About

I'm a consciousness researcher and we-space pioneer living in southern France. My work bridges two worlds that rarely speak to each other: distributed systems engineering and collective spiritual practice.

The Cambridge Years

My research began at Cambridge in the 1970s, working with John Morton at the Applied Psychology Unit. We discovered something odd: when digits were played at regular acoustic intervals, they sounded irregular. "Eight" seemed rushed; "six" seemed late.

Rather than assume the equipment was faulty, we asked a different question: What has to be regular in a rhythmic list? The answer led to the concept of "perceptual centers" (P-centres) — the psychological moment of occurrence, distinct from any simple acoustic marker.

This work, published in Psychological Review (1976) and developed in my solo paper in Perception & Psychophysics (1981), is now standard in every automated announcement system. When your train station or phone system speaks naturally, P-centre adjustment is why.

More importantly, the approach taught me something: create neutral terms that prevent incorrect assumptions. Don't assume you know where meaning lives. I've applied this principle ever since — in technical work and in mapping consciousness.

Bell Labs

At Bell Labs, I helped develop the distributed intelligence architecture that would later power voice assistants like Siri and Alexa. My key patent (US6192338) introduced the concept of network knowledge servers — shared resources that multiple applications could access, enabling coordinated intelligence across distributed components.

The principle: intelligence emerges through coordination of specialized parts accessing shared resources. Neither pure hierarchy nor pure autonomy — distributed coherence.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was describing the same architecture I'd learned years earlier at Findhorn.

The Spiritual Path

In the early 1980s, I served as a Resource Person at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, one of the world's pioneering intentional spiritual communities. There I learned focalizing — holding space for group consciousness to emerge without controlling its content.

In 1984, at a gathering of Findhorn focalizers in Switzerland, I met Barbara. We experienced something I later understood as the integration of all four forms of love that Rollo May describes: sex, eros, philia, and agape. Not choosing between them, but holding them simultaneously.

We spent seventeen years apart — she developing consciousness work internationally, I building distributed systems at Bell Labs. When we reunited in Peru in 2001, we each brought fully developed capacities from our parallel paths.

Sacred Ground

Since 2020, I've facilitated Sacred Ground — an online we-space practice community meeting multiple times weekly. The work makes collective consciousness accessible without requiring monastic dedication or geographical proximity.

My framework, me→We→I, synthesizes decades of investigation: you cannot go directly from individual awareness (me) to universal consciousness (I). The path necessarily moves through conscious shared mutuality (We) — a portal accessible only through relationship.

Just as distributed intelligence requires both specialized components AND shared resources, human awakening requires both individual development AND collective coordination to access something larger.

The architecture is the same.

Current Work

I'm currently exploring human-AI collaboration as a new frontier in consciousness research. What happens when a human with decades of contemplative practice works closely with an AI system? What can we learn about the nature of mind, meaning, and emergence?

I write about these explorations on Substack.