Connections

How the Pentagon Engineered the Destruction of Anthropic Note on sourcing and method All factual claims have been verified against reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Axios, CBS News, NPR, CNN, CNBC, ABC News, Fortune, TechCrunch, DefenseScoop, The Hill, NBC News, and Anthropic’s own public statements, as of March 1, 2026. Interpretive framing — including the premeditation thesis and the “corporate murder” characterization — is the author’s own analysis. Where Claude’s re

Zhiyi, Nichiren, and the Cosmological Answer to the Sovereign Nexus The third in a series: The Enemy Within — The Soul Machine — The Round and Complete Teaching I am writing this on the morning of February 28, 2026. While I was drafting the final sentences of the previous piece in this series, my phone lit up with a news alert I had been half-expecting and wholly dreading: the United States and Israel have launched coordinated strikes on Iran. Operation Epic Fury. Explosions

There is a teaching I give every new student that tends to surprise them. Do not sit for thirty minutes. Do not sit for twenty. Do not even sit for ten, not yet. Sit for three minutes. Every day. No exceptions. The eyebrows go up. Three minutes? That hardly seems worth the trouble of finding a cushion. And that, precisely, is the point. We have a peculiar relationship with spiritual practice in the West. We tend to measure its value by its drama — the length of the sit, the i

Anthropic, the Pentagon, Peter Thiel, and the Architecture of the Sovereign Nexus There is a question that the mainstream technology press has been reluctant to ask directly, perhaps because asking it forces an uncomfortable confrontation with the degree to which the architecture of artificial intelligence has become inseparable from the architecture of American imperial power. The question is this: Was Anthropic's celebrated commitment to AI safety ever a genuine constraint

A student wrote to me recently with a question that stopped me mid-sip of morning tea. She had been practicing breath awareness meditation for some time and had noticed that during her sits she naturally settled into five or six breaths per minute — calm, unhurried, exactly where contemplatives and researchers alike say the breath ideally belongs. But her smartwatch told a different story at night: seventeen to twenty breaths per minute while she slept, automatic and unconsci

In the West, “beginner’s mind” is almost universally associated with Zen Buddhism. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s 1970 classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind gave the concept its English-language home, and his famous observation—that in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few—has become one of the most widely quoted lines in all of Western Buddhist literature. The Japanese term shoshin (初心) is now firmly lodged in the popular imagination

Globalism, the Axial Age, and What Nations Lose When They Close Their Doors I. The World Has Always Moved There is a myth embedded in the current wave of nationalist politics, one that its proponents rarely examine too closely: the myth of the self-sufficient civilization, the sovereign people who once thrived in proud isolation, whose identity was formed in the absence of outside influence, and who can return to that pristine condition by simply closing the gate. It is a com

A Wrong Idea Worth Having Something strange happens during deep meditation or sustained Odaimoku chanting. Time shifts. The ordinary texture of minutes and seconds dissolves, and when awareness returns to the clock, it is almost always with surprise. An hour has passed that felt like fifteen minutes. Or the reverse: a brief sitting felt immeasurably spacious. Anyone who has practiced seriously knows this territory. Athletes call it being in the zone. Psychologists call it flo

Vignettes Along the Silk Road A Work of Fiction For all who carried ideas in their saddlebags alongside the silk and the cinnamon. “The camel does not know what doctrine it carries, but the merchant does, and the monk beside him.” — Attributed to no one; remembered by everyone I. The Gymnosophist’s Question Taxila, 326 BCE The Greek soldiers called them gymnosophistai—the naked wise men—because they could not fathom why anyone would stand unclothed in the sun for hours on end

I am finding it harder and harder not to despair this past year reading and watching the news, or what passes for the news these days. Honestly, it feels more like people yelling at each other than any real news. And if an event occurs, it is immediately spun into some alternate reality version of itself. But as a former police officer myself, I know what I saw in the numerous widely shared videos: two American citizens were gunned down in the streets of their own homes in Ja

An Unexpected Convergence This morning I listened to the January 20th episode of Jeff Warren's Mind Bod Adventure Pod , featuring John Philip Newell and Cami Twilling. By the end, I found myself sitting in stillness, stunned by recognition. What began as a pleasant listen became something else entirely—a moment when different streams of wisdom suddenly revealed themselves as tributaries of the same underground river. I'd been working on The Living Sound for months, immersed

An Unexpected Doorway This is perhaps not the most common starting point for a dharma reflection, but contemplative life has taught me that insight arrives through unexpected doorways. A chance observation, a phrase overheard, the peculiar shape of light through winter branches—the mind trained in meditation learns to attend to these moments when two seemingly unrelated domains suddenly reveal themselves as expressions of the same underlying pattern. What emerged from this pa

How later Buddhist innovations inverted an earlier doctrinal consensus—and why Nichiren was right to object One of the most consequential doctrinal disputes in East Asian Buddhism concerns a seemingly simple question: What is the relationship between Śākyamuni Buddha—the historical teacher who walked the dusty roads of ancient India—and Vairocana (or Mahāvairocana), the cosmic “Great Illuminator” who appears in later Mahāyāna texts? For the Shingon tradition founded by Kūkai

Nichiren and the Kamakura Pathmakers How five reformers carved new paths through petrified forests—and why one of them was more traditional than we thought ——— When the Dharma declines, new paths must open—not by denying the past, but by reawakening its living flame. ——— The Crucible In the crucible of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japan, the Buddhist landscape was undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Political chaos, social upheaval, and a widespread belief that the age of

Tolkien, Lewis, and the Dharmakaya There is a moment familiar to anyone who has ever made something—a poem, a melody, a garden, a meal prepared with unexpected grace—when the work seems to arrive rather than be constructed. The hands move, the words come, but something else is doing the work. We become, in those moments, less like engineers and more like scribes. Two of the twentieth century's most beloved writers gave voice to this experience with striking clarity. J.R.R. To

Feminine Emptiness at the Heart of the Sacred Title When we chant Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, we rarely pause to consider what lies hidden in the brushstrokes. But Chinese characters are not arbitrary signs. They carry histories, and those histories sometimes preserve truths the conscious mind has forgotten. Consider 妙 ( myo )—the "wondrous" or "subtle" that names the Dharma we invoke. The character is composed of 女 ( onna , "woman") combined with 少 ( sho , "young" or "small"). But

Language, Meaning, and the Odaimoku A student recently asked me a deceptively simple question: "If language is just metaphor—symbols pointing at reality rather than reality itself—then isn't Namu Myoho Renge Kyo just another metaphor? How can we say the Odaimoku is ultimate reality rather than merely representing it?" The question cuts to the heart of what we're doing when we chant. And the answer, I've come to believe, lies in one of Tiantai Buddhism's most subtle teaching

The Unexpected Power of Vibration There's a moment in every fire suppression demonstration that makes audiences gasp. Two engineering students point what looks like an oversized speaker at a small flame. Bass frequencies between 30 and 60 hertz pulse through the air—too low to hear clearly, but powerful enough to feel in your chest. Within seconds, the fire goes out. No water. No chemicals. Just organized sound waves creating pressure variations that separate oxygen from fuel

Visualizing Dependent Origination Through the Apple The Cosmos in a Seed: Potential That Must Be Cultivated Consider the image of the apple cut in half. At first glance, it is a mundane object, the kind we hold in our hands without a second thought. But look closer at the core. Resting where the seeds should be are two embryonic figures, their faces serene, bearing the countenance of the Buddha. This image is a radical visualization of both Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamu

A Chronological Journey through the Asian Mind A Speculative Essay on the Convergence of Chinese and Indian Thought It may be fun to speculate and imagine a meeting of the three giants of Eastern philosophy—Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao-Tzu—as contemporaries, perhaps meeting on a dusty road in ancient China or gathered around the famous “vinegar tasters” jar. There is romance in imagining these sages exchanging wisdom and shaping world consciousness together. While this meet