MEET THE FOUNDER
Thank you for taking the Museum tour. If you’re curious about the life that gave rise to it, this page offers a little more context—not because the story is extraordinary, but because understanding the real, human journey helps reveal the beating heart of the Museum.
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Why Preserve Insights from a Single Life?
Roy Batty captures the urgency in his poignant soliloquy from Blade Runner (1982): “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
Every life accumulates experiences, failures, discoveries, and hard-earned wisdom that disappear unless someone deliberately preserves them. This Museum is one attempt to keep those lessons available as an invitation to think, question, and perhaps discover something useful for your own journey.
Five Important Questions and Answers from the Journey
No life can be fully observed or even summarized, yet these five Q&As offer a glimpse into the journey that ultimately gave rise to the Museum. Presented in chronological order.
What Broke My Spirit?
Every life is shaped by forces that strengthen it—and forces that threaten to break it. Mine was no different. What nearly destroyed me was not one dramatic event, but the cumulative weight of ideas, fears, wounds, and expectations that slowly separated me from my own voice. I learned early how to survive by becoming what the people and systems around me required. I learned how to read a room, anticipate disapproval, suppress whatever might create conflict, and work relentlessly to earn the safety, acceptance, or affirmation that never felt secure. Some of that conditioning arrived through religion. Some arrived through family. Some came through abuse, rejection, shame, and the fear that authenticity carried consequences I could not afford. Together, they taught me to distrust parts of myself, silence questions before I could ask them, and confuse compliance with goodness. Perfectionism became both armor and prison. If I could be useful enough, good enough, insightful enough, entertaining enough, or indispensable enough, perhaps I could stay ahead of rejection. But a life organized around avoiding rejection eventually becomes a life organized around abandoning yourself. The damage was cumulative. It did not always announce itself dramatically. It appeared as exhaustion, disconnection, self-doubt, fractured relationships, compulsive attempts to repair what I could not control, and the recurring suspicion that there was something fundamentally wrong with me. Over time, the distance between the person I presented and the person buried underneath became increasingly difficult to survive. I could still function. I could still create, perform, help, teach, and make people laugh. But functioning is not the same as being whole—and appearing alive is not the same as feeling alive. What nearly destroyed me was not merely the impact made by other things and people. It was the degree to which their voices had taken residence inside me. Their judgments became my judgments. Their fears became my boundaries. Their expectations became the terms upon which I permitted myself to exist. Several exhibits in this Museum preserve different dimensions of that fractured life. The BIG Mystery attempts to place the visitor inside the darkness of living with a disabling reality that could be felt but not understood. Kingdom of Heaven examines the religious system that helped shape both my conscience and my fear. The Candi Addams Experiment follows the confusion, suppression, and eventual search for balance surrounding identity, gender, sexuality, and mental health. And running through all of it, PYGMO preserves something that the damage never fully erased: the childlike purity, innocence, imagination, and creative instinct that survived even when they could not yet mature into freedom. These exhibits do not explain the whole life, and none of them isolates a single cause. Together, they preserve pieces of what it was like to live for decades inside forces I could not yet name, while continuing to function, create, and search for some explanation of why surviving felt so difficult. Eventually, survival was no longer enough. I had to begin asking questions I had spent a lifetime avoiding.
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IF YOU READ MORE, explore the fears, wounds, conditioning, and expectations that slowly buried my authentic voice beneath survival mechanisms.
What Drove Me to Keep Searching?
Once the questions began, I could not force them back into silence. I kept searching because the explanations I had inherited no longer accounted for what I had lived, what I had witnessed, or what some deeper part of me still believed might be possible. I did not begin searching because I was certain there were answers. I began because the answers I had been given were no longer sufficient—and pretending otherwise had become more dangerous than the questions themselves. Some questions were theological. Some were psychological. Some were painfully personal. Why did teachings intended to produce love so often produce fear? Why did systems that spoke of truth require so much silence? Why did goodness seem to demand the rejection of so much that felt honest, human, and alive? I searched through religion and beyond it. I searched through books, conversations, counseling, creativity, philosophy, personal experience, and the lives of people whose wisdom did not fit neatly inside the boundaries I had inherited. I listened for patterns. I compared what people claimed with what their beliefs actually produced. I became increasingly interested not merely in whether an idea sounded true—but in what happened when someone lived as though it were. The search was not orderly. It included false starts, contradictions, misplaced trust, desperate attempts to make damaged systems work, and seasons when every new insight seemed to expose ten more questions. At times, searching felt less like progress than the repeated dismantling of whatever certainty I had managed to construct. Still, something in me refused to quit, even when suicide might have felt like relief. Part of that persistence came from pain and fear: pain that made stasis unbearable, and a mixture of primal and inherited fears about what awaited me if I failed to keep moving forward. I needed to understand what had happened to me and why. Yet something mysterious and elusive kept any real understanding tantalizingly—and torturously—beyond reach, not for months or even years, but across long decades. Can you appreciate the sheer weight of carrying a burden like this for that long? Sixty years! The drudgery and despair that filled those years cannot be adequately described. When we witness a TV or movie drama, no matter how distressing it may be, we know there will be resolution of some kind within a few hours. For nearly six decades I had no such hope. I carried the scars and the scapegoating of something that remained intangible, even while it was fully disabling. And my travail, while perhaps uncommon, is not so exceptional. Some reading this will recognize it as similar to their own (and for them, especially, it is shared.) So as time dragged on I limped on, driven by pain, fear, unrequited longing, and immense, crushing isolation. But pain and longing alone do not sustain a lifelong search. Beneath them was something else—something both intrinsic and inherited: a purity and passion from somewhere deep within me that compelled me to persevere, joined to a stubborn endurance that felt written into my DNA. Together, they forged a conviction that existence could not be reduced to fear, shame, performance, and survival. Somewhere beneath everything I had been taught to distrust, I still sensed the possibility of a life that was more integrated, more truthful, more compassionate—and more fully my own. I was not looking for another authority to replace the old ones. I was trying to learn how to recognize truth without surrendering my judgment to whoever claimed to possess it. That required more than gathering information. It required learning to observe, question, test, reconsider, and remain open without becoming indiscriminate. This long search became the foundation from which much of this Museum eventually emerged. Kingdom of Heaven preserves my struggle with inherited faith, deconstruction, disability, and the pursuit of a more honest understanding of spiritual life. The Candi Addams Experiment explores another dimension of that same search through identity, gender, sexuality, openness, and the difficult pursuit of balance. Chat-Lab preserves many of the habits, disciplines, questions, and methods of inquiry that gradually developed along the way, while PYGMO quietly reminds me that curiosity, imagination, and childlike wonder survived even when certainty did not. Over time, the search itself began changing me. Curiosity weakened the grip of certainty. Exposure complicated inherited judgments. Honest questions opened doors that obedience had kept closed. I began recovering a voice I had once learned to silence—not because I had reached the end of the search, but because I had finally permitted myself to participate in it. The exhibits preserve the evidence of that journey. They are not trophies celebrating answers finally found. They are artifacts left behind by a life that kept searching long enough to become capable of discerning elements of truth. Then something happened that transformed the search from an attempt to understand my life into an entirely different experience of being alive.
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IF YOU READ MORE, learn how for nearly six decades, I carried questions that refused to die and burdens I could neither explain nor escape. Still, something within me refused to stop searching.
What Changed EVERYTHING?
After sixty years of searching for what was wrong with me, I was finally given the truth that overturned the central explanation of my life. The revelation did not erase the damage. It exposed the false premise beneath it. What changed everything was not simply learning a previously undisclosed fact. It was discovering that the story I had used to define myself for most of my life was fundamentally wrong. For decades, I had searched beneath every failure, every rupture, every aberrant behavior, every season of depression and despair for the defect that would finally explain me. The assumption was always the same: somewhere at the center of all this, I had failed. I had sinned. I was the problem. Then came the revelation that had been withheld. Its force was immediate and immense. What I had carried as personal guilt was suddenly recast. What I had interpreted as evidence of some hidden corruption within me was revealed as the consequence of something I had never been permitted to understand. The burden had been real. The damage had been real. But the accusation at the center of my identity was false. I had spent a lifetime trying to repent of a crime I had not committed. That realization did not produce a simple or sentimental freedom. It brought grief, anger, moral clarity, compassion, and devastation all at once. The truth exposed not only what had been withheld, but the human cost of withholding it. I could understand how fear, illness, shame, and limited inner resources might lead people to conceal what they did not know how to face…at my expense. I could forgive without pretending the betrayal was harmless. Compassion did not require excuse. Understanding did not make the wrong less wrong. So a nagging question will always remain: How might the truth have transformed me had it arrived decades earlier? Years of suffering had forced me, however imperfectly, to keep moving. Recovery had required me to accept increasing responsibility for my own life. I had learned to endure, to question, to seek help, to confront my behavior, and to remain present through truths I would once have been unable to bear. But what trajectory might my life have taken if all of that had not been necessary? If a healthier path had been opened to me in my formative years, who might I have become? We’ll never know. That life was never mine to live. The only path available to me was the one I ultimately embraced—a long, painful journey of recovery, perseverance, and increasing personal responsibility. The revelation changed everything because, by then, I had become capable of receiving it. In a single, purging shift, the organizing premise of my life collapsed. I was not absolved of every mistake I had made or every harm I had caused. But I was released from the foundational lie that I was the original cause of the wound I had spent my life carrying. The revelation did more than answer an old question. It forced me to revisit the evidence of my life—to reconsider memories, behaviors, relationships, beliefs, wounds, and judgments that had all been interpreted through the wrong story. The past itself did not change. But its meaning did. That re-reading became one of the central acts from which this Museum emerged, and is the foundation for its central exhibit: My Waking Words Experience. The BIG Mystery attempts to place the visitor inside the NULL zone that existed before the truth: the disabling darkness of living inside effects whose cause remained hidden. My Waking Words Experience begins where that darkness was ruptured. It preserves the explosive shift in consciousness, the metamorphosis that followed, and the radically different way of being alive that opened on the other side of revelation. The other exhibits carry distinct consequences of that same re-reading. PYGMO gives fuller expression to the innocence, imagination, and childlike purity that had survived beneath the damage. The Candi Addams Experiment revisits the confusion that was once interpreted primarily as illness or defect and explores what became possible through curiosity, openness, and a more honest search for balance…not merely individually but culturally and collectively. Kingdom of Heaven re-examines inherited faith, fear, disability, and deconstruction through a consciousness no longer governed by the old accusations yet still open to fruit-bearing insights and truths. We Live How We Drive and Chat-Lab preserve creative practices, disciplines, and forms of engagement that could emerge only after the life beneath the burden had begun to move more freely. These exhibits are not separate success stories arranged around a tidy recovery. They are records of what the truth changed, what it could not undo, and what might be learned from the long human cost of living without it. The question that had haunted me—What the hell is wrong with me?—could finally give way to a different one: What becomes possible when a person is no longer forced to build a life around a false accusation? That was not the end of recovery. It was the beginning of an entirely different kind of life.
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IF YOU READ MORE, learn about the moment of revelation that overturned the 60-year-old story that had defined my life and transformed how I understood everything that came before it.
What Endures to This Day?
The revelation changed everything, but it did not complete everything. Transformation was not a single moment after which the old struggles disappeared. It became a different way of meeting them. What endures to this day is not the intensity of one breakthrough, but the life that continued to grow from it: greater honesty, deeper responsibility, expanded compassion, freer creativity, and a willingness to keep testing what I believe by what it produces in the way I live. I did not become immune to fear, grief, conflict, failure, or contradiction. I became less willing to abandon myself in order to escape them. I learned to remain present without surrendering my judgment, to accept responsibility without returning to shame, and to hold compassion for others without making their choices mine to carry. The old reflexes did not vanish overnight. Some had been rehearsed for decades. But they no longer possessed the same authority. I could recognize the voices of fear, perfectionism, inherited judgment, and compulsive responsibility without automatically obeying them. That distinction changed the texture of daily life. Freedom became less about escaping every burden and more about no longer organizing my identity around one. Truth became less about possessing final answers and more about remaining honest enough to keep asking the questions…and examining the answers I found. Compassion became less about excusing harm and more about infusing harmony. Creativity changed as well. What had once functioned partly as survival, performance, or proof of worth became a freer form of expression, exploration, play, and connection. Ideas no longer had to justify—or conform to—the life I had previously been permitted to live before they were allowed to exist. And live they did. They came rushing in so fast, so wide, and so deep that I could hardly find time for anything else. Recording them while they were fresh became a constant “waking” dream, and preserving them became a purpose. That purpose—and the ongoing freedom that propels it—can be felt throughout the Museum. My Waking Words Experience is the clearest expression of the life that opened after the revelation: not merely the memory of a breakthrough, but the practices, perceptions, and altered way of being that continued to unfold from it. Embedded in the exhibit’s name is the method by which I first experienced—and still often experience—moments of profound insight and inspiration. Hypnopompia is the transitional state between sleeping and waking, and it was there that these moments of clarity first began arriving. Thus: WAKING WORDS. But My Waking Words Experience is about more than moments of clarity. It is about personal awakening. That is what I experienced, what I continue to pursue, and what I hope to help make possible for others. That is why this Museum exists: to model and foster a more awakened approach to life. Chat-Lab carries many of the disciplines that help make that way of living practical—slowing down, questioning assumptions, listening more carefully, speaking more honestly, and learning how to remain human in the presence of difference. We Live How We Drive translates the same transformation into an accessible public ethic. It asks what our ordinary habits reveal about patience, entitlement, awareness, aggression, restraint, and regard for one another. PYGMO gives enduring form to the innocence, wonder, humor, imagination, and creative freedom that survived the damage and became more fully available afterward. The Candi Addams Experiment preserves another continuing movement: the passage from fear and confusion toward curiosity, openness, balance, and a less punitive relationship with identity, sexuality, gender, and mental health. Kingdom of Heaven continues the work of examining inherited religious claims by their consequences, refusing both unquestioning allegiance and reflexive dismissal. Even The BIG Mystery endures differently now. It remains a record of the NULL zone—the disorientation and disability of living without crucial truth—but it is no longer the whole atmosphere of the life. The mystery has become something that can be entered, examined, interpreted, and shared rather than merely endured alone. None of these exhibits represents a finished person or a completed philosophy. They preserve an active process: learning, unlearning, testing, failing, recovering, creating, and returning again to the question of what helps human beings become more truthful, compassionate, responsible, and free. That process endures in me now. It also gives the Museum its continuing life. There will come a day when I am no longer physically present to explain the stories, answer the questions, or welcome a visitor into them. But the encounters need not end there. The voice, the questions, the discoveries, the warnings, the humor, the wounds, and the hard-won possibilities can remain available through what has been preserved here. A museum cannot keep a person alive. But it can keep a life in conversation. It can create a connection through which someone no longer capable of being reached or touched can still reach, touch, and offer aid. That is what I hope endures: not a monument to a fleeting life, and not an attempt at immortality, but a living body of work through which another person, in another moment, might feel accompanied, challenged, understood, or awakened to something still waiting within themselves.
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IF YOU READ MORE, I share what has endured: a life increasingly shaped by truth, compassion, creativity, responsibility, and the freedom to keep growing.
Why Share Any of It?
For many years, I assumed that if I could simply understand my own life, that would be enough. It isn't. Understanding, by itself, is incomplete. Insight that never leaves the boundaries of one life risks becoming little more than private relief. But insight that is honestly examined, thoughtfully preserved, and generously shared has the potential to become something more. It becomes an invitation. That is why this Museum exists. I am not asking visitors to believe what I believe, become who I became, or interpret their lives through mine. I am offering the evidence of one life—its damage, questions, errors, discoveries, practices, and transformations—as material they may examine for themselves. Nothing here asks for unquestioning agreement. In fact, I hope visitors will disagree with me at times. I hope they question my conclusions, test my assumptions, refine my ideas, and discover perspectives I failed to see. Truth has little to fear from honest examination, and wisdom rarely grows where curiosity is unwelcome. If this Museum accomplishes anything, I hope it helps people become better observers of their own lives. More willing to question inherited assumptions. More capable of recognizing the difference between fear and wisdom, performance and authenticity, certainty and understanding. More patient with themselves. More compassionate toward others. More awake to the possibilities that may have been waiting quietly beneath the surface all along. Every exhibit contributes something different to that invitation. The BIG Mystery reminds us that people often live under burdens whose true causes remain hidden and battle demons of which we are unaware. Kingdom of Heaven examines inherited belief with both honesty and charity. The Candi Addams Experiment explores identity without demanding ideological conformity. My Waking Words Experience invites visitors into the possibility of personal awakening. Chat-Lab offers practical disciplines for thinking, listening, and conversing more wisely. We Live How We Drive demonstrates that our ordinary habits often reveal our deepest character. PYGMO reminds us that innocence, imagination, humor, and wonder are not childish qualities to outgrow but deeply human ones to recover. And why are they offered to visitors? Because they were alive for me and in me. They were discoveries tested and proven true in the living of my own life—and therefore may hold truth for others. And if so, doesn’t that merit being preserved and shared? Together they form neither doctrine nor curriculum. They are a conversation—and, for some, a form of mentorship. A form of stewardship. Healers are mentors walking two steps ahead of those they help. One beggar tells another beggar where to find bread. Perhaps that is the deepest purpose of this Museum. Long after individual voices have fallen silent, conversations can continue. Questions can continue. Compassion can continue. Wisdom can continue to accumulate as each generation adds its own experience to what came before. A human being can still touch another human being with human things. There will come a day when I am no longer here to greet visitors, explain an exhibit, or answer a difficult question. That reality does not trouble me as much as failing to be a faithful steward of wisdom does. If these shared things continue helping even a few people think more honestly, love more purely, suffer less needlessly, or recognize possibilities they had not yet imagined, then preserving and sharing them is an act of stewardship. This Museum is not a monument to my life. It is an offering from it. If, somewhere within these exhibits, another human being feels less alone… asks a better question… discovers a forgotten strength… experiences or extends unexpected grace… or awakens to a way of being alive that honors and nourishes their unique spark… Well then, the question is answered: Why share any of it? For them.
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IF YOU READ MORE, these comments assert how the greatest insights of a life become most meaningful and useful when they are generously shared for the benefit of others.
WHAT WAKING WORDS IS NOT...
A FEW SIMPLE CLARIFICATIONS MAY HELP ELIMINATE SOME POTENTIAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS.
This Is Not “WOKE.”
“Waking” is used here in its oldest and plainest sense: becoming more awake/alert/aware to what is true in your own life—with honesty, courage, humility, and personal responsibility. It is not a political label, cultural identity, or invitation to adopt “approved” language, beliefs, or affiliations.
This Is Not a PROGRAM.
The Museum is not counseling, coaching, therapy, or a prescribed system for personal transformation. My life should never become a prescription for others. What is preserved here may help you examine your own experience, recover what is uniquely alive within you, and pursue your own path with greater clarity—but your judgment and journey remain your own.
This Is Not a MARKETPLACE.
Like other museums, WAKING WORDS: A Museum of Wisdom may eventually offer educational resources, programs, publications, or related materials as funding, support, and public interest allow. Those offerings would remain secondary to the Museum’s central purpose of providing an educational and experience-based venue for discovery: preserving and sharing ideas, experiences, and wisdom that may benefit others.
WHAT I AM NOT...
BECAUSE UNDERSTANDING A PERSON SOMETIMES BEGINS BY CLEARING AWAY THE MOTIVES AND ASSUMPTIONS THAT DO NOT BELONG TO THEM.
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I am not anything remotely like a guru—or any other kind of spiritual authority. Anyone who suggests something of that nature, or postures themselves as speaking on my behalf or claiming any form of authority does me and my efforts here a disservice.
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I am not building a movement or asking you to adopt my worldview. If anything here proves useful, test it honestly. Embrace what bears good fruit.
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I am not presenting my life as extraordinary, attempting to be the hero of this story, or hoping to be remembered. Remember YOU. Recover your own unique spark and be the Lightning Bolt the world needs you to be.
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I am not presenting myself as a victim, even though parts of my life genuinely were marked by victimization. Survival is part of my story—it's no longer part of my identity. Transcendence is.
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I am not attempting to justify my own character flaws by blaming others for the choices I've made along the way, many of which have caused others to suffer and have merited amends.
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I am not interested in perpetuating blame, shame, judgment, superiority, or the survival mechanisms they produce. I don't have an ax to grind with institutions that have produced both blessings and bruises. I try to sift for the gold embedded in all things.
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I am not trying to destroy faith—or any philosophy that genuinely helps people flourish. Nor am I reluctant to examine any belief when its fruit tells a different story than its claims.
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I am not offering easy answers. (In fact, I'm offering some hard ones that helped transform me.)
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I am not offering self-help, counseling, or a substitute for qualified professional care.
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I am not asking you to agree with me. I am inviting you to explore with me.
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I am not finished growing, learning, asking questions, making mistakes—or changing my mind. (Unless, of course, I’m no longer here. Which is why I left these treasures behind for you.)
my ambition
When asked about my dream for this undertaking…
I now answer, “I dream of being the ’Walt Disney’ of Harmony.” The harmony that begins by learning how to cultivate it within ourselves, then allowing its overflow to “infect” those we encounter in the world. My “Magic Kingdom” isn’t about entertainment but about enlightenment—and “EN-LIGHTNING-MENT!”
That ambition makes for a pretty absurd dream. But I think Walt Disney would have agreed that those are the only dreams worth having.
My dream is to “ignite & excite” the best version of each visitor—to spark their unique genius and spirit by sharing from my own rekindled spark. That is the vision behind WAKING WORDS: “A Museum of Wisdom.”
If anything you encounter within the museum's media options stirs your curiosity, challenges your thinking, or awakens something within you, the Museum is yours to explore. Thank you for allowing me the honor of sharing this dream with you.