Welcome to my personal page. I founded the Dharma Underground, which lead to the wetpaint version of the Dharma Overground, which lead here to this version of the DhO. I am also a site administrator.

Having gotten frustrated with the world of on-line dharma blogs that were all about dogma, hierarchy, disempowering view about how it can't be done, mindless blind faith in absurd ideals and texts that were wildly out of touch with reality, and a whole host of other absurdities, I founded this place to form a save haven for people who were into hardcore practice, real attainments, helping people out in the spirit of mutual friends, open conversations about topics related to actual practice, and the like.

My home website is http://www.interactivebuddha.com

I make the following claims to attainments:

• I am an arahat, having attained that in April, 2003.
• I have mastery of the samatha jhanas, including Pure Land One and Pure Land Two, The Watcher, and Nirodha Samapatti
• I have some experience with some other traditional attainments.
• I can access the state that this place calls No Dog.

I wrote the book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book, often abbreviated MCTB, which has influenced the practice of many members of the DhO.

I am an emergency medicine physician who practices in emergency departments in Northeast Alabama, where I live with my wife, Carol, and my cats Boris, Mavis, and Elvira (Mistress of the Dark), along with a number of relatively tame raccoons.

I give a whole lot more bio information in MCTB, so look there for more.

I have many outside interests, including green building, cooking, dancing, playing and listening to music, the writings of Jack Vance, and a good deal more. My current practice revolves around Actual Freedom.

It is my sincere hope that this place will serve to add to the available literature and support of hardcore, empowered practice and that through the collective work of a group of dedicated, skilled practitioners that meditation technology and culture will be advanced, enhanced and adapted to this post-post-modern world.

A brief disclosure of finances, in case anyone cares: renting the server space and bandwidth for the DhO costs me about $50/month from Omegabit. There are also other expenses in running this place, such as developing the PM feature (which Liferay didn't have), which cost me about $1,500 out of pocket for the programming. I also get a small royalty on MCTB, my book, which generally runs roughly $500 every 6 months. Thus, I after paying for the DhO server time and miscellaneous expenses, I just about break even, which is just fine by me.