On an airplane to Brazil after my graduation I was in an intense concentrative practice on the breath — in hindsight, I was trying very diligently to avoid the desperate feeling of being lost — when everything began to feel two-dimensional.

I stepped off the plane and realized everyone around me felt like a video game character. Even my own body moving through space felt like 3D avatar. It all seemed fake, distant, and fading. I was light headed and everything seemed further and further away. My friend Nick called, and I recall feeling his voice as an anchor, without which I’d surely drift away entirely.

—

We can argue about the simulation hypothesis for the rest of eternity, but I have found that, at its core, whether I live in a simulation isn’t really the problem.

The problem is being disconnected from the world. Subtle or obvious disembodiment.

One of the clearest markers of dissociation is that everything starts to feel virtualized, and the waft of blooming flowers seems flat, or the purple painted on her fingernails feels faded.

It does not help that modern work and school is oriented around manipulating representations, rather than smelling touching licking crawling.

You know what helps? Dancing.

I like Afro-Brazilian folk.

Turn the volume up and dance!

Dance weird enough to embarrass yourself. Dance so you’re shaking.

Take off your clothes if you feel like it.

Dance with hands on the ground, shiver, bounce, jolt.

Sounds are great too — laughing groaning hissing.

Try this for ten minutes.

Then come back and notice the difference. What does your body sense? How real does the room feel?

I give myself 25 minutes to tell you about 2025.

Fragments

My lecture: what might our minds be, if not computers? [for 6.s094]

My lecture: the set point theory of chronic illness

Away from biosecurity, onto the cybernetics of pain

• ‘Root cause’ is not a language we use in cybernetics. “Treatment” is ill-defined for the therapeutic process. Ignores the role of interaction with therapist and other contextual factors. Ontology is off.

The internal direction: pushing and pushing, hitting a wall.

I am invited to visit the sages

I venture to Athens to meet a sage

I venture to Ann Arbor to meet two sages

I venture to Woodstock to meet a sage

I venture to Valencia to meet a sage

I venture to Los Angeles to meet two sages

Moving! Goodbye Cambridge, hello San Francisco!

How can body be gateway to love?

July 16th, 2025

Gesar practice. Notice a rising energy and the tendency to see myself as above. When this is seen, it is sealed and I can relax into care. Light dissociation when rising above. Lifting out of pelvis. The Good King Norbu Dradül Gesar rests on and of the earth; he does what needs to be done.

We drink our piss

Great fear, at the quaker friends meeting house in ann arbor. Petrified at being seen wholly as I am.

Doing, Having, Knowing, Seeing, Being

The internal direction: slowing slowing, pausing, waiting to be pulled.

What a beautiful life this is.

Addendum: Quest for 2026

Since my body broke down in grad school, I have been obsessed with chronic pain and illness (and how widely misunderstood it is). My quest now involves:

• coaching people out of the body breakdown cycle

• develop better scientific accounts of chronic illness

  • (right now: qualitative interviews with people who recovered from pain through reading John Sarno’s book)

If any of this quest resonates, would love to hear from you.

“It really hurts”

My finger drips with blood.

“God… do you want me to do it for you?”
“Sure, I guess”

Before I can say anything more, she stabs the needle into my finger again. And again. And again.

More rivulets of blood along my pinky, my eyes tear up, and she squeezes my finger over the test tube.

“OK, you can go clean up.”

The first human genome took $2.3 billion dollars and 13 years to sequence.

Today, you can use an Oxford Nanopore ($1000 dollars) to sequence whatever DNA you want in less than 48 hours. Or so their marketing materials say.

Right now, if you want to sequence your own DNA, you have to send blood or a cheek swab to some shady third party that, for all I know, gives my DNA away on a USB stick with 10,000 other peoples’ DNA in a dark corner of Shenzhen.

Some friends and I became curious: How hard would it be for us to buy a Nanopore and sequence DNA, using makeshift equipment in our bedroom?

How do you sequence DNA?

The goal is to get from 10ml of blood to a string of 3 billion A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s.

The rough steps are pretty straightforward:

1. Get blood sample

2. Extract human DNA from all the other goop

3. Run the DNA through small electric holes so the Nanopore can read individual base pairs of each DNA fragment

Before getting into the equipment, please allow me a quick technical digression into how DNA sequencing has changed over the years:

A brief history of sequencing

A summary of the Three Ages of DNA Sequencing from this excellent paper.

1. Sanger Era: Very Slow (1960-2003)

Sanger et al. figured out you could stop DNA polymerase at specific base pairs by feeding it defective nucleotides. Add a bunch of defective nucleotides and this happens more or less at random, resulting in a bunch of DNA strands at different lengths.

Add an electric current across a gel and the smaller bits will separate. You can then read the bands like a barcode.

This approach took 13 years and $2.3 bn to do the human genome (~3 billion bp).

2. Illumina Era: Parallelization (2005-2010s)

‘Sequencing by synthesis’. instead of chopping up and separating each base pair through a gel lattice, we

3. Single molecule sequencing

Now we use electrical nanopores and read the individual charge of each base pair. Nothing needs to get chopped up, the processed DNA is unwound and passed through a tiny hole. each base pair like beads on a molecular string pulled through a hole

This is the approach we used.

The equipment

• Oxford Nanopore MinION starter kit ($1,000) - includes the USB sequencer, flow cell with tiny biological pores, and prep chemicals

• Zymo DNA extraction kit (free sample from their website)

• Mini centrifuge from Amazon ($50) - spins stuff fast

• lab consumables: eppendorf tubes, lancets, pipette ($50)

• Thermal cycler replacement: An electric kettle ($20) + bucket + styrofoam to float our sample tube on hot water (a new thermal cycler costs ~3k-5k).

Total cost: ~$1,100

Step 1 Take blood.

We had to collect 200 µL of blood (about ⅕ of a ml).

I made a bad mistake by buying diabetes lancets that were too small, and each prick only yielded about 10 µL. It was unsurprisingly horrible to stab my finger again and again so Cece kindly took the lancet and rapidly jabbed it into my pinky until there were multiple tiny beads we could squeeze out.

Step 2. Extract DNA

Blood itself has all this gunk in it - mostly red blood cells, which don’t even have DNA. You need to dissolve the white blood cell membranes and separate out this DNA. The Zymo kit gave us the right enzymes and a special test tube that acted as a filter when spun through a centrifuge. We followed the instructions using our thermal cycler which worked fine.

We then had to follow the Nanopore prep kit, which basically had us attach adapter molecules so the nanopore could tell what it was reading.

Step 3. Sequence using the Nanopore

We pipetted the prepared DNA into a tiny port on the MinION flow cell - a device smaller than a pencil case. We plugged the whole thing into a USB port, fired up the MinKNOW software, and watched in real-time as the software did ‘basecalling’ — as far as I can tell it feeds electrical signals into a neural net and predicts the signature as an A, T, C or G in real time.

Results

So I have to acknowledge that the results were basically useless for analysis.

We sequenced around 1 gigabase total across two runs (the first died during a hardware error). The human genome is around 3 gigabase so we got about 13% coverage. Another problem is that 75% of what we sequenced was actually human DNA - the other 25% was some form of bacterial contamination.

I wanted to look at my single nucleotide polymorphisms (eg lactose tolerance genes, breast cancer genes). To confidently call SNPs you want to sequence the same section multiple times. We had most spots sequenced zero or one times.

Another problem was our flow cell was malfunctioning from the start — only 623 out of 2048 pores were working.

Still! We sequenced a meaningful fraction of my human genome for $1100.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my dear friends Lenni, Cece, and S for conducting this experiment with me

1. Clarify the purpose (why are you running this?) and function (how is the ritual supporting this?)

   In my case, the purpose is twofold: i) emotionally connect with the people who've supported me, ii) honor the importance of Cambridge in my life

   The gathering and festive mood, comfort at initial music and food, then a space with symbol and explicit sharing of experiences/memories lead a deliberate, sincere mood.

2. Decide on a high-level structure.

   
   In accordance with the purpose, we have casual connection for the first half. Light music, fruit, question prompts support contact with each other. In the second half, we have a more formal ritual where everyone enters a different space and comes forth to offer something. I'll hand everyone a flower that they place in a circle. They offering is optional and may now be an item, a personal reflection, a song.

3. Do a light rehearsal to revisit obvious confusions.

   
   By walking into my room, imagining my eight friends behind me, I realized there would be no place to comfortably sit for half the group. So instead I've decided to have everyone leave the living room temporarily, then slowly re-enter with a flower. I also realized it makes more sense to explain the ritual before anyone gets.

I woke up feeling a curling anxiety at leaving Cambridge — my home for the last eight years. In my midsection was a grief-fear, tension folding inwards… am I really going to embark again on an open-ended journey?

The ritual itself was perfect. Wistful tenderness, welling tears. Standing there, each of us holding a flower, the space was so caring.

At the end, something in me unfurled. The grief felt honored, and a deep resolution.

To be fully free and fully feeling.
To live in the fullness of the present.
To realize the depth of my potential.
To remember what I am so fully that I never forget again.
To drop the act.
To stop fighting myself.
To live as whole goodness.
To allow my heart to break open fully and never close again.
To love as deeply as I am capable.
To live in fearless integrity.
To fall into truth, again and again.
To die gracefully. To comfort knowingly. To hold carefully. To live wondrously.
To speak from the depths my core, resonating with the entirety of my being. To know that it was peace, not truth, that I was seeking.
To manifest glory for my contribution. To keep dancing.
To learn how to cry again.
To fuck magnificently.
To be able to be forgotten.
To show myself.
To be an excellent friend, son, lover, father.
To honor my teachers by carrying forth their teachings.
To be tough as a brigand, gentle as a grandmother.
To be moved by the joy of a child in a playground.
To love, to love, to love.
To let go of letting go.
To help others. To really help others.
To know that I am and we are.

That is why I practice.