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Orientation 2

Naikan In Four Movements

This four-part Naikan series grew out of a course I offered at Baltimore Dharma Group in Spring 2025. While Naikan is often framed as a tool for self-reflection, I came to see it as something more relational: not a system of correction, but a practice of returning—again and again—to what holds us, what flows through us, what we leave behind, and what we remain with.
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Orientation 3

Threadwork

Here, in language, is the closest I have come to tracing the patterns I live inside — and the patterns I see others living inside, too. ...That, to me, is the heart of this offering: not to win empathy through performance, but to make coherence inhabitable — even when the pattern isn't matched. These pieces are not arguments. They do not aim to persuade. They exist to demonstrate — without explanation. To resonate — without claiming universality. To name the cost of asymmetry — without blaming the other. To hold clarity — without self-erasure.
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Orientation 4

Holding Vow Sutra: An Introduction

Introduction and Intention:  This is a sutra, but not a sutra in the traditional sense. It is not part of the Buddhist canon, nor is it offered from a seat of transmission or formal authority. It is, rather, a thread — woven from lived practice, shaped by fidelity, and rooted in a vow that did not begin with me and does not end with me.
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The Autistic Mode: A Way Of Thinking

We all have moments of deep concentration—those times when we are so absorbed in something that the world recedes. A musician practicing alone, refining a passage with exquisite focus. A philosopher turning an argument over in their mind, testing its weight from every angle. A scientist working through the layers of an equation, adjusting variables, refining the logic until it holds. In these moments, the noise of the world fades, and what remains is a kind of clarity, a steady presence of thought moving toward resolution.

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Threshold to Threadwork

Introduction: There are two doors into this work. The one below meets the moment. It is written in accessible language—for those seeking clarity about autistic experience, and especially about how it differs in rhythm, in structure, and in the invisible labor it asks of those who must translate themselves to be understood. But this isn’t the only way in. There is another door—quieter, less translated, more interior. If you're looking not just for insight, but for shape—if you’ve ever sensed that what goes unspoken is sometimes the most coherent thing there is—you may find yourself at home there.
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Musings from the Meta-Verse: Tip of the Iceberg Cosmologies

Before you begin: please take a moment, settle in, enjoy the image above—of me holding my baby daughter as a first-time dad, tune into the frequency of restful wonder. Now allow your mind to wander outward from the edges of that image: to the room, to the street outside, to the vast sky beyond the vast sky. Further—past the solar system, past the galaxy’s edge, past everything known—to the edge of the cosmos. And then…

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Woven

I never stopped making art. I just didn’t always call it that. What I made with you, my loves — in those days we shared — was the most embodied form of relational creation. Art was us — there was no interruption. Something Luu Li and and I talked about yesterday landed deeply. She said, “Wow Papa, 54 years! I'm so glad you’re starting to do art again.” And I told her — honestly — it’s never left me. But after that, I found myself thinking: when I was homeschooling Luu Li and CT, I wasn’t just not doing art — I was expressing my creativity through my life with them.
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Hard To Kill

...the American Dream, that is.
As the Foreclosed Move Out, First-Time Buyers Move In, Damian Cave, NYT 4/3/09
MIAMI — While her friends ran up credit card debt and bought show homes beyond their means, Taina Goldman saved for a down payment. She moved back in with her parents, sharing a room with her young daughter, ate in and worked two jobs.
     “I don’t live dangerously,” said Ms. Goldman, 42, a nurse. “You can’t live on ‘what if.’ ”
     Now, she is reaping the rewards. She and her daughter recently moved into a three-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch-style house, with a pool, after putting 20 percent down and persuading the seller to cover most of her closing costs. She paid $187,000 for a house that sold in July 2006 for $370,000.
     ...
     In some areas, several families have pooled enough money to pay cash for homes. There are others, like Ms. Goldman, who saved enough to afford a traditional down payment and mortgage.
     But in many cases, agents and loan officers say, first-time buyers are receiving loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration, which allow for lower credit scores and a down payment of only 3.5 percent.
     Unlike the subprime mortgages doled out a few years ago to nearly anyone who asked, F.H.A. loans include strict income requirements. Buyers must document two years of employment history with pay stubs and W-2 forms that are verified by the underwriter, and they can typically borrow only around 31 percent of their income, or 43 percent when other debt is included.
     ...
     “It’s like the best feeling,” she said, admiring the arches in her doorways. “I never thought I could own.”
     Many other buyers are equally giddy.
     Julio Cesar Memeses, 45, a construction worker who is about to close on a three-bedroom home in West Phoenix for $50,000, said he and his family were thrilled to own “a piece of the American dream.” He said they were not worried about making their mortgage payments because the price was so low.
It's possible the lessons of the last ten years of excess will last for a few more decades. But the optimism that's the basis of the American Dream necessarily leads to short memories.

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