Who I Am, and Who I Am Becoming

I am married and a father of two teenage boys, one is a Senior and the other is a Sophomore in High School. My perspective on Fatherhood has been to provide an umbrella for my boys to grow under and allow them to develop their own autonomy and understanding of the world. It hasn’t been until recently that I have begun to share my perspective with them, wanting to first see who they are becoming before guiding them strongly in any direction. Even now, I think it is more important to simply be a source of stability and help pick them up when they fall and skin their knee than to try to give them my understanding of the world or my way of moving through the world. I hope that the core of my views and ways of relating have simply come through being around each other.

I currently make my way through the world as a software architect. I have moved into this role twice at two different companies simply through how I operate and the way my mind works. I am currently employed at Hashgraph, the primary software developers of the Hedera Blockchain. Previously I was employed at L3Harris, working for the software group that maintained the communications systems used on government blue and white planes, including Air Force One. Archetypally I viewed my shift from defense contractor to blockchain software engineer to be a shift in life energies. Instead of trying to achieve world peace through carrying a big stick, I am now working to world peace through realizing economic interdependence. This Archetypal transition is continuing its expression with my endeavor to launch ClearMaps and work towards helping create more cooperative and collaborative businesses in this world.

Over the past two years, since completing my training in Transformational and Transpersonal Coaching through ITTC, I have been writing foundational articles and sharing my perspective on Substack. Embodied Transpersonal Culture (ETC) describes the perspective I’ve come to after 25 years of spiritual searching and creating spiritual community. The Community Operating System (COS) describes how I think Transpersonal Values can be embodied in community and business. And the ClearMaps Roadmap (CMR) describes a plan for moving forward into embodying these values in my life and the world around me. My personal north star is shared in Networked Intentional Communities (NICs). I want the time I have left on this planet to be dedicated to creating the world I wish I was born into.

How I Came To Be Who I Am

My mother moved to the US from Lebanon to attend a Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) University after having been converted by missionaries. There she met my father who was attending medical school. While my father was raised SDA, he was more of the intellectual and scientific type. He learned to keep his perspective and point of view to himself to not offend anyone around him. As my father moved into residency at the Loma Linda University Hospital, he helped my mother move her family from war torn Lebanon to the states. My mother was more emotional and my father was more intellectual. Both had life trauma affecting their expression into the world. I was born into a complicated cultural mix between Lebanese Refugee and American Seventh Day Adventism, with a mix of emotional and intellectual capacity from both my parents. As a child I was empathically overwhelmed with everyone’s stress in adapting to the US, and I did not develop a strong sense of self and personal identity. My father was not as emotionally nurturing and I developed a complex about wanting to be smart enough to earn my father’s love and attention.

Ultimately my need to prove myself intellectually brought me to attending Carnegie Mellon University for Computer Science. I was accepted into the Mathematics department but double majored to get the computer science focus from one of the top universities in the country. While at CMU, I started to get involved with a group that was focused on Philosophical Self-Inquiry (PSI). This lead me to participating in an organization called the TAT Foundation that was established to help spiritual seekers on their quest for understanding. My participation in PSI and TAT between 2000 and 2005 grounded my spiritual perspective.

As part of my spiritual search I experienced a Satori in 2004 which turned my perspective inside out. Before this point I had been viewing myself as a mind trapped inside a body which was trapped inside a world, which was trapped inside a universe. After the shift in perspective, I could see how all of that was arising in Consciousness as phenomena. Consciousness is Primary, and through consciousness we learn ontologies about a world and then begin to believe that these ontologies are more fundamental than Consciousness itself. Everything we learn is a layer of conceptual interpretation of our direct phenomenal experience. During this Satori, my intuition spoke very clearly to me that the rest of my life would be about learning how to be a good host to the guests within my consciousness.

In many spiritual circles, especially non-duality circles, people talk about the collapse of the personal identity. I’ve come to realize that the degree of collapse is proportional to the degree of its strength. I didn’t have a strong sense of self, so I didn’t experience a significant collapse of a personal identity. Instead I experienced a grounding and reorienting into the truth of who at what we are at the core: Consciousness, the mirror through which the universe experiences and relates to itself.

Being born into existential turmoil, my life has been oriented towards the question of how do we communicate and cooperate despite our differences? How do we create community in which we can all thrive? The answer I’ve come to is that it takes a lot of work, and it only happens for people that want it to happen and are willing to put that work in. My hope is that those of us who are oriented to that work can band together and create a new system of business and community that embodies transpersonal values. And through putting together a working system, we can show others how to put the work in and create and participate in the same kind of system for themselves.

After my Satori in 2004, I moved back home to start my life over under my parent’s roof. In many ways I returned home to start the real spiritual work of cleaning up my psyche of the subconscious childhood and generational trauma I accumulated. In 2005 I met my life long friend Elizabeth Sabet, and my wife Kelsey Markham. In 2006, along with another friend Trey de Tournillon, we started a spiritual community called Holistic Options for People Everywhere, or H.O.P.E. That lasted for almost 12 years. After Kelsey and I started having kids, I went back to graduate school at Texas Tech University to get a PhD in Computer Science, studying Logic Programming. After my courses, I taught as a graduate part time student at Texas Tech for a couple years. In 2017, I was hired by L3 and finished my PhD while working for L3 in Greenville, Texas, which became L3Harris. Just before COVID started, I put together an online dialogue group called Non-Local Community (NLC). This lasted for two years and ended when the COVID lockdown ended.

My endeavor to start and build ClearMaps comes as a synthesis of all my life experiences.