the same materials already in view—rock, water, salt, fire, spirits—I found myself reading across a second archive. The language was different. The world it described was the same.
 MB had opened the door to Scripture as a symbolic record of creation, and AI made it possible to move through that record at scale and speed. I could finally ask the blunt questions I had been inching toward for months. Where does Scripture speak of rock? Of stone? Of clay? Of water emerging from rock? Of salt, fire, brimstone, return to dust? What startled me was how little effort it required. The repetitions surfaced immediately. They recurred across books, authors, and centuries with remarkable consistency, and I remember stopping, sitting back, and feeling my pulse change, because by then it was no longer a single correspondence but an accumulation.
 Scripture named the same elements consistently, framing them in the contexts of creation, breakdown, purification, and renewal. Very quickly, I began to recognize the same physical processes I had already pieced together across geology, biology, chemistry, hydrology, and related sciences, and the overlap felt concrete and specific, grounded in my now deeper understanding of Earth’s cycles after months of scientific research.
 The major difference lay in the mode of description. Alchemy tracks the recurring process of formation, breakdown, purification, and renewal through matter and transformation. Scripture presents that same process through narrative, law, prophecy, and covenant, using the same materials while embedding them within events and history. Alchemy maps the structure of the cycle, while Scripture preserves its passage through human history. Both describe how order forms, collapses, and is restored through the same underlying movements of the world.
 By then, we had already assembled the science supporting the Rock–Water Circuit, and the connections between the Hermetic texts and that circuit had been firmly established. What I still needed to know was whether Scripture recorded evidence of that same circuit as well, and I became convinced that it would. And it did. In Scripture I found water emerging from rock, salt as covenant, fire as refinement, and dust as both origin and return. I was reading these passages as materially specific as much as symbolic. The texts read as if they carried assumptions about how matter is formed and about the conditions on which life depends for stability, renewal, and endurance.
 What Scripture provided were repeated material descriptions conveyed through symbolism, and those descriptions became far more intelligible once placed beside what modern science now knows. Scripture did not supply the detailed chemistry. Modern science did. What the ancient texts recorded was the sequence of the process—its unfolding, its breakdowns, and its renewals—while modern science supplied the mechanisms that explain it in material terms.
 The problem, then, was never accuracy. It was separation, because the ancient world documented the pattern while modern science identified the mechanisms, and once those two were seen together, the next question became unavoidable: why had they remained separated for so long?
 What No Single Discipline Can See
 Modern scientific methods describe these processes with a level of detail that would have been unimaginable to the authors of Scripture. The chemistry is exact, the measurements are precise, and the mechanisms have been tested and are real. But they are most often described in isolation—geology here, biology there, chemistry somewhere else—not because broader questions are forbidden, but because modern science is structured that way for maximal advancement.
 Following a process across domains is not prohibited; it is just unwieldy. It is slower, messier, harder to fund, harder to publish (I will report back on that shortly), and far more difficult to evaluate. Coordinating a Byzantine network of concepts, methods, and literatures across fields is inefficient compared with staying in one lane and going deeper, so most scientists, quite reasonably, choose the easier path: know one thing extremely well, and know more of it tomorrow.
 Modern scientific advances are increasingly rigorous, but they remain local. The result is fragmented knowledge. At one point, it struck me that what we were calling the Rock–Water Circuit was assembled from half a dozen scientific disciplines, and I could not think of another example in modern science that did the same. It began to seem possible that what we were doing was, at least in that sense, unusual, perhaps even unprecedented. That alone explains a great deal, but not all of it, because beyond the fragmented nature of modern science lies another limit, less visible and more consequential.
 At first, I thought human limitation, disciplinary fragmentation, and cognitive load were the boundaries I had been pressing against. But there was another one—deeper, quieter, and more absolute.
 The Boundary Beyond the Boundary
 What eventually clarified itself in my mind was something I had already sensed without fully articulating: modern scientific inquiry is constrained by an unspoken restriction that runs beneath all disciplines, namely, that explanation must stop short of saying that nature was created, ordered, or intended by God. In Chapter VII, I examined the consequences of methodological naturalism, which came to dominate in the nineteenth century: the rule that scientific explanation must restrict itself to testable, observable phenomena and set aside questions of purpose, even when the order and functional coherence of living systems make such questions difficult to avoid.
 I crossed that boundary before I had language for it. I still remember the first dinner MB and I ever had together, our first meeting in person, when he began telling me what he thought he was seeing in the old texts and where he believed this work was leading. I remember feeling a little overwhelmed, almost incredulous, because he was effectively suggesting that I was brushing up against something supernatural, and I suspect the few drinks I had that night helped me take it in without fully grappling with it. The conversation ran for hours, covered a great deal of ground, and that particular moment dissolved into the rest of the evening. For months afterward, our focus remained where it had begun, deep in the biochemistry of minerals.
 By the time I turned seriously to The Six Keys , I knew I was studying something that did not belong wholly inside conventional science, yet the crossing itself went by almost unnoticed. I did not experience it as a dramatic rupture. I took it up the way I would have taken up a dense paper on mitochondria, reading closely, pushing on the details, and trying to see how tightly the pieces fit. Once I became convinced that those texts contained descriptions of Shimanishi’s work with a specificity that should have been impossible, the whole thing still felt, in one sense, like an intellectual exercise, a puzzle I wanted to push as far as it would go. That was not because it lacked excitement. Quite the opposite. More than once, after one decoding or another, I would call MB almost breathless, half-delirious with excitement and shock. But even then, I think I was still experiencing it more as the satisfaction of solving a hard problem than as a man sitting still with what solving it might actually mean.
 That, in retrospect, is what matters here. I did not set out to challenge methodological naturalism. I did not even know it had a name, and I certainly did not think I was wandering into philosophy. I was following mechanisms. I kept tracing the same mineral-water cycle across domains, across timescales, and across texts, ancient and modern, without first asking which questions were permitted. I did not begin this work with a conclusion about design. I simply refused to rule it out in advance. I simply refused to rule it out in advance, and that single choice altered the shape of what could appear. If the Earth is the product of intelligence, then coherence, efficiency, and self-perpetuation should be visible in its most fundamental systems. If it is not, then whatever order appears should be fragile, accidental, and short-lived.
 Then something unexpected happened. The relationships between modernity and antiquity did not fragment when they crossed those boundaries. They aligned. The same cycle modern science could describe with extraordinary precision was already present in ancient texts—recognized, named, and preserved without the chemistry, but with astonishing fidelity to the process itself. I could only see that coherence once both limits were loosened: once mechanisms were allowed to speak across disciplines, and once design was no longer ruled out in advance.
 Once that became clear, a line of Scripture I had encountered countless times began to register in an entirely different way.
 The Stone the Builders Refused
 The boundary I had crossed hit home for me one day when I came across a line I had heard countless times before and, alongside it, an interpretation that struck me.
 “The stone that the builders refuse, shall be the head cornerstone.”
—Psalm 118:22 (KJV)
 Traditionally, this verse is understood as referring to Christ. Here, I am reading it in a different but related way: as the refusal of something foundational by those responsible for building.
 I had heard that line before—sang it along with Bob Marley for most of my life—but I had never really stopped to ask what it meant. I discovered that the builders are the ones who decide what counts as foundational: religious authorities, scholars, and experts. To refuse a stone is to judge it unsuitable, irregular, or incompatible with the prevailing model. Yet the stone chosen for the cornerstone fixes the alignment of the entire structure, determining its orientation, load-bearing capacity, and long-term stability. If a critical stone is rejected when it should have been selected as load-bearing, the entire structure is compromised from the outset.
 At that point the verse began to read like a description of what I had already been seeing in modern science. Methodological naturalism, as I had been describing it, functions precisely by refusing certain categories at the outset, especially intention, purpose, and design. In that reading, “the stone” is the possibility that the Earth has been designed, and the rejection of that possibility is not ancient at all, but relatively recent, hardening in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Darwinian chance became the default explanatory frame for biology and even cosmology.
 I had already pondered the implications of believing we had discovered a similar mechanistic and structural relationship across geology, hydrology, chemistry, and biology. What had initially looked fragmented had resolved into a closed, self-perpetuating system. The idea of design started to look like a true cornerstone. What would modern science allow those alignments to point to when laid out together? I knew that science could describe each instance in isolation. Whether it could follow those alignments across domains to their implications rested on the question of whether it would reject the stone.
 What remained was to gather the scriptural evidence carefully enough, and lay it out clearly enough, that the implications would be hard to ignore. If modern science was going to reject the stone, I wanted to make that as difficult as possible.

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
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 From Research to Practice - Links Below Image

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back To Soil
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could have Ended the Pandemic
 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 Medical Musings - A View From the Inside Of Modern Medicine

Summary: Scripture and alchemy began to read as two archives of the same world. Once design was no longer ruled out in advance, the rejected stone looked increasingly like the cornerstone.


You Should Be Reading Paul Marik—One Of The Best Clinician-Scientists I Have Ever Met

You should be reading Paul Marik’s new Substack (especially his recent and most popular post titled “ How Nutrition Shapes The Cancer Battlefield” ).
 My Friend, My Colleague, My Brother-In-Arms
 There are very few men in medicine I trust the way I trust Paul Marik.
 As many of my readers know, Paul and I didn’t just work together. We went to war together.
 We co-founded the FLCCC and stood shoulder to shoulder against one of the most corrupt and oppressive episodes in modern medical history. We paid for it. Jobs lost. Careers derailed. Board certifications stripped. Reputations attacked. Marriages lost. . The full weight of the machine came for us.
 And through all of it, Paul never stopped doing what he has always done better than anyone I know: following the science all the way down.
 That was always his gift. Long before the world knew his name from COVID, Paul was already a giant in critical care medicine. He had built a career on refusing to take anything he was taught for granted. He was never impressed by consensus for its own sake.
 He always went back to the foundations, back to the original science, back to the studies and the assumptions underlying them. And time and again, he found the same thing: entire practices, dogmas, and “settled” conclusions built on bad interpretation, weak evidence, or shifting sand as a foundation. That is why he was always upending consensus. It is also why his lectures were legendary. Standing room only. Everybody wanted to know what Marik thought about the latest emerging therapeutic trends.
 Further, he was, quite literally, the most published practicing ICU physician in the history of the field. And not just prolific—precise, careful, and relentless about supporting his views based on published scientific evidence.
 So it should surprise no one that after the system exiled him from our specialty, he dove deep into a new field, where there was even more consensus to overturn.
 Paul turned his focus to cancer, specifically the metabolic theory of cancer , and his book, Cancer Care, is, to me, unparalleled as it is a deeply scientific, review and grading of the evidence base for dozens of repurposed drugs and neutraceuticals. Spoiler alert: of the over 250 repurposed drugs and 2,000 nutraceuticals touted on the internet or by practitioners, only about 50 have sufficient published evidence to form a scientific opinion or recommendation on.
 We’ve been using Paul’s work in our own cancer practice at the Leading Edge Clinic as it has directly shaped how we think about and treat these patients. The central theory is simple and was first validated in 2010 based on the work of Thomas Seyfried: cancer is a metabolic disease first, and the genetic mutations arise downstream from it.
 He is the Principal Investigator of our Leading Edge Clinic study on the use of combination repurposed drug therapy and dietary interventions as adjunctive therapies in cancer.
 His new Substack, Marik’s Cancer & Metabolic Healing Playbook , is exactly what you would expect from him: practical, science-driven, and fearless. He is tackling cancer with diet, repurposed drugs, and targeted nutraceuticals based on physiology and evidence.
 In the post I’m highlighting today, “ Metabolic Wars: How Nutrition Shapes the Cancer Battlefield ,” he lays out something all of my patients’ “system” oncologists still ignore: that what they eat is foundational. Food is signaling, chemistry, and energy that can support or undermine tumor growth.
 That is where medicine is going (eventually), whether the old guard likes it or not.
 Paul has always had a gift for seeing what matters before the institutions are ready to admit it. He did it in critical care. He did it during COVID. And now he is doing it in cancer.
 And if cancer is not something you are dealing with personally, then send this to someone who is. Send it to a patient, a friend, a family member, a caregiver, someone who needs to know there are still serious physicians doing serious work outside the walls of a badly broken system.
 We’ve been through a lot together. We’ve seen how “the system” behaves when challenged. And we’ve both come out the other side still doing the same thing we always did, trying to understand what actually works, and then telling people the truth about it.
 If you follow my work, you should be following Paul’s.
 He is one of the sharpest clinical scientists I know, and he is now focused on one of the most important problems in medicine.
 Go read him.
 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
 Subscribe now

 From Research to Practice - Links Below Images

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 Primora Bio - Bringing Life Back to Soil
 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: I’m highlighting Part 1 of one of the most important and widely read research on cancer I’ve seen in years—Paul Marik's Substack and his recent series on how nutrition shapes the cancer battlefield.


I Thought I Was Done Changing Careers. I Was Wrong.

**This post is a day late! I wanted it as a post to celebrate World Water Day, but my 10-hour trip from Honolulu to Tokyo had no WiFi (I had planned to finish and send it on the plane). So, we are extending the sale one more day. Enjoy the 25% discount code Springsale26 at Aurmina or Primora Bio . Also, this post begins with lots of personal reflection; if you just want to get to the Spring Garden Vitalization Protocol, scroll down.

 The Same Work, A Different Scale
 As an ICU and lung doctor in the U.S, I was called an “intensivist,” while in France, my French compatriots were called “reanimators.”
 The first time they told me that, it connected, like an “ah-hah” moment, as it so perfectly described the essence of our work, given that critically ill patients are often unconscious and immobile, appearing almost lifeless to the uninitiated, either from a primary brain insult, brain failure secondary to overwhelming illness (encephalopathy), or a need for deep sedation to synchronize them with the ventilator while we try to reverse their often multi-organ failure.
 When successful, we restore the coordination of their organ systems such that their brain functions return, allowing them to either wake up or be woken up, thus “re-animating” them.
 With that in mind, here perhaps I may be extending that metaphor too far, but I feel like, even though I long ago left critical care, now that I have been drawn to work guided by that same spirit and aim, but on a far grander scale, of “re-animating” the Earth’s soils, crops, aquifers, and surface waters.
 So funny. How did a New Yorker go from running inner-city ICUs to going on a mission to resuscitate soils, plants, and waters?
 There is both a simple and complicated explanation for that. Among the many rabbit holes I have gone down in my journey researching therapies that might repair the Covid vaccine-injured, for the first time in my career, I landed on one that applied to patients as much as it did plants, grasses, microbes, and animals, one central to every biological process that supports life.
 My initial intrigue stemmed from a fascination with the responses I observed in some patients, albeit using off-label protocols distinct from water purification. The research and investigation into its obscured and fragmented history in Japan and then in the U.S. showed me the potential for benefits far beyond my clinic, my practice, and my patients.
 I sensed it before I understood it, and that sense only intensified as I traced it across geology, hydrology, biochemistry, soil biology, and agriculture—until, to my surprise, its effects in other living systems proved more compelling than anything I was seeing in human physiology.
 Something Started to Shift
 Although I studied mathematics in college, I have wanted to be a doctor since I was a teenager. Problem: I kinda, sorta, failed out of college. It then took me 7 years and an impeccable performance in grad school before I was accepted into medical school (overseas), allowing me to finally leave the restaurant business where I had spent my 20s.
 However, I soon discovered that, unlike the increasingly joyless and elusive higher-order problem-solving in mathematics, I loved my new role in life as a “diagnostician,” facing the daily task of figuring out why someone was sick and suffering. Getting that puzzle right meant everything, and in the ICU, what the residents called “medicine on steroids,” getting it wrong raised the stakes as high as they come, with up to 20% of my patients dying in some weeks. When successful, we relieved suffering and restored function, a satisfaction far more fulfilling than arriving at a successful solution to a complicated equation or devising an elegant logical proof.
 The Point of No Return
 Over these months, it became clear that my life was moving in a new direction. The work took on the shape of a mission: to uncover and disseminate Shimanishi’s insights, examine the potential of Themarox, and address a critical gap affecting soils, agriculture, water, and ultimately animal and human health.
 But, at the same time, I think this year broke me. What I stumbled upon held an importance I could not ignore or reduce to a side project or hobby, as these books and this research took over my life to a magnitude that makes my previously frenetic, all-consuming advocacy for ivermectin in Covid pale in comparison.
 I have been so inspired by Shimanishi’s work and the realization that I had stumbled upon something so impactful, with such potential, and that had somehow slipped under History’s gaze, only retained in small pockets of people around the world.
 But what happened was that the joy and fulfillment I had always gotten from seeing patients began to feel like a detractor from what I was supposed to be doing. I began to wake up with frustration and exhaustion, knowing that each day was taking me away from what I increasingly felt was more important work.
 I really don’t give a crap if you think I am talking crazy or in a self-interested manner. I did not make that decision lightly or for commercial reasons. What I am trying to say is that it was effectively made for me in spirit. I resisted for a while, but I followed where it was leading and even started a company to get it done, especially so that the company would devote itself to funding the research it would require to get there, meaning to convince the world of this vision that I, and an increasing number of others, hold.
 The Decision
 So, after 25 years, I have decided to stop seeing patients. Although I will continue to lead, manage, and guide our Leading Edge Clinic , as of June, I am giving up my personal patient practice panel. One reason I was comfortable stopping is that the provider team at LEC is phenomenal, inspiring, devoted, and empathetic, perhaps in ways that now exceed my capacity. So I am confident that in handing over my patients to them, they will continue to be cared for with the skill and care they need.
 Now, if that was not enough of a personal reveal on this belated World Water Day, there is yet another reason I closed my patient schedule.
 My wife is pregnant with a baby boy due on July 4th.
 I have been reminded that apparently, you are supposed to spend time with young children, and since I don’t have time to pee most days, I thought it wise to create some space to welcome young Lutzee onto planet Earth.
 Do not make fun of the name; it is a phonetic spelling of my Hungarian father’s nickname “Laci,” a common diminutive of his real name, “Lazlo.”
 If I put “Laci” on the birth certificate, the poor child would forever be called “Lacey,” and I don’t want to set him on the path depicted in the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue.”

 My Contribution To World Water Day
 With the history of my career trajectory behind us, I now want to focus on the real purpose of today’s post, which is two-fold.
 The first is to offer as concise an articulation of the “Geohydrological Shift Theory” as I can muster, aimed at the world’s agronomists, hydrogeologists, soil biologists, regenerative farmers, and others working in these domains, with the intent of shifting their focus to what we believe is a viable solution to many of the problems befalling modern agriculture.
 The second is for a more specific segment of my readership, those who “identify” (hee hee) as home gardeners, hobby farmers, and even farmers, where I will lay out this former intensivist’s “combination therapy resuscitative and re-vitalization protocol,” to kick off your spring planting season toward a harvest most have never experienced before.
 So, if you’re interested only in the latter, feel free to skip toward the end. If you’re interested in both, read on.
 When The Geohydrological Shift Began
 If you want to understand what is happening to our water, you have to go back to the moment agriculture fundamentally changed.
 The “Green Revolution” began in the 1940s in Mexico, led by agronomist Norman Borlaug, who developed high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. The success of that work expanded into Asia in the 1960s, especially in India and Pakistan, and later into rice systems through institutions such as the International Rice Research Institute.
 Basically, the idea was to maximize yield per acre using external inputs and improved genetics. The core components were: high-yielding crop varieties (HYVs), synthetic fertilizers (especially nitrogen), irrigation expansion, pesticides, herbicides, and, importantly, mechanization.
 The impact was enormous, arguably one of the most successful large-scale interventions in human history. Earth saw massive increases in yields, the avoidance of widespread famine (e.g., India no longer needed food aid), lower food prices, and greater caloric availability.
 At the same time, historically, it marked a shift from antiquity, in which traditional “slow” farming practices rapidly switched to a science- and input-driven system.
 Yes, it bought the world time, and a lot of it. But I believe time is running out.
 The Shift
 Over the past few decades, the costs of this system have become increasingly apparent, like now, in my middle age, here in the 2020s. The soil is being degraded (less organic matter, microbial diversity, increasing dependence on inputs), the water system is being stressed (over-extraction of aquifers, salinization in irrigated lands), and we now suffer from a widespread chemical dependency (fertilizer and pesticide use has skyrocketed, pest resistance has emerged).
 Even worse, the benefits, although considerable, have been uneven, favoring large farms and capital-intensive systems over traditional farming.
 Where We Are Now
 My interest and passion began to sharpen as my research into water and minerals led me to what I can only describe as flashing warning signs. After nearly a hundred years of “success,” the data is now showing yield stagnation. Between 24% and 39% of global cropland is exhibiting yield plateaus; elsewhere, yield increases are being maintained, but at a slowing rate. Most concerning, and what I consider the loudest warning signal, is that in some regions yields are now declining despite increased inputs.
 Further, biological simplification abounds with the dominance of monocrops, leading to a loss of resilience and even buffering capacity.
 Basically, the more fertilizer used, the smaller the yield gains, meaning that “nitrogen efficiency” is dropping in many systems. Earth’s agriculture has now shifted from an immensely productive system to a “compensatory” one, and, in some areas, it is failing to even do that.
 Is there any hope on the horizon? Yes, but, as you will learn, not in the areas where most are placing it: regenerative agriculture, precision agriculture, and alternative inputs aimed at improving soil biology or reducing existing inputs. These are important advances, but they do not go far enough upstream.
 Now, I know this is starting to sound like doom and gloom, and the story does get worse, but this is also where I see a possible, scalable solution beginning to emerge. Because if we can fix the water, I believe we can restore the entire system.
 You see, our water systems have entered a state of overt stress. After a century of pressure, aquifer depletion is accelerating globally, while nitrate and salinity levels continue to rise, fundamentally altering hydrogeochemistry.
 The Solutions Being Proposed
 Before we get to my proposal for a path forward, I'll give a quick overview of the current directions various scientific disciplines are proposing to remediate, solve, or fix the current state of agriculture.
 The Soil Physics / Hydrology Camp
 Most mainstream scientists, such as Rattan Lal and Johan Six, as well as the broader soil physics and hydrology field, are rightly focused on the idea that soil degradation and water dysfunction are tightly linked. Their central observation is that as soil structure degrades, water infiltration declines, water retention becomes less stable, and the soil’s ability to store and deliver plant-available water is compromised.
 I am with them on this because productivity clearly declines when soil loses its ability to regulate water properly. Their proposed solution is to restore soil structure, primarily by increasing organic matter, improving aggregation, and reducing disturbance, thereby rebuilding the physical framework through which water moves and is retained.
 My take is that I disagree with where they place causality. Their emphasis is on repairing the soil as the primary lever, with water secondarily improving by restoring the condition of the soil it passes through.
 My take is that I disagree with where they place causality. Their emphasis is on repairing the soil as the primary lever, assuming that water will improve secondarily as the soil through which it moves is restored.
 The Rhizosphere / Soil Biology Camp
 Within this field are notable scientists like Elaine Ingham, Jeff Lowenfels, and other rhizosphere ecology researchers, whose focus is on the problems with microbes' root exudates and biological signaling. What I like is that they also focus on water by recognizing that all of this dysfunction occurs in water films. They clearly recognize that nutrients exist in the dissolved phase, microbial signaling depends on water quality and composition, and root uptake itself is fundamentally water-mediated.
 But here again, their solutions appear to focus not on mediating the water but on restoring microbial life and avoiding further chemical disruption by increasing organic inputs. Ultimately, restoring the biological layer that water enters will not directly address the water chemistry that is driving the disordered biology.
 The Hydrogeochemistry / Water Quality Camp
 This camp is the one that is most closely “circling the target.” To give credit where it is due, the literature from hydrogeochemists, environmental chemists, and groundwater scientists most grabbed my attention. They are the ones sounding the alarm the loudest (and from whom we laid the foundation for the Geohydrological Shift Theory). They are clearly documenting rising nitrate levels, increasing salinity, changing ion composition, and most importantly, redox shifts in aquifers.
 Their cumulative argument is that water chemistry is changing at a planetary scale, and, as importantly, they elucidate the consequence: such water will affect soil chemistry, plant uptake, and microbial processes.
 The Hidden Lever: Themarox
 What pulled Matt and me into this was the chemistry of Themarox itself. Our early conversations, debates, and attempts to understand what it was doing to water gradually made it clear that we were not just looking at another agricultural input, but at a system-level intervention whose behavior did not fit within the current frameworks of agronomy or hydrogeochemistry.
 Just as we came to believe that understanding the science and methods behind Shimanishi’s achievement allowed us to extend origin-of-life research with the Rock–Water Circuit Theory, we now believe that what Themarox does to water lies outside the current awareness of those fields. And that realization is what ultimately changed my trajectory. This knowledge came to me first through Matt, and what followed, these months of trying to figure it out, was driven by the growing recognition that we were studying an intervention the world does not yet fully see.
 Thus, I want to help push the focus of the hydrogeochemistry field to study the potential of Themarox. Although they are rightly measuring and describing critical changes to the water system, they are not framing it as we are attempting to, which is that it is the root (or main) cause of the widespread biological dysfunction the other fields are describing.
 Right now, they are focused on reporting that “water quality is degrading,” but do not go on to say, “water chemistry is upstream of biological deterioration.” Most importantly, they are not aware that Themarox can restore that water to a state capable of reversing those downstream biological effects.
 The Regenerative Agriculture Practitioners
 Here, leading proponents like Gabe Brown and Ray Archuleta, among others, are also rightly proposing a potentially complementary solution, namely that reducing inputs can actually lead to better outcomes, less pest pressure, more water retention in the soil, and ultimately, more resilient plants.
 They often say, similar to the other fields, “Fix the soil, and everything else follows.”
 But here again, they describe the fix as improving soil health, soil biology, and soil carbon, without a focus on the chemistry, ionic composition, and electrochemical behavior of water.
 Where We Are and Where We Should Go
 Collectively, at present, although numerous fields have repeatedly circled the problem, there is no unified framework that places water chemistry at the center of broad system dysfunction. The soil people write about how water movement matters, the biologists write about how the water medium matters, the chemists about how water composition is changing, and the farmers about how system behavior is shifting.
 Many fields have correctly identified that the problem lies upstream, but, in our opinion, they still point to the wrong thing. Some point to soil, others to biology, others to hydrology, but very few have followed the chain far enough to recognize that all three are downstream expressions of the ionic composition and electrochemical behavior of water itself.
 Such properties of water are literally the upstream regulators of soil structure, microbial behavior, and plant function.
 Ultimately, their solutions, like adding carbon, adding microbes, reducing chemicals, and optimizing irrigation, just do not go far enough upstream to change the water chemistry itself.
 The Solution Is Not Mine Alone
 At this point, instead of attempting to lay out a grand, fully formed solution, one in which agricultural systems worldwide are remediated through the treatment of irrigation, drinking, and surface waters, I’m going to shift gears. What I have tried to do here is define the problem, to make the case that water chemistry sits upstream of much of the dysfunction we are now observing.
 The next phase is not mine alone to solve. I am not a hydrogeologist, irrigation engineer, or water treatment expert, and I won’t pretend to be. My goal is to bring Themarox to the attention of those who are, so they can test it, challenge it, and, if warranted, figure out how it might be deployed at scale. That work lies ahead.
 For today, I am staying within the domain where I feel most comfortable offering guidance: the small grower, the home gardener, the hobby farmer, the orchardist. Because while large-scale systems may take time to shift, smaller ones can move now. So, for today, we start small.
 REVIVE: The Kory Resuscitation and Vitalization System for Soil and Garden Health
 Here we go again, with my tireless attempts to elevate my name into an eponym (hopefully understood for what it is - self-deprecating humor). Although agriculture has never quite leaned into eponyms the way medicine has, the pattern is there. Certain names have been fused to their central contributions, for instance, Liebig and his “law,” Borlaug and his wheat, Fukuoka and his natural farming, Steiner and his biodynamics, etc.
 They are not quite like “Koch’s postulates” or “Parkinson’s disease,” but it is close enough that I find myself with the mildly absurd notion that I might attach my own name to a way of thinking about water, soil, and life.
 So, as a former ICU specialist now self-proclaimed “agro-intensivist,” or more accurately and humbly, an “agro-educator,” but even there, that title has limitation because I have never farmed, potted, or even tended to a plant (remember, I am a city boy), thus I am writing and teaching a topic on which I have no “front-line experience.”
 Which gives me the creeps, honestly, because then I start to resemble the “desk doctors” of Covid, those who offered expert opinions and dictated policy while never having treated a single patient.
 Of course, Fauci comes to mind, but my most vivid memory is of Dr. Ashish Jha—a persistent media voice during Covid and head of Biden’s White House coronavirus response—who, when asked by Senator Ron Johnson in the very same hearing that I gave my ivermectin testimony, “Have you ever treated a Covid patient?” Jha paused and admitted, “I have not, sir.”
 I don’t want to be that guy.
 The difference here is I am openly stating what I do and do not know, which is simply that I had the fortune of coming across Shimanishi’s work, recognized its importance, and devoted now seven months of my life to studying it, discussing it, and spending many dozens of hours talking with those who have known of his work longer. Basically, I have learned a specific water chemistry, heretofore unknown to the wider world, and I have committed to disseminating that knowledge and its implications and potential.
 More recently, since starting the Asao Group , I have gotten to work with some amazing agronomists who have taught me about the use of a combination of agricultural inputs that can build back, revitalize, rescue, and reanimate soils, plants, grasses, and crops, whether they be houseplants, backyard gardens, hobby farms, or big farms.
 So, with that, let’s break down the first iteration of the REVIVE protocol (while also understanding that I will adapt and update the protocol as my experience and insights accumulate, similar to Paul’s and my approach with the protocols we created and evolved with our FLCCC in Covid.
 REVIVE: The Kory Resuscitation and Vitalization System for Soil and Garden Health
 As in critical care, there is no “one size fits all” with set doses, duration, and combinations; but you have to start with a core intervention to work from and then adapt and revise accordingly. As one of my new colleagues says, “Nature isn't exact; your approach doesn’t have to be either.”
 Thus, I encourage anyone to scale up or down in intensity based not only on the state and fertility of the starting soil but also on the response to therapy. However, note that the field trial I presented in the last post started with dead, infertile soil and relied solely on an initial cosmotropic water irrigation, followed by weekly foliar spraying, with the only addition being a one-time mid-season light application of fish hydrolysate and microbes. The results were beyond impressive despite starting from literal dead soil.
 The Trinity Of Recommended Inputs
 1) Cosmotropic Mineral Concentrate ( Primora Bio )
 Water treated with a biotite-derived vermiculite mineral extract, a mineral composition with “multiplicative” properties, meaning the addition of small amounts acts on large volumes of water, rendering a much larger water volume in a more electrochemically ordered state, which, across six studies in varied conditions and contexts, demonstrates changes in a multi-domain agricultural impact profile as per this AI-generated image below:

 2) Liquid Fish Hydrolysate Complex (Primora Nourish or equivalent)
 Liquid hydrolysate includes a wide range of minerals, micronutrients, amino acids, and fats which are known tot:

 3) Liquid Biochar (Primora Char or equivalent, e.g. American Biochar)
 Here, we use a 5-micron-sized activated wood biochar combined with humate, a size that allows for a liquid formulation, thus enabling all three inputs to be combined in a single application with a water sprayer:

 Sequence and Technique of Application
 1) Beginning of Season (Pre-Planting) Combination Soil Spray - Use All Three Interventions
 A) Cosmotropic Mineral Concentrate
 Seasonal soil spray frequency is once every 4-5 years. Recommend doing this for first year of protocol as it won’t hurt, but, depending on starting spoil, may not be necessary.
 Calculate the recommended amount of Primora Bio for the volume of water estimated for the area of your plot, garden, or farm. Note: the amount needed for the seasonal soil spray is much more than used in weekly or biweekly foliar spraying.

 B) Liquid Fish Hydrolysate:
 Calculate the recommended amount of liquid fish hydrolysate based on the required water volume, then add it to the water and stir.

 **Note: Fish hydrolysate should be done 2-4 more times this season for optimal results.
 C) Liquid Biochar
 Calculate the recommended amount of activated liquid biochar based on the required water volume, add it to the water, and stir.

 2) Pre-Germinate Seeds (apply only Primora Bio to water for the pre-germination step)
 Fill bowls with Primora Bio -treated water for each seed type appropriate for pre-germination. Add seeds to bowls of treated water as follows:

 3) Seed Planting
 Insert seeds in soil at depths appropriate for size (depth should be 2-3 times their diameter).

 4) Hydration During Germination Period

 4) Foliar Spraying With Primora Bio Every 7-14 Days

 Well, folks, I hope that was helpful. To all those who have gone “all in” and purchased one or all of these agricultural interventions, I wish you the absolute best growing season possible, and we at Asao Group look forward to hearing about all the amazing results!
 Primora Bio Control Trial Photo Contest
 To that end, several customers have already written in about plans to treat some of their pots, gardens, greenhouses, and even orchards with the REVIVE protocol (or some variation of it), compare them to the plants they have not treated, and then share their results with us.
 This is behavior we absolutely want to encourage, so this year we are holding a seasonal harvest photo contest, with which we will build "Use Case” page(s) on our website.
 We invite anyone interested to take serial photos this season to compare the speed of germination, growth, size, vigor, and color of their treated vs. untreated plants, and we will use those photos for our first Annual Photo contest below.
 Prizes
 Anybody who submits a comparison photo of even just a single treated plant vs. a non-treated plant will receive a 50% discount on their next purchase, up to a 3-quart bundle, and the three top photo entrants will receive a one-year supply!
 Please include documentation of the dates of soil spraying, planting, foliar spraying, and the date each photo was taken. Most importantly, please document what combinations of Primora Bio , Primora Char , and/or Primora Nourish that your plants were or were not treated with.
 See this example from Jeff of the Curious Outlier Substack of two basil plants after 18 days, published here :

 Invitation For Research Opportunities
 Now, for those who want to go “all-in,” venturing beyond photos, into carefully and serially measuring “hard data” at baseline and harvest, such as soil pH, soil nutrient levels, leaf nutrient levels, biomass levels, please email contact@primorabio.com. We would be happy to discuss the possibility of subsidizing your effort with product and/or funding, depending on research experiences, capabilities, and skills.

 *If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about (or the Op-Eds and lectures I generate for the public), your support is greatly appreciated.
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 Silly Humor Section:
 Check out virtual farmer Pierre working in his virtual garden this weekend:

 From Research to Practice - Links Below Images

 Aurmina – The Mineral Extract For Naturally Vitalized Drinking Water
 The Blueprint of Life - The Hidden Architecture That Powers Life and Health
 From Volcanoes to Vitality -The Untold Story of Asao Shimanishi
 The War on Chlorine Dioxide - The Medicine That Could End Medicine
 The War on Ivermectin - The Medicine That Could Have Ended The Pandemic
 Leading Edge Clinic - Tele-Medicine Clinic Caring For Patients in All 50 States

Summary: An ICU doctor’s obsession with restoring failing human systems led to something larger: a hidden shift in water, soil, and agriculture driving biological collapse—and a path to reverse it.