The books collected here represent something that I would hesitate to call a body of work in any organized sense — more accurately, they are a record of one person's sustained attempt to understand what the teachings actually require, and to write honestly about the distance between understanding that and living it. The trajectory runs from Renaissance philosophy through Western esoteric practice to Vajrayana Buddhism, not because that is a coherent curriculum anyone would design, but because that is what the seeking actually looked like. A Harvard formation in Medieval Studies, two decades hosting a podcast on Western esotericism, Masonic initiation, and eventually discipleship under a Vajrayana master — these are less a list of credentials than an account of how someone arrives, by a roundabout route, at the place where the real work begins. The books are what happened along the way: an attempt to bring those teachings into honest contact with the specific confusions they are meant to address, using myself as the exemplar because this experiment is being conducted with me as the subject.
What I notice, looking back at these books, is that each one was an attempt to resolve something I had not yet resolved — which is probably not the most reassuring description of a body of work, but it is the honest one. The scholarship was never separate from the personal stakes. I wrote about Pico della Mirandola because the question he was asking — whether the great traditions are really describing the same territory in different languages — was the question I was living inside. Every book since has been a continuation of that same question, at increasing personal cost.
Celestial Intelligences
Celestial Intelligences was the beginning of what I can only describe, in retrospect, as a project I did not know I was undertaking. Through Pico's attempt to read Greek, Hebraic, Islamic, and Christian mystical currents as variant grammars of a single spiritual language, I was working out something I believed but could not yet fully defend: that the impulse to syncretize is not a modern confusion or a failure of rigor, but an ancient and serious intellectual instinct. The book established the question. Everything after has been an attempt to answer it more honestly.
PRONAOS
PRONAOS is where the scholar had to admit he was also a practitioner. A comparative study of the Vajrayana preliminary practices alongside their structural analogues in the Western esoteric tradition, it was the first book that required me to have actually done what I was describing. Pico attempted the syncretism at the level of Renaissance philosophy. I was attempting it at the level of practice — asking not only whether the traditions describe similar terrain but whether their methods produce recognizably similar results in a single person navigating both. I believed the answer was yes. Writing the book was the attempt to demonstrate rather than merely argue that.
A Revelation of Wonderment
A Revelation of Wonderment remains the book I am most uncertain how to speak about, because its subject resists the kind of description that would make it sound like what it is. The Dzogchen Nine Spheres teaching — the understanding that reality is openness-emptiness-nothingness and brightness, that the Original Situation is already present beneath the accumulations of confusion — cannot be conveyed by analysis alone. The book was an attempt to orient rather than explain, which is a different kind of writing and a more exposed one. Whether it succeeded is not for me to say. What I can say is that it pointed toward something I have encountered from the inside, and that pointing was the only honest thing I knew how to do with the subject.
Entangled in Sunlight
Entangled in Sunlight was the book I had been avoiding. Autobiographical in form, it made the person behind the scholarship the explicit subject — not because I wanted to write about myself, but because the argument I had been making across the preceding books eventually required evidence. If genuine transformation demands not only knowledge but practice, not only seeking but surrender, then at some point the author has to show his hand. The autobiography was the hand.
Peregrine: Crossing Spiritual Boundaries to Find a New Home
Peregrine takes the syncretic conviction that has run beneath everything I have written and attempts to defend it directly, as an argument rather than an implication. The essay makes the case that the perceived barriers between Eastern and Western spiritual paths are not genuine spiritual or cultural realities but projections of a particular kind of nihilism — and it does so through historical precedent, textual scholarship, and the particular confidence that comes from having crossed those borders yourself and found something on the other side. The reading of Thomas Vaughan's alchemical writings against the framework of tummo practice is, I think, genuinely original — and it could only have been written by someone who knows the practice from the inside. That is not a boast. It is a description of the only position from which that argument is available.
The Silent Call of the Heart
The Silent Call of the Heart is the most exposed thing I have written. It is a confession in the oldest sense — not a disclosure of wrongdoing but an account of what a sincere encounter with the Divine has actually cost and produced in one specific life: the spiritual bypassing, the years of esoteric seeking in books that kept me just nourished enough to remain lost, the practice that generated extraordinary states that dissolved the moment ordinary life reasserted itself, the wound running the show beneath the spiritual ambition. All of it named as plainly as I could manage.
The book closes with a Dzogchen teaching story from my teacher, Traktung Rinpoche, which places that personal confession inside its cosmological home: the child of luminosity wandering in endarkenment, hearing only faint strains of the Mother's call, until suffering and longing and grace bring him close enough to hear. I did not plan that structure. It was simply what the material required.
The Arc
Taken together, these books move from scholarship about spiritual experience to testimony of it — from knowing about to knowing through. I am not certain that arc is complete. I am not certain it can be. But I am more interested in that uncertainty than I am in the appearance of having resolved it, and I think that orientation — more than any credential or accomplishment — is what makes these books what they are.
