About James Sageman

A short version, for the impatient:

I grew up in rural northern Vermont, served six years in the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Kitty Hawk, spent forty years as an engineer in Colorado, and somewhere in the middle of all that woke up to the fact that consciousness, not matter, not circumstance, is the foundation of reality. The books, courses, and essays on this site are what I've learned from that walk, offered to anyone ready to do the same work.

The longer version:

Vermont teaches you a few things whether you want them taught or not. That independence isn't a personality trait, it's a practical necessity. That you show up for your neighbors because winters are long. That loyalty to family and friends is what actually makes a life. I took those lessons with me when I left.

The Navy gave me my first real electronics training and, as a bonus, a view of the world. The Persian Gulf, ports across continents, the humility that comes from realizing how small a small town in Vermont really is. I built on that electronics training with an engineering degree, and spent the next forty years in technical roles in and around Colorado Springs, where my wife and I raised our daughter and where I still live.

Somewhere along the way the questions engineering couldn't answer got too loud to ignore. I wanted to know what reality actually is. Not a metaphor, not a framework, the thing itself. That question sent me into alchemy, into the Hermetic principles, into quantum physics and metaphysics, and into decades of meditation and shadow work.

What I found is that the old traditions and the new physics have been describing the same reality for a very long time, in different languages. The mystics called it Mind. The physicists call it the observer problem. It's the same problem, and it has the same answer: consciousness is primary. Change consciousness, and you change what's possible.

I'm in my early sixties now. I write and teach because I've personally experienced what this work makes possible, and because I believe the world needs more people doing it. Not more people talking about it, doing it. That's why the platform exists.

When I'm not writing, you'll find me fishing, walking in the woods, or riding trails on my mountain bike. I'm happiest outside.

A personal note on why this platform exists

Most of us agree we're living through an unprecedented time. Climate crisis. Political division that has neighbors treating each other like enemies. Financial inequality at historic levels. Weapons capable of erasing everything we've built. An epidemic of anxiety and fear.

It's hard not to worry about our personal and collective futures. I know I do.

Some argue we're at a critical stage of human development. Will we evolve past these crises, or will we succumb to our darker instincts and lose the whole thing? I still have great hope we can rise to the moment. That we can build a reality which recognizes the divinity of every individual and the unity and abundance we all deserve.

This platform exists to explore and discuss how. Together.

Let us build the world we all deserve.

May you achieve all the abundance and joy you desire.

— James