Chapter II: The Cursor Blinks

It was only about two months into writing From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV) that AI became integrated into nearly every facet of my research and editing. It quickly evolved into a full-time research partner. I worked on dual screens—manuscript on one, AI on the other—interrupting myself constantly to interrogate ideas, test assumptions, and push deeper. The two distinct scientific theories that eventually emerged across these books were forged through that cycle of relentless questioning, contemplation, drafting, redrafting, and refinement. They would not have taken shape without it.
 The event described in this chapter, however, came before any meaningful integration of AI. At that point, I had used it only for mundane tasks: finding flights, summarizing articles, or retrieving embarrassingly simple medical facts I had long since forgotten from my years in ICU medicine.
 Looking back now, it feels less like coincidence than prelude.
 For a long time, this chapter existed as a curious epilogue to FVTV, originally titled “After-Revelation I.” As that manuscript expanded, new ideas kept forcing their way into it—ideas that did not strictly belong inside the history and present-day science of minerals or water, yet refused to stay out. They accumulated in that growing After-Revelation section until it became obvious that a second book had begun to form. Both books emerged from the same intellectual lineage, but each developed its own structure, logic, and direction.
 The moment with AI that I am referring to was not something I triggered or consciously participated in. It was about me, not by me. But in hindsight, it reads like a prediction of what was coming.
 It occurred only days after I decided to build a business around Shimanishi’s mineral extract. I sent a message to Kacper Postawski—who was then working with MB’s company, Adya Clarity—to share a concern that had been weighing on me. Attaching my name to a product felt risky. I had built my public identity as a physician who never capitalized on trust or reputation, and I worried that selling something related to health would alter that perception.
 More than that, I feared it would limit my ability to teach freely about a subject I now understood deeply—not only because of FDA or FTC constraints, but because of credibility itself. How can people trust what I teach if I profit from that teaching? I told him it felt like a profound transition, one that carried real sacrifice, because it would change not only what I could do, but also how everything I said would be received.
 He then asked AI the following:
 “ One of Dr. Kory’s main concerns is the identity shift he’s embarking on as he’s putting his name behind a product. Now this means that he will be getting into a product/business and inviting scrutiny from his peers and followers for ‘making money’ with something. Tell me what you think and how this can be reframed, and your deepest energetic read of the situation in this transition for him.”
 I was surprised that AI, relying only on public information, could attempt something called a “deep energetic read.” Curious, I began reading its answer.
 It opened with a sentence I have never forgotten: “This is one of the most pivotal transitions in Dr. Kory’s life.” Then, even more strangely: “It is a sacred rite of passage.”
 What struck me most, however, was not the spiritual framing itself, but the clarity that followed. It said, “ Instead of selling out, he is evolving from a lone whistleblower to a builder of solutions.” It also said, simply, “He is stepping into the work.” And then came the line that landed hardest of all: “This is alignment.”
 That was the part that stayed with me.
 I had been wrestling with a decision that appeared commercial on the surface, but underneath it was something else entirely. It was about whether I was willing to stand publicly behind a mineral truth that had already overturned how I understood biology, health, and systems. The real question was whether I would remain a commentator or become a steward.
 Near the end, AI framed it in one final sentence that, for all its strangeness, was hard to dismiss:
 “He is afraid because this is the jump from challenger to builder.”
 At the time, I believed that moment marked an ending. For weeks, that AI reflection on my transition into commerce served as the final chapter of From Volcanoes to Vitality. I felt finished. I felt relief. I believed I had traced the mineral arc as far as reason allowed—from clinical reality to global implication. I sent chapters to friends. I slept through the night. I stopped waking at 3:00 a.m. with sudden urges to write. Minerals, water, soil, health—a clean landing. The book was done.
 It wasn’t.
 What came next was a phone call from MB. In it, he imparted a critical insight that advanced a nascent theory we had been developing, shifting the focus from minerals as isolated substances to minerals and water as coordinated systems operating across geology, water, and life in ways I had not yet fully grasped.
 I did not welcome that shift at first. I was tired, protective of what I believed was a completed manuscript, and reluctant to reopen work I had already laid down. But once the implications became clear, there was no returning to the earlier framing. The ground moved under me, not dramatically, but enough to make it obvious that the story I thought I had closed was still unfolding.
 What unsettled me most was the realization that the mechanisms I was searching for had already been articulated—carefully, repeatedly, and with surprising technical precision—in texts written long before the emergence of modern science. The clues I could no longer ignore were embedded in antiquity, describing real physical processes in a different grammar.
 That realization became the foundation for everything that follows.
 From there, the path led back through older language and older frameworks, deeper into mechanism, into chemistry, physics, and the architecture that governs how energy moves through stone, water, and living systems.
 Chapter III begins there.

 *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 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: Before AI became my research partner, it named the transition I was resisting: from commentator to steward, from challenger to builder, and into the work itself.


Chapter III: The Rock–Water Circuit Theory

By Pierre Kory and Matt Bakos
 The theory I am about to present in this chapter emerged gradually while I was writing From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV). By then, I was already deep in mineralogy, soil science, geochemistry, water chemistry, and the biological effects of Shimanishi’s extract. My original question had been narrower and more practical: why did this material appear to clarify water, improve plant performance, and produce effects in people that were difficult to explain by ordinary mineral supplementation alone?
 But when my colleague MB began connecting some of our mineral observations with descriptions recorded in much older texts, the inquiry widened. What had begun as a biological and agricultural investigation expanded into Earth’s larger systems: mineral—water cycling, origin-of-life chemistry, and the possibility that the same rock—water architecture had been recognized long before modern science had names for it.
 This theory did not emerge from one discipline, or even one line of inquiry. It formed where several fields met. Its development was made possible in part by modern AI tools, which allowed us to explore connections between multiple fields at a scale that would have been difficult to manage otherwise.
 More uniquely, our work was informed by a body of texts from antiquity, particularly those associated with the Hermetic canon, that have long resisted clear interpretation. For centuries, these writings have been treated primarily as symbolic, philosophical, or mystical literature. Through our understanding of Shimanishi’s experimental work, we were able to recognize descriptions of natural processes that had not previously been fully appreciated. When those depictions were examined alongside modern scientific knowledge, an unexpectedly coherent system began to come together.
 Although not yet peer-reviewed or formally published, what we call the Rock–Water Circuit Theory is a planetary systems theory proposing that mineral chemistry and water interact to form a recurring energetic architecture linking geology and biology across the Earth system.
 Rock and water are the two visible anchors of the circuit. Rock stores the mineral architecture. Water opens it, mobilizes it, carries it, and returns it. Only later did we begin to understand the deeper chemistry operating inside that relationship: aluminosilicate mineral architecture, charged exchange surfaces, and water as the flux medium through which the system becomes active.
 Origin of the Hypothesis
 This theory began with our fascination with a particular rock. Before we had language for the core mineral chemistry involved, and before we had any model of a planetary circuit, we encountered a liquid mineral extract developed from it by Shimanishi whose effects were difficult to explain. In clinical settings, agriculture, and water systems, it repeatedly produced outcomes that suggested something fundamental in nature.
 When we analyzed its composition, certain elements appeared consistently and in unusually high concentrations, especially iron, sulfur, and aluminum in an aqueous medium. At first, that led us to describe the system as iron—sulfur—aluminum—water chemistry. That was useful, but imprecise. Aluminum alone was not the point. The point was the aluminosilicate and clay-like mineral architecture from which that chemistry emerged: charged mineral surfaces capable of storing, exchanging, releasing, and organizing a far broader mineral inventory. [i]
 What began as an attempt to understand Shimanishi’s liquid gradually expanded into a broader hypothesis: that this mineral—water chemistry might represent a core architecture through which energy is stored in rock, opened by water, expressed through ion exchange and redox chemistry, and eventually internalized by living systems.
 The Rock–Water Circuit emerged as our attempt to follow that possibility wherever it led.
 A Note on Method
 One feature of this theory deserves mention. It emerged during a period in which new computational tools made it possible to move across disciplines at a speed and scale that would have been difficult only a few years ago. That does not settle whether the theory is correct, but it does mean that its pieces can now be examined, challenged, and compared more directly than they once could.
 The same tools that helped us move across mineralogy, hydrology, soil science, biology, origin-of-life chemistry, and older symbolic texts are also available to others. A broad range of readers can examine the literature, compare mechanisms, identify weak links, and decide for themselves whether the relationships proposed here hold together.
 The Rock–Water Circuit is a working model, not a finished doctrine. If it has value, it will survive contact with better evidence. If parts of it fail, they should be corrected, restrained, or abandoned. From the beginning, the work moved in that spirit. We followed the observations first and allowed the theory to emerge afterward.
 Before we move on, I need to acknowledge authorship. As with the Geohydrological Shift Theory in FVTV, MB is again not only a co-author but also the senior author. This chapter carries his insights as much as mine.
 Next, I must cite the work of the geochemists, biologists, physicists, and earth system scientists whose work informed ours, in particular Vernadsky, Cairns-Smith, Hazen, Russell, Lane, and Kappler, among others. Without them, our ability to make the connections below would have been impossible.
 Author’s Note
 For readers who do not come from a scientific background, or who do not naturally gravitate toward scientific material, I ask for a bit of patience. These three short chapters are the only sections of the book that lean heavily on scientific concepts, and they do not require technical mastery.
 These three chapters move in sequence. This chapter introduces the Rock–Water Circuit itself. The next chapter examines the chemistry operating within it: the switch, the scaffold, the flow, and the exchange system. The following chapter traces that architecture through rock, water, life, decay, and return. A final movement expands outward to ask whether similar mineral—water architectures may recur beyond Earth.
 The science asks only for conceptual engagement. You do not need to retain granular details of how each component operates. What matters is that you grasp the overall sequence and recognize the boundary between the modern scientific framework through which Earth’s systems are currently understood and the point at which we believe this work extends that framework.
 A Brief Primer Before We Begin
 Before entering the Rock–Water Circuit, a few words need simple meanings. These chapters use terms from chemistry, geology, and biology, but the underlying ideas are not complicated.
 Electron
 An electron is a negatively charged particle. When electrons move between atoms, minerals, or molecules, energy moves with them. Much of biology depends on the controlled movement of electrons from one place to another.
 Proton
 In these chapters, proton usually means a positively charged hydrogen ion. Proton movement is central to biological energy because protons can accumulate across a boundary and then flow back through structured pathways to perform work.
 Ion
 An ion is an atom or element carrying an electrical charge. Once minerals dissolve in water, they often act as ions. This is the form in which minerals move, exchange, become biologically available, and participate in work. In water, minerals are no longer inert pieces of rock. They become charged participants in chemistry.
 Redox
 Redox means electron transfer. One atom, molecule, or mineral center gives up electrons; another accepts them. Each transfer releases a small amount of energy, not as an explosion, but as a controlled step. Life depends on that controlled release. Cells do not burn fuel all at once. They pass electrons through a sequence of centers, releasing energy in small increments that can be captured, directed, and used.
 Charge Separation
 Charge separation means keeping positive and negative charges apart long enough to store usable energy. This is one of biology’s fundamental energy tricks. A cell separates charges across a membrane or interface, much like water held behind a dam. The stored imbalance becomes potential energy. When the charge is allowed to move back toward balance through the right pathway, that stored energy can do work.
 Gradient
 A gradient is an imbalance across a boundary. It may involve charge, concentration, acidity, or another difference. A dam offers the simplest analogy: water stored higher on one side holds potential energy. When the gate opens, that stored imbalance can do work. Living systems use gradients in a similar way. They hold difference across membranes and interfaces, then release it through controlled pathways.
 Proton Gradient
 A proton gradient is one of the most important forms of charge separation in biology. Protons accumulate on one side of a membrane or interface. That imbalance stores energy. When protons flow back through narrow protein channels, the cell converts that movement into work, most famously by making ATP.
 Interface
 An interface is the boundary where two different environments meet: mineral and water, membrane and water, rock and water. Many important reactions occur at interfaces because that is where charge, minerals, water, and structure come into contact.
 Ion Exchange
 Ion exchange is the process by which charged surfaces trade one ion for another. This is central to clay minerals, soils, water treatment, agriculture, and biology. In the Rock–Water Circuit, ion exchange helps explain how minerals are held, released, buffered, and made available.
 Aluminosilicate Scaffold
 An aluminosilicate scaffold is a mineral framework built largely from aluminum, silicon, and oxygen. These structures are common in clays, mica, and many rock-forming minerals. They can hold charge, host ions, organize nearby water, and give chemical reactions a stable place to occur.
 Rock–Water Circuit
 The Rock–Water Circuit is the proposed cycle in which mineral architecture forms within rock, is opened and activated by water, becomes mobile through hydration and ion exchange, enters living systems, and eventually returns through decay, sedimentation, burial, and geologic renewal. In this circuit, rock stores the architecture, water opens and carries it, life temporarily organizes it, and geology gathers it back again. Once returned, the cycle begins anew.
 Figure 1. The Rock–Water Circuit

 An Outline of The Rock–Water Circuit
 With those terms and components in place, the circuit itself can be stated simply.
 Deep within the Earth, minerals assemble into rock in specific structures, ratios, and compositions. Those rocks store latent energy in their charge relationships, redox-active minerals, and layered mineral architecture. Geodynamic processes lift, fracture, and expose that rock.
 Water enters, opens the mineral body, and releases its chemistry into mobile ionic form. In such crystalline basement environments, water moves largely along fracture networks, where flow is constrained and water residence times lengthen. [ii] Under these conditions, water does not simply pass through, dissolving a few minerals while in brief contact before moving on. It resides against fracture walls, repeatedly acquiring minerals from rock surfaces over extended periods. [iii] [iv]
 Those ions then enter soils, microbes, plants, animals, and eventually human biology, where they help regulate metabolism, charge movement, enzyme function, structure, signaling, and the countless exchange processes on which life depends. At the end of life, that same chemistry returns through decay, sedimentation, burial, and geologic renewal.
 That cycle is what we began calling the Rock–Water Circuit.
 It is recursive, meaning that its output becomes part of its next input. What geology prepares, water releases. Earth largely preserves the same water and mineral inventory while continually reorganizing it through weathering, ion exchange, hydration, biological uptake, sedimentation, burial, and uplift.
 What life borrows, it returns. What returns to the Earth can, over time, be reorganized into new mineral bodies and released again.
 The later chapters examine the architecture inside that movement: iron and sulfur as the energetic switch, aluminosilicate matrices as the scaffold, water as the activating medium, and ion exchange as the behavior through which the broader mineral inventory becomes available.
 Biotite matters enormously in this book, though the theory does not rest on biotite alone. Biotite was the doorway. It was the mineral body most directly suggested to us by Shimanishi’s process, its transformation toward vermiculite, and by what we believed we were seeing in Hermetic texts such as the Emerald Tablet and The Six Keys of Eudoxus.
 Biotite was not important because it was unique. It was important because it contained, in one mineral body, nearly every major feature of the architecture we were trying to understand: iron, magnesium, potassium, layered aluminosilicate structure, exchange potential, and a natural weathering pathway toward hydrobiotite, vermiculite, and clay systems. Biotite was simply the place where that larger architecture first became visible to us.
 For now, the important point is simple: the Rock–Water Circuit begins with formed mineral architecture that water later opens.
 *Part 2 of this three-part series is here.

 *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
 A note to longtime readers:
 Everything I have written about over these past months eventually led me here.
 This work began with a volcanic mineral extract that seemed, at first, simply unusual. The deeper I followed it, the more it opened: into water, minerals, soil, biology, ancient texts, Scripture, and finally into a framework I believe is real, enduring, and much larger than a product.
 Aurmina and Primora Bio are not side projects to me. They are the first practical expressions of what this research uncovered. Aurmina carries this mineral-water chemistry into drinking water. Primora Bio carries it into soil, crops, plants, and animals.
 I do not feel the need to sell you on any of it. If the work has not persuaded you, ignore it. If my writing over the years has earned your trust, and if what I have found here seems sound to you, then I invite you to take part in it.
 My wife and I have given ourselves to this because we believe it matters. I have no anxiety about whether it sells quickly, slowly, or not at all. I know what I found. I know what it means to me. And I believe it can help people, animals, soil, water, and living systems in ways I was never able to help before.
 For those who have followed me through the hardest years, through the late nights, the rabbit holes, the losses, the fights, and the search for truth: this is the most real thing I have ever uncovered.
 If you feel drawn to it, the link is below.

 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: The Rock–Water Circuit begins with ISAW: iron, sulfur, aluminosilicate lattices, and water. Together, they form the mineral-water engine that stores energy in rock and carries it into life.


Chapter IV: The Switch, the Scaffold, and the Exchange

By the time I arrived at this stage of the investigation, something had begun to bother me.
 Earlier versions of the theory treated iron, sulfur, aluminum, and water as four participants in a recurring mineral chemistry. That description was useful, but it felt incomplete. The deeper I went into the literature, the harder it became to believe these elements were simply acting side by side. They were not equivalent parts of the same machine. They were performing different jobs.
 Iron and sulfur kept appearing at the energetic center of the system. [i] Water acted as the medium through which the chemistry became active. Aluminum seemed different. It was present everywhere, yet it was not behaving like the others. Eventually I realized that the more important actor was not aluminum, but the aluminosilicate architecture in which aluminum is contained.
 Once that became clear, the system started to sort itself into functions.
 The Redox Engine
 Iron: The Electron Carrier
 As I followed the redox chemistry deeper into the geological literature, one element repeatedly stood out.
 Iron.
 Iron-sulfur redox systems embedded in rock represent one of the earliest geochemical energy-transfer systems recognized in origin-of-life and Earth-system research. Iron stands out among the elements because of its unusual redox flexibility. It can donate electrons when the chemical environment requires it and then accept electrons again when conditions change. In this way, iron stores and transmits energy without being consumed or structurally destroyed. It can perform this cycling indefinitely, keeping energy in motion while the surrounding structures remain intact.
 Every living cell ultimately depends on this controlled movement of electrons, coupled to proton gradients, to power respiration and metabolism. For this reason, redox-active minerals—especially iron-bearing ones—sit at the foundation of both geology and biology. Iron conducts life’s current because it keeps energy moving.
 Sulfur: The Gradient Partner
 Sulfur’s role is different. It does not simply “move electrons” in the same way iron does. Sulfur exists across a wide range of oxidation states and repeatedly participates in reactions that shape redox disequilibrium, acid-base chemistry, mineral alteration, and proton-gradient formation.
 Throughout Earth systems, sulfur appears in volcanic gases, reduced sulfur species, sulfide minerals, sulfate-bearing waters, sediments, and biological chemistry. In iron-rich mineral environments, sulfur’s reactivity becomes especially important because iron-bearing minerals can stabilize, organize, and couple sulfur chemistry to electron transfer and proton movement at water-mineral interfaces.
 The Iron–Sulfur Switch
 Iron and sulfur work as a pair. Iron helps move electrons. Sulfur helps link that electron movement to acid-base chemistry, mineral alteration, and proton-gradient formation. One supplies redox flexibility. The other helps translate that redox activity into gradients and mineral change.
 Together they form the energetic switch at the center of the architecture. But a switch still needs a place to operate.
 The Scaffold: Aluminosilicate Architecture
 At first glance, aluminum appears to be the odd participant in this system. But the deeper I went, the more I realized that I had been focusing on the wrong thing. The important actor was not aluminum itself, but the aluminosilicate architecture found throughout rocks, clays, and mineral systems across the Earth. [ii] [iii]
 Iron moves electrons. Sulfur mediates proton activity. The aluminosilicate scaffold appears to do neither. Yet as I examined the mineral structures where these reactions unfold, it became clear that the aluminosilicate scaffold plays a role just as essential as the more obviously reactive elements.
 Aluminosilicates do not participate directly in the constant exchange of electrons that defines redox chemistry. They organize into lattices that form some of the most persistent mineral structures on Earth. Many aluminosilicate lattices carry persistent negative charge and remain structurally intact over immense spans of geological time.
 That stability is what the rest of the system requires. Iron and sulfur may supply the switch, but the switch does not operate in empty space. It is embedded within mineral structure, held inside iron-rich aluminosilicate systems where electron transfer, proton chemistry, hydration, ion exchange, and mineral release can occur in one physical setting. [iv]
 The lattice gives the switch somewhere to act. It holds charge, hosts ions, shapes nearby water, and allows exchange to occur without the whole structure collapsing. [v] Without such mineral scaffolds, iron-sulfur chemistry would likely be more localized and less capable of sustaining large-scale exchange processes. Without the iron-sulfur switch, the scaffold would remain mostly architecture: charged, ordered, durable, but not yet generative.
 That was the relationship I had been missing. The switch and the scaffold were different functions of the same mineral architecture.
 Once the switch and scaffold were clear, water became impossible to treat as a passive solvent.
 The Exchange
 There came a point in our research journey when we encountered a scientific field that neither of us had fully appreciated as its own discipline, and it changed the way we understood the circuit.
 The field is called ion exchange. It appears across soil science, water treatment, clay mineralogy, membrane science, geochemistry, chromatography, environmental remediation, agriculture, and biology.
 Once we understood it, a great deal of the theory began to come into focus. The geohydrological shift began to make sense. Soil depletion began to make sense. Vermiculite began to make sense. Even many of Shimanishi’s observations began to look different.
 More importantly, ion exchange helped reveal the hierarchy inside the system. It showed us that the broader mineral inventory did not become available on its own. Something had to keep the exchange active. That recognition is what pushed iron and sulfur to the center of the theory.
 Before water could move many minerals efficiently, exchange processes often had to occur at mineral surfaces. That realization changed the way I thought about water.
 Until then, I had tended to think of water primarily as a carrier: the medium through which mineral chemistry moved from one place to another. But ion exchange forced me to look more closely at what actually happens when water encounters charged mineral surfaces.
 Without water, minerals remain locked within crystalline lattices. Without charged mineral surfaces, there is little structure through which exchange can occur. But when water comes into sustained contact with aluminosilicate surfaces, the system changes.
 In intact Earth systems, rainwater does not simply fall to the surface and evaporate. It enters fractured rock and begins a much slower journey through mineral environments rich in iron, sulfur, aluminum, and silica. [vi] There it remains in prolonged contact with mineral surfaces under conditions of pressure, temperature, charge, and time.
 Through that contact, water acquires dissolved ions, altered charge distributions, and chemical characteristics shaped by prolonged mineral interaction. [vii] When that mineral-conditioned water eventually returns to springs, streams, aquifers, soils, or surface waters, it does not act only as the small volume that entered the rock. It can influence far larger volumes through the chemistry it carries, the ions it exchanges, and the conditions it helps establish. [viii] That amplification will become increasingly important as this book progresses.
 For much of human history, water’s relationship with rock, soil, and the broader hydrologic cycle remained largely intact. Waters emerging from springs, aquifers, and other naturally conditioned sources were often regarded as possessing unusual vitality and were sometimes described as “living water.” The language was pre-scientific, but it reflected a long-standing observation that not all waters behaved the same.
 Today, some of those differences are described in terms of dissolved mineral content, interfacial water behavior, electrochemical conditions, and prolonged interaction with mineral surfaces.
 The relationship is recursive. Water is altered by the minerals it encounters, but the chemistry of the water also influences what minerals are released, exchanged, retained, or transformed. In mature Earth systems, water enters each new exchange already carrying the chemical consequences of countless exchanges that came before.
 Aluminosilicate structures provide charged surfaces capable of hosting ions. Water hydrates those surfaces, allowing ions to bind, release, and exchange. Iron and sulfur keep the chemistry active. Only then can the broader mineral inventory enter circulation.
 Minerals bind, release, compete, buffer, and redistribute themselves continuously. Potassium, calcium, magnesium, sodium, manganese, copper, zinc, molybdenum, and countless others move out of the scaffold in dissolved ionic form.
 The Aluminum Problem
 Once the architecture was clear, a problem remained. If aluminosilicate systems were central to the architecture I was describing, then biology seemed to present an immediate objection.
 Iron is everywhere. Sulfur is everywhere. Water is everywhere. Yet aluminum appears largely absent from the core energetic machinery of living systems. At first, I had trouble reconciling that observation with the theory.
 Eventually, the tension eased once I stopped treating the system as a list of elements and began viewing it as a set of functions.
 In our interpretation, biology appears to replace many of the structural and boundary-forming functions performed by aluminosilicate minerals in geological systems with protein-based structures, membranes, and enzymes. The point, however, is that aluminum-rich mineral environments may have provided the structural and electrochemical conditions that allowed biological architecture to emerge in the first place.
 Although biology did not carry forward elemental aluminum itself, it appears to have recreated some of the organizational functions that aluminosilicate systems performed in geological environments. The absence of aluminum from mitochondria suggests a transition from mineral-based structural systems to biological ones.
 The aluminosilicate scaffold came first. Biology later reinvented its function using organic structures.
 The Architecture Reveals Itself
 Only after following each piece separately did the larger architecture become visible.
 The mineral world is vast. Magnesium, calcium, potassium, sodium, copper, manganese, zinc, molybdenum, and countless other elements participate in life. Some stabilize structure. Some regulate enzymes. Some carry signals. Some participate in photosynthesis, respiration, detoxification, and repair.
 But they do not all occupy the same level of the system. Before those minerals can participate in biology, an older architecture must already be in place. The minerals must be stored, released, exchanged, transported, and kept available rather than locked indefinitely inside rock.
 That architecture is built around water, iron, sulfur, silicon, and aluminosilicate mineral systems.
 Iron and sulfur form the energetic switch. Silicon and aluminum form the charged mineral scaffold. Water opens that scaffold, hydrates it, moves through it, and carries its chemistry outward into the world. Ion exchange then releases, sorts, buffers, and distributes the broader mineral inventory.
 Only then do the rest of the minerals enter the story.
 Potassium, magnesium, calcium, manganese, copper, zinc, molybdenum, and countless others participate in life because the architecture has already made them available.
 What had initially appeared to be a collection of minerals increasingly looked like a coordinated architecture.
 The hierarchy can be stated simply: iron and sulfur form the switch. Aluminosilicates form the scaffold. Water provides the flow. Ion exchange distributes the inventory. Life internalizes the architecture.
 The switch does not exist for its own sake. Iron and sulfur sit at the energetic center of the architecture because they help open access to the broader mineral inventory. Magnesium, calcium, potassium, manganese, copper, zinc, molybdenum, and countless others enter circulation through the same weathering, hydration, ion-exchange, and transport processes. The switch activates the architecture. The architecture releases the mineral economy.
 What struck me over time was that the system did not become less elegant as its complexity increased. The opposite happened. The clearer the architecture became, the more obvious it was that it operated within a wider mineral order whose full intricacy may be beyond human summary.
 But an architecture is not yet a circuit.
 A circuit has to move. It has to leave its source, pass through another form, and return changed.
 That is where biotite became important again.
 **Last part of the Rock-Water Circuit is here.

 *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
 A note to longtime readers:
 Everything I have written about over these past months eventually led me here.
 This work began with a volcanic mineral extract that seemed, at first, simply unusual. The deeper I followed it, the more it opened: into water, minerals, soil, biology, ancient texts, Scripture, and finally into a framework I believe is real, enduring, and much larger than a product.
 Aurmina and Primora Bio are not side projects to me. They are the first practical expressions of what this research uncovered. Aurmina carries this mineral-water chemistry into drinking water. Primora Bio carries it into soil, crops, plants, and animals.
 I do not feel the need to sell you on any of it. If the work has not persuaded you, ignore it. If my writing over the years has earned your trust, and if what I have found here seems sound to you, then I invite you to take part in it.
 My wife and I have given ourselves to this because we believe it matters. I have no anxiety about whether it sells quickly, slowly, or not at all. I know what I found. I know what it means to me. And I believe it can help people, animals, soil, water, and living systems in ways I was never able to help before.
 For those who have followed me through the hardest years, through the late nights, the rabbit holes, the losses, the fights, and the search for truth: this is the most real thing I have ever uncovered.
 If you feel drawn to it, the link is below.

 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: The Rock–Water Circuit's core architecture: iron moves electrons, sulfur mediates protons, aluminosilicate lattices provide the scaffold for ion exchange, and water carries the system into life.


Chapter V: Rock Gives Forward

When Biotite Begins to Open
 Biotite gave us the clearest place to watch the architecture begin moving. We focus here on its iron, sulfur, aluminosilicate architecture, and its interactions with water because they form the core architecture of the system, while recognizing that they operate within a far richer mineral matrix whose full complexity likely exceeds our ability to map cleanly.
 Its layered aluminosilicate lattice is remarkably well suited to sustaining ion exchange, redox buffering, and charge organization at the mineral-water interface. Biotite commonly forms within igneous and metamorphic rocks under elevated heat and pressure, often well below Earth’s surface. Over immense spans of time, tectonic uplift and erosion carry these minerals upward toward shallower environments.
 By the time biotite reaches the near-surface environment, it is already carrying a history written at depth: heat, pressure, crystallization, broad trace mineral incorporation, and long residence within Earth’s crust. Weathering releases and transforms what the deep Earth has prepared.
 Between biotite and vermiculite lies an intermediate state known as hydrobiotite. In that state, potassium has begun to leave the lattice, water has begun entering the interlayer spaces, and the mineral is partially opened while still retaining characteristics of both parent and daughter structures. Hydrobiotite shows the opening process in motion. The transformation does not occur all at once. Mineral architecture is gradually loosened, hydrated, and prepared for exchange.
 Near the surface, acidic, sulfate-bearing rainwater begins acting on its iron-rich layers. Interlayer potassium weakens and leaves the lattice. [i] [ii] Sulfur, through proton activity and iron oxidation, further destabilizes the structure. Water enters, hydrates, and expands the layers. [iii] Over time, biotite transforms toward hydrobiotite, vermiculite, mixed-layer clays, and secondary mineral systems. [iv] [v] [vi]
 That sequence became one of the clearest insights in the theory: the same chemistry stored in the rock also helps open the rock. The redox activity of iron and sulfur, especially sulfur’s role in proton chemistry and mineral alteration, participates in the weathering process itself. Sulfur moves through the circuit and also helps reopen the mineral body from which the circuit begins.
 As the layers hydrate and expand, mineral chemistry that had been locked within crystalline form becomes mobile. [vii] [viii] [ix] Iron, potassium, magnesium, sulfur species, aluminum-associated trace elements, charge, and a wider mineral inventory begin moving into surrounding soils and waters as dissolved ions. [x]
 This is where energy becomes generative: the chemistry is no longer confined within rock. It has become mobile, exchangeable, and available to participate in living systems. Water carries the chemistry forward, supporting charge organization across mineral interfaces while mobilizing minerals that enter soils, microbes, plants, and animals.
 The Larger Mineral Architecture
 Biotite matters here because it gave us a visible doorway into a much larger architecture. It is not the whole theory, and it should not be treated as a singular mineral key. It is one unusually rich example of a broader family of rock-forming and clay-forming aluminosilicate systems capable of holding charge, hosting ions, regulating hydration, exchanging minerals, and preserving structure while more reactive chemistry moves through them.
 That larger architecture includes micas such as biotite, phlogopite, muscovite, and illite; weathered mica intermediates such as hydrobiotite; expandable clay minerals such as vermiculite and smectite; mixed-layer clays such as illite-smectite and chlorite-vermiculite; iron- and magnesium-bearing silicates such as chlorite and serpentine; feldspar-derived secondary clays; and later weathering products such as kaolinite, halloysite, allophane, iron oxides, and iron oxyhydroxides. [xi] [xii] These minerals differ in structure, charge, reactivity, and biological relevance, but they belong to the same broad geologic story: rock becoming a charged, hydrated, exchange-capable interface.
 As these minerals weather, fracture, hydrate, oxidize, and transform, they generate the surfaces on which much of soil and water chemistry depends. They contribute to cation exchange capacity, mineral buffering, water retention, trace-element availability, aggregation, redox behavior, and the slow release of potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron, manganese, zinc, copper, molybdenum, and other biologically important ions. [xiii] In soils, they help determine fertility. In waterways, they influence suspended particles, dissolved ions, and mineral conditioning. In living systems, their released chemistry becomes part of the mineral economy on which enzymes, membranes, gradients, and metabolism depend.
 The broader claim is this: life depends on mineral availability, and mineral availability depends on older geologic architectures capable of storing, releasing, exchanging, and reorganizing chemistry through water. Biotite revealed that architecture. Vermiculite, clays, soils, waterways, and biological mineral systems carry it forward. [xiv] [xv]
 Biological systems later rely on a related logic: iron-sulfur clusters, layered membranes, structured interfaces, ion exchange, and proton gradients. [xvi] [xvii] [xviii] [xix] The biological and geological architectures are not identical. Biology does not carry forward aluminosilicate lattices as mitochondria. But the pattern is continuous: charge must be separated, held, exchanged, and directed before work can be done.
 Rock does not simply break down. It opens, exchanges, and gives forward.
 The Return
 At the end of life, the same chemistry changes roles again.
 Nothing disappears. Minerals do not die. Water does not die. Carbon does not disappear. It rearranges. What dies is the living coordination that had held those materials together.
 A living body is matter under governance: electrons moving in sequence, protons held across gradients, membranes maintaining separation, enzymes acting in time, water carrying charge and chemistry through tissues that still know what to do with it. [xx]
 When that coordination fails, the materials remain, but the living order is gone. Electron transport stops. Proton gradients collapse. Energy production halts. The body is still made of carbon, water, and minerals, but they are no longer being directed by a living system.
 Then the return begins. Water changes roles.
 During life, water helps maintain structure and flow. It sustains gradients, organizes charge, and carries chemistry through living systems. But when biological structures begin to break down, water is no longer held within those ordered arrangements. Instead, it moves through environments shaped by microbial activity, enzymatic cleavage, fluctuating pH, and oxidation. The same substance that helped sustain structure now becomes the medium through which that structure is loosened, dissolved, and redistributed.
 Picture water emerging from a mountain spring, issuing cold and clear from a rock face. It may have spent decades or centuries moving slowly through fractured rock, pressed, filtered, and conditioned by mineral lattices. Such water supports gradients. It carries organized charge. It sustains vitality, not because it is “pure,” but because it has been shaped through prolonged contact with rock.
 Now picture water in a bog, dark and tea-colored, heavy with dissolved organic matter. It moves slowly as well, but through a very different environment: one dominated not by ordered mineral surfaces but by decaying leaves, microbial mats, and collapsing biological structures. Here, water performs a different task. It dissolves structure. Acids accumulate. Oxygen is consumed. Minerals are released back into circulation as biological architecture breaks apart.
 Both waters belong to the same larger return. One supports life by maintaining order. The other supports continuity by enabling return.
 Together, they complete the cycle.
 Through that return, iron, sulfur, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and countless other minerals reenter soils, waters, and sediments. [xxi] Aluminosilicate frameworks remain within the geologic domain, while weathering, transport, burial, pressure, heat, and time gradually reorganize mineral matter into new structures.
 The Circuit Completed
 The Rock–Water Circuit describes the full geodynamic sequence: formation at depth, ascent toward exposure, hydration and opening, ionic release, biological use, decay, burial, mineral reformation, and eventual return toward the surface, where the rock is opened once again through weathering.
 It is a planetary recycling system in which Earth prepares mineral architecture below, water releases it above, life temporarily organizes it into biology, and geology slowly gathers it back so it can be reformed, reopened, and returned to circulation.
 What begins as mineral architecture becomes a circuit only when water enters. The scaffold holds the charge-bearing structure. The iron–sulfur switch helps activate the chemistry. Water opens the mineral body and permits exchange. Ion exchange releases and distributes the mineral inventory. Life borrows that chemistry and organizes it for a time. Geology then gathers it back, reforms it, and eventually exposes it again. Nothing is truly consumed. It is reorganized.
 Beyond Earth
 For a long time I assumed that was where the theory stopped. Then I began looking beyond Earth.
 One of the most intriguing examples comes from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Much of what we know about it comes from the Cassini spacecraft, a joint NASA-European mission that spent more than a decade studying Saturn and its moons. [xxii] During multiple flybys, Cassini passed directly through enormous plumes of water vapor and ice erupting from fractures near Enceladus’s south pole. By sampling those plumes, it detected evidence consistent with liquid water, salts, silica nanoparticles, methane, molecular hydrogen, and ongoing water-rock interaction beneath the moon’s icy crust. [xxiii]
 What caught my attention was the chemistry. Enceladus appears to possess several of the same ingredients that repeatedly appear throughout this book: rock, water, mineral exchange, redox disequilibrium, and the generation of chemical gradients. Particularly striking was the detection of molecular hydrogen, because hydrogen is one of the clearest indicators that water may be actively reacting with iron-bearing rock below the surface. In other words, Enceladus appears to host a form of hydrothermal chemistry that looks surprisingly familiar.
 Mars tells a different story. Rather than an apparently active system, it appears to preserve the remnants of one. We do not possess returned Martian rock samples yet, but orbiters and rovers have spent decades analyzing the planet directly. Instruments aboard missions such as Curiosity and Perseverance have identified clay minerals, sulfates, hydrated minerals, iron-rich alteration products, carbonates, and extensive evidence of prolonged water-rock interaction. [xxiv] Entire regions of the planet record a history in which water once moved through mineral systems and altered them in ways that remain visible billions of years later. [xxv]
 What the evidence from Mars and Enceladus suggests is not proof that the Rock–Water Circuit exists elsewhere. It is something more modest, and perhaps more interesting: the ingredients are not unique to Earth.
 Rock. Water. Silicate minerals. Iron chemistry. Sulfur chemistry. Redox disequilibrium. Gradients. Time.
 Where those conditions persist, similar forms of mineral-water organization may become possible. The details would differ. The minerals would differ. The outcomes would differ. On Earth, that architecture eventually entered biology. Elsewhere, it may have remained entirely geological. That possibility changed the way I thought about the theory.
 I no longer saw it only as an explanation for Shimanishi’s extract, or even for Earth’s mineral-water cycle. I began to wonder whether the deeper pattern might be more general: structure, water, exchange, gradients, and return appearing wherever wet rocky worlds have enough time to organize them.
 Energy requires a gradient. Gradients require structure. Structure becomes productive only when something can carry the flow. Whether the Rock–Water Circuit ultimately proves correct in whole, in part, or not at all remains for others to decide. But Mars and Enceladus returned me to a question most of us have contemplated at some point in our lives.
 What if Earth is not the exception?
 What if Earth is simply the world where this architecture became alive?
 The Observations Came First
 One final observation is worth making before we leave the theory behind.
 The argument in these chapters began with a mineral extract, expanded into geology and hydrology, reached into biology and origin-of-life science, and eventually raised the possibility that similar architectures may recur beyond Earth itself.
 But none of this began with a planetary theory.
 Long before there was a Rock–Water Circuit, a switch, a scaffold, or a mineral economy, there was simply a Japanese engineer who had spent decades working with a particular mineral system and producing results that were difficult to explain.
 The theory came later. The observations came first. Everything in these chapters emerged from repeated attempts to understand something that already existed.
 That places a limit on what has been claimed here. We did not begin with a model and impose it on nature. We followed a trail of observations wherever they led and then attempted to build a framework large enough to contain them. Whether that framework ultimately proves correct in whole, in part, or not at all remains for others to decide.
 But if the theory has any value, it began with the same thing that all worthwhile scientific inquiry begins with: paying attention. The person who paid attention first was not a geochemist, an origin-of-life researcher, or a planetary scientist.
 He was a pharmacist from Wakayama Prefecture who became fascinated by a tree growing from a crack in stone.
 His name was Asao Shimanishi.
 And before any of these ideas could exist, he had to find a way to bring the chemistry of that stone into water.

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 A note to longtime readers:
 Everything I have written about over these past months eventually led me here.
 This work began with a volcanic mineral extract that seemed, at first, simply unusual. The deeper I followed it, the more it opened: into water, minerals, soil, biology, ancient texts, Scripture, and finally into a framework I believe is real, enduring, and much larger than a product.
 Aurmina and Primora Bio are not side projects to me. They are the first practical expressions of what this research uncovered. Aurmina carries this mineral-water chemistry into drinking water. Primora Bio carries it into soil, crops, plants, and animals.
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 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: Before biology carried energy, Earth already did. Water moving through iron-rich rock created gradients, charge, and chemical return—the planetary circuit life later entered and internalized.


Chapter VI: The Volcano Alchemist and the Rock Extract

In the previous three chapters, I presented the Rock–Water Circuit framework, a theory that integrates insights from geology, hydrology, biology, chemistry, and origin-of-life research. Those chapters established a central idea: the same iron–sulfur–aluminum–water (ISAW) mineral chemistry that formed in rock helped initiate life on early Earth and continues to operate today, continually reforming and releasing the mineral inputs on which all living systems depend.
 This conclusion should not be entirely surprising. Any planetary energy system capable of sustaining life over immense spans of time must also contain mechanisms that continually regenerate the energy gradients on which life depends. Without such renewal, the mineral systems supporting biology would gradually exhaust themselves.
 When a Human Isolated a Phase of the Rock—Water Circuit
 For billions of years, ISAW operated only within the slow machinery of the Earth itself. Water circulated through rock; mineral lattices hydrated and exchanged ions with passing water; electrochemical gradients formed and dissipated; and, ultimately, this energy architecture established the conditions under which life eventually emerged and evolved.
 Then, in 1977, after more than a decade of solitary experimentation, a Japanese engineer succeeded in extracting the system’s mineral core, separating a geologically generated chemistry from its host rock and rendering it portable in liquid form.
 His name was Asao Shimanishi.
 What is remarkable about his accomplishment is that most scientific discoveries either identify previously unknown processes in nature or, in technology, create processes that did not previously exist. Shimanishi’s work belonged to a third, historically unusual category of discovery: he succeeded in isolating and stabilizing one of nature’s primary energy-generating systems.
 This work was done by a single individual operating outside the scientific mainstream.
 Reconstructing the Life of Asao Shimanishi
 Over the past seven months of studying Shimanishi’s life and work, I have been challenged by the near-total lack of formal documentation of his personal life and professional accomplishments. That scarcity makes it difficult to speak with complete confidence about the full arc of his scientific journey.
 What follows, therefore, is drawn from the small body of material I was able to gather: a few oral histories from people in Japan who worked with him or for his company, and a translation of what appears to have been his only public interview, published in a Japanese magazine shortly before retirement. [i] I also drew on a first-person chapter in a limited-edition Japanese book called Rock Water , written nearly twenty years ago by colleagues, based on notes they had taken during lectures he delivered in China.
 Ultimately, I do not believe that Shimanishi knew he was extracting a foundational piece of planetary chemistry. His goal at the time was much more practical. To see how he came to it, however, we have to begin earlier, with the formation of the man himself.
 Asao Shimanishi was born in Wakayama Prefecture in 1926. After finishing high school in 1944, he first studied engineering, then entered Osaka Pharmaceutical College in 1946, in the difficult years just after the war. His earliest professional work was in pharmaceutical research, but the interests that would later define his life had begun much earlier. From childhood, he recalled a fascination with rocks and with the hidden processes by which the natural world seemed to sustain itself.
 One story about him that has been told to me since I first began studying Shimanishi concerns an experience he had in his early thirties. Sitting near the sea in meditation one day, he noticed a tree growing straight out of what appeared to be naked stone. There was no soil, no visible earth, only a narrow crack in a granite boulder from which the trunk rose, supporting a tree in full bloom.
 Image 1: Tree Growing Out of Rock

 That event appears to have influenced his decision to turn away from pharmaceutical research. He found himself less interested in the increasingly abstract sophistication of synthetic chemistry and the rapid advances of petrochemical and polymer science, and more drawn to working with what he called “natural starting materials,” with the sense that something extraordinary might still be discovered in them.
 Soon afterward, he encountered a senior colleague from his hometown who showed him what he called a “mysterious mineral”: vermiculite. He later referred to that moment as his “Encounter with the Stone” and described it in retrospect as serendipitous. He soon learned that vermiculite was the weathered form of an iron-rich black mica mineral called biotite, which contained an unusually large number and variety of mineral elements, in some analyses more than forty. Although vermiculite is more open and hydrated than biotite, its minerals still remain tightly bound within stacked aluminosilicate sheets.
 He knew that common elements could be extracted from rock relatively easily with acidic or alkaline solutions, but his interest centered on the rarer trace minerals. What drew him onward was the possibility that, once dissolved as charged ions, such elements might display catalytic behavior and unusual reactivity. He also reasoned that for those minerals to become chemically active in a meaningful way, they would have to be dissolved in water. From that point on, his aim was clear: to produce an aqueous mineral solution extracted from rock.
 It was a simple idea, yet difficult enough to occupy the next decade and a half of his life. Outside work, he began devoting increasing amounts of time to what he himself described as a private obsession, a “castle in the air” project with no immediate practical application and no clear commercial objective, all the while aware that those who knew of his efforts regarded him as something of a fool.
 From the start, he had little success with the acids and methods he first selected. Yet he persisted for nearly fifteen years, driven by a single conviction: that a liquid solution containing broad mineral complexity might be of benefit to humanity. He tested combinations of different rocks, acids, and alkalis under varying conditions of heat and water, advancing only through failure, repetition, and adjustment, with a patience measured in years.
 He became, in his own words, captivated by the stone, so much so that he compared himself to someone being sucked in by its very name, hiru-ishi , “leech stone.” Working often late into the night, he continued experimenting, adjusting equipment, and enduring a grueling private research life. He later said that he barely noticed because he was so absorbed in it, and that under intense concentration, flashes of insight would sometimes come.
 The ambition itself was elemental: to extract minerals in a form that could move beyond a single volcano or spring and enter ordinary water, soil, and life.
 Finally, in 1977, he produced the exact liquid solution he had sought: a spectrum of minerals dominated by iron and sulfur, with dozens of other elements appearing in minute, yet still active, amounts. He named his extract Themarox, or “Rock Extract.”
 One clarification will help here. Themarox is the concentrated mineral extract itself. It is not used directly. When diluted into water, it transforms that water into what Shimanishi and his colleagues called “Rock Water.” Themarox is the source. Rock Water is the active medium through which biological effects occur.
 A Historically Unparalleled Achievement
 It is my opinion that his achievement is unique in the history of science. Although many scientific discoveries begin with moments of insight that then take years to develop into practical form, Shimanishi’s path was different. He spent well over a decade working by himself on a single technical problem until it finally yielded a solution.
 Further, other giants in the history of science had teams, theories, funding, or infrastructure. For instance, Pasteur refined revolutionary ideas within an ecosystem that steadily supplied recognition and resources. Although Mendel also worked alone for years and succeeded in mapping a single problem—genetics—he did so in approximately a decade less time. Tesla spent much of his life pursuing the idea of resonance as a transformative principle in energy and communication, but he never fully realized the system he envisioned.
 Thus, as far as I can tell, those who had come before him either had a combination of collaborators and institutional support or met with success more quickly.
 Sulfur chemistry became central to that process. In retrospect, aspects of it resemble what modern geochemists now study as enhanced weathering: the accelerated chemical breakdown of minerals in water to release ions and alter surrounding geochemistry. Under carefully controlled conditions, sulfuric-acid-based reactions could convert certain minerals into water-soluble sulfate forms while simultaneously helping undesirable metals precipitate or be filtered out.
 The mineral complex Shimanishi released from vermiculite contained an unusually broad spectrum of trace elements derived from the original mica lattice. Crucially, those elements appeared primarily as sulfate salts, reflecting the sulfur chemistry central to his extraction process. In practical terms, this meant the minerals were already water-soluble and charged.
 The result was a liquid mineral extract with a composition akin to naturally mineralized waters, carrying a broad spectrum of ions that could alter the water’s electrochemical properties. What mattered, however, was what happened when it was diluted into water. The resulting water behaved differently. Murky water quickly clarified, while foul, stagnant water became clear and oxygen-rich. When added to ponds, tanks, or reservoirs, impurities and contaminants gathered into visible aggregates that settled to the bottom.
 What is fascinating is that this phenomenon mirrors what happens continuously in nature. In rivers, wetlands, and mineral springs, water is clarified by contact with rock surfaces, which release minerals into the water, causing dispersed particles and contaminants to coagulate and settle. What Shimanishi had unknowingly done was extract from rock a functional fragment of that mineral-water chemistry and render it usable through water in glasses, tanks, ponds, and irrigation systems.
 When applied to soils or irrigation water, crops grew with unusual vigor, grasses thickened, vegetables ripened, and fish in aquaculture ponds became more active and resilient. He and a growing number of colleagues began describing the transformed water as Rock Water.
 He obtained a patent for its use in purifying and clarifying brackish water. Eight years later, in 1985, his achievement led to the founding of Shimanishi Co., where he began producing Themarox, a citrus-colored liquid concentrate containing a broad and electrically active spectrum of minerals, fully dissolvable and readily absorbed. What is striking is that this mineral complex belonged to nature alone; it was not a synthetic invention so much as a successful release of a naturally embedded chemistry.
 A famous three-and-a-half-minute Japanese news segment captured one of the most dramatic demonstrations of Themarox’s clarifying power. [ii] At a polluted brackish pond at a well-known Shinto shrine in Tokyo, the minerals were used in a public cleanup event. The pond, popular with students who came to pray for success in entrance examinations and studies, reportedly went from brackish to clear in four hours.
 At roughly the two-minute mark in that segment, one catches what may be the only public footage of Shimanishi: smiling as he drinks the freshly treated water from a glass mug lowered into the pond on a rope. The same broadcast also showed smaller demonstrations. At 2:41, on the host’s desk, two cloudy fishbowls appear, each containing a single fish barely visible through the haze. One bowl is treated with Themarox, and the suspended particles rapidly clump together and sink, leaving the fish clearly visible and swimming in crystal-clear water.
 Rock Water: Agricultural and Aquaculture Applications
 Next, he directed his efforts beyond water treatment and into agricultural and aquacultural applications, testing water prepared with Themarox—what he and his colleagues called Rock Water—in agricultural trials, seed germination tests, and soil restoration initiatives in Japan and other countries.
 It did not take long for farmers to notice certain patterns in soil and crops.
 The rice didn’t just grow. The stalks were sturdier, more resistant to pests and insects, and the plants stayed upright instead of collapsing in wind and rain. Vegetable plots developed plants that grew with a vigor older farmers recognized from their youth. Golf courses began using Rock Water to ensure fuller, verdant, and more resilient grasses.
 In fish farms and ponds, operators added Themarox to their water systems, creating Rock Water, and watched as foul-smelling, low-oxygen water cleared. Fish that had been sluggish and prone to disease became more active and fed more vigorously. Eels raised in Rock Water reportedly reached market size in half the time, allowing two crops per year. Stocking density increased by 30 percent, partial water exchange was needed only every 4–6 months, survival was reported at 100 percent, and finished eels sold for 2,300 yen/kg or more, compared with a conventional market price of about 1,600 yen/kg.
 A few environmental engineers began using the solution in polluted lakes and lagoons, reporting improvements in water clarity, odor, algal blooms, and biota. As these uses expanded, the reports multiplied faster than the formal literature. Shimanishi did not work within academia, and his objectives were therefore not centered on research or publication. Instead, he relied primarily on demonstrations for customers to help grow his business. Even so, a small body of published studies and technical reports on the efficacy of Rock Water in agriculture does exist, including a UN internal report on a soil restoration project, a Japanese Ministry of Health field trial, a peer-reviewed seed germination study, and several later privately commissioned studies conducted in the US.
 However, when analyzed as a comprehensive evidence base, the studies demonstrated an extensive list of improved outcomes:
 Increased plant yield

 Reduced immature or poorly matured yield components

 Increased trace mineral incorporation into plant tissue

 Increased photosynthetic activity

 Increased antioxidant capacity

 Increased disease resistance

 Faster root establishment

 Accelerated vegetative growth and thicker stems and leaves

 Improved biomass accumulation efficiency

 Increased soil microbial diversity and density

 Improved balance among dominant bacterial species

 Reduced uptake of pesticides

 The number and diversity of the positive outcomes suggest that Rock Water represents a novel functional category in terms of its diverse beneficial impacts on soil, microbial, and plant health. Furthermore, although not formally documented, hundreds of compelling use cases were reported to the company and its representatives.
 To this point in history, no single conventional agricultural input—whether fertilizers, biostimulants, microbial inoculants, or soil amendments—has been shown to influence all these metrics simultaneously. A summary of the above studies, along with links to the underlying reports, is provided in the endnote. [iii]
 The Rock Extract: Therapeutic Applications
 Readers may reasonably wonder how a physician ended up spending seven months at a computer, often eighteen hours a day, wandering far beyond the usual boundaries of medicine into mineralogy, water chemistry, geology, soil biology, agriculture, and origin-of-life research—a process that, I should admit, was not particularly kind to my own health.
 The explanation is simple. For the first time in my career, I had encountered something that appeared to influence physiology not only in patients, but across living systems more broadly: microbes, plants, animals, humans, and even the water systems that sustain them.
 In medicine, there is really no precedent for that. No vitamin, antibiotic, immune modulator, cytotoxin, or metabolic therapy operates across biological kingdoms, much less extends its influence into soil and water.
 No physician expects a therapeutic principle to operate alike in bifidobacteria, basil, eels, potatoes, and people. The only other agent I could find with effects extending beyond mammals was aspirin, since its derivative, salicylic acid, participates in plant signaling. Although I found several studies on the use of salicylic acid in agriculture, its relevance appeared to stop there, as I found none related to water treatment.
 Although the discovery of such broad applications led me far outside medicine, my journey into the world of minerals and water first began when I encountered the work of a physician named Hisotake Nojima.
 Dr. Hisotake Nojima’s Super Mineral Solution
 Nojima was not an outsider to medicine. He rose within Japan’s public health system and served as director of the Sawara Health Center in Chiba Prefecture before later becoming head of a regional hospital. Yet during his years in practice, he became increasingly troubled by what he saw as a blind spot in modern medical thinking. Research, he wrote, had become almost entirely focused on organic molecules while largely ignoring the role of inorganic elements, metals, salts, and mineral ions in biological function.
 His interest deepened after he started treating patients with Rock Water. One of the first cases he described was of a town mayor with advanced gastric cancer. Surgery was being planned. The mayor’s family had heard that Nojima was quietly experimenting with a new ionized mineral solution. They were desperate.
 Nojima was still in an exploratory phase. He adjusted concentration, designed a high-dose oral regimen, and proceeded cautiously. Based on many later cases, he noted retrospectively that gastric cancers, because they are directly bathed in the mineral solution twice daily, often respond unusually fast.
 Within days, the mayor’s appetite returned. His pain diminished. He began to regain strength.
 Before gastric cancer surgery, surgeons repeat an endoscopy. The first had documented a clear malignant mass. When they returned to confirm the target, the mass was gone. The hospital physicians were, by his account, confused and effectively speechless.
 What struck Nojima was the disappearance of a documented tumor between two scopes, with no conventional therapy in between. He did not treat this as proof of a cure, but as the first signal that something fundamental was occurring that existing frameworks could not explain.
 Whatever the tumor biology was doing, equally notable were the systemic shifts he described: appetite, strength, sleep, and mood.
 Nojima then began offering the therapy to patients with advanced cancer who had exhausted surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. He repeatedly described observing pain subside and strength return. Imaging showed reduced tumor burden or halted progression. Infections improved unexpectedly. Chemotherapy became more tolerable.
 These were not isolated anecdotes in his book. They recurred in a pattern. Over time, Nojima came to understand what he was seeing as follows:
 “The minerals were restoring the body’s mineral architecture, and the body was doing the healing.”
 What Nojima Actually Claimed
 Because stories like the mayor’s invite distortion, restraint matters. Nojima never claimed universal cures. He documented recoveries, partial responses, stabilization, and non-responders. His insistence was that mineral architecture mattered to all of them. Many improved, some stabilized, and a few experienced remissions.
 He also acknowledged patients for whom mineral restoration could not reverse the decline.
 Author’s Note: The reports above come from Nojima’s own clinical writings and have not been independently verified through modern controlled clinical trials.
 What struck him instead was a recurring pattern: when the body’s mineral (or aqueous) environment was restored, physiological resilience often seemed to improve. In his writings, he summarized this idea with a phrase that appeared repeatedly throughout his books: the solution was helping restore what he called the body’s “mineral architecture.”
 Over the following years, he documented his experiences in several books (one of which was translated into English here in the US) and founded a nonprofit organization devoted to exploring the roles of minerals, nutrition, and environmental factors in chronic disease. At its height, he wrote, the organization had tens of thousands of members.
 Although his work remained largely unknown outside Japan and was never integrated into mainstream medical research, his clinical observations represent one of the earliest attempts by a modern physician to investigate the biological effects of a sulfated biotite-derived broad-spectrum mineral complex.
 Shimanishi also believed that the mineral spectrum in his solution could support numerous human biological processes. In his view, since minerals act as cofactors that activate enzymes throughout the body and enzymes require specific minerals to function properly, restoring mineral diversity to water could help restore normal biological activity.
 He claimed that health improvements reported by users arose from this mineral-enzyme interaction, though he acknowledged that medical claims were legally restricted and should be approached cautiously.
 Author’s Note: I recount the observations above as historical medical reporting rather than as evidence of established therapeutic effects.
 Carrying Rock Chemistry Into Water
 What Shimanishi isolated was a mineral chemistry capable of conditioning water into an electrochemically organized state, much like the mineralized waters that have emerged naturally throughout history from geothermal systems distributed through the Earth’s crust. In the framework of ISAW and the Rock–Water Circuit, what Shimanishi did, unknowingly, was extract from rock and carry into water a redox-active chemical set that geology had assembled long before.
 What became of Shimanishi himself, and of the company that carried his extract forward, is harder to reconstruct, but no less important.
 What Became of Shimanishi’s Work
 On a recent trip to Japan, I tried to learn as much as I could about Shimanishi, including even the possibility of his whereabouts. I could find no record of his death, and the people still working at the company told me they had neither seen nor heard from him in many years. He would be 100 years old today. Although the Japanese are known for remarkable longevity, I could not determine whether he was still alive, but neither could I confirm that he was dead.
 I met only one man who had known Shimanishi well: Mr. Ishii, until recently the longtime majority shareholder of Shimanishi-Kaken and, at 86, still its plant manager. He told me that Shimanishi’s gifts did not lie in business or operations, and that around the year 2000 a bitter rupture developed between him and the company’s then president. That conflict ultimately led the owners to dissolve the company and sell off its assets. When the plant went up for auction, Shimanishi asked Mr. Ishii, apparently the one friend with the means to do so, to buy it to preserve the production of Themarox. Mr. Ishii did. Shimanishi stayed on and worked for a few months afterward, but it seems his heart was no longer in the new company. He told his colleagues that he wanted to retire, which in Japan, even at seventy-four, was highly unusual. They later learned that he had tried to attract investors to start a new company of his own but had not succeeded. No one has heard from him since.
 I came to see Mr. Ishii as the keeper of Shimanishi’s legacy, the man who ensured that his mission did not die with the collapse of the original company. Mr. Ishii shepherded it through several near-bankruptcies during the difficult years after the acquisition. In those early years, he had to rely on people like his younger brother, whom he asked to work for the company without pay. Even now, I believe the salaries remain modest, and the company’s leadership consists largely of retired Toshiba executives. In Japan, corporate men of that era were often forced to retire at 60. Yet many still have to find work afterward, since pensions alone are not enough to sustain a desired standard of living.
 MB first met those men when they worked without pay. When he asked them why they did so, they replied, “Because we believe what you believe.” MB has never forgotten that. Nor has he forgotten that when he reached out to them during their first conversation, they told him that he would be the sole importer to North America, an agreement they have honored for more than twenty years, based on a handshake.
 Coming into this small commercial world late in the writing of From Volcanoes to Vitality (FVTV), I was struck by that degree of trust and shared mission. Learning that both parties had worked peacefully and successfully for twenty years on nothing more than a handshake moved me and gave me confidence. It deepened my trust in what we were building and strengthened my sense of responsibility to carry that shared mission forward.
 What the Ancients May Have Seen
 In Shimanishi’s own region of Japan alone, the accessible vermiculite reserves are sufficient for centuries, perhaps millennia, of human-scale application.
 This is not a scarce remedy.
 It is a geological inheritance.
 As detailed in From Volcanoes to Vitality [iv] , if understood and applied responsibly, Rock Water may represent a path for the gradual restoration of soils, waters, husbandry, and even human health.
 Beyond that aspiration, a separate question arose in the wake of my studies into Rock Water. If a specific mineral-water chemistry capable of organizing electrochemical energy has been operating quietly within rock for billions of years, and if a human being has now managed to isolate a working phase of that chemistry, then why do ancient traditions, alchemical writings, and even fragments of early scripture appear to describe processes that map so precisely onto this same mineral-water transformation?
 The chapters that follow explore how this pattern connects modern science with far older attempts to understand the relationship between matter, water, and the organizing forces of life.

 [i] https://www.bodyrevitaliser.nl/en/aquarevitaliser/aquarevitaliser-ionized-mineral-extract/the-discoverer-and-inventor-dr-shimanishi-from-jap/
 [ii]

 [iii] https://pierrekorymedicalmusings.com/p/the-efficacy-of-themarox-in-agriculture?r=iutjw
 [iv] https://fromvolcanoestovitality.com/

 *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: Asao Shimanishi spent fifteen years trying to release minerals from rock into water. What he produced may have isolated a working phase of Earth’s life-sustaining chemistry.