Ikigai on my bedside table. Sep 7 2017 Started Reading.
#### Things were getting crazy. How survival became my Ikigai "a reason for living."
Some friends had come in from out of town, bringing me a gift I’d been wanting for a while—*Ikigai* by Ken Mogi. Eight years later, Ken and I would become actual friends, which seems surreal now, but back then I was still just following his work—particularly his explorations in consciousness and artificial intelligence. The book arrived at a moment when I desperately needed grounding, (after receiving some bad news) something to remind me of deeper purpose, but I couldn’t finish it.
It was cute that my friends got me this book, Ikigai. It wasn't the correct Ikigai by Ken, but I understood the confusion and thought I would just read it anyway.
I had organized a summit—a major one. It was projected to generate substantial revenue, and I had personally invited several of my well-known friends to speak. Then I discovered my name had been removed. Erased. By the very partners I had trusted to co-steward the event. The entire thing had been hijacked.
At the same time, they’d been pushing these estate planning documents for over six months. They wanted me to list them as beneficiaries. The pressure was constant and increasingly disturbing. Something about it felt off—morbid, even—but I kept doubting my own intuition, chalking it up to paranoia.
Still, I wasn't feeling well physically, and something inside me wouldn’t let go of the unease. I started researching the supplements they'd been giving me—supplements they had strongly encouraged me to take in specific dosages. The deeper I looked, the more chilling it became. The doses they recommended weren’t just high. They were potentially fatal. Known to induce cardiac failure.
So I put *Ikigai* down. I had to.
At the time, there were also strange developments around the Royal Society (founded 2015) club—an institution I was closely tied to. Unbeknownst to me, my partners were attempting to take that over too. At first, I thought I must be imagining things. The supplements. The estate planning. The summit sabotage. The institutional subversion. It had to be some kind of overreaction on my part. Right?
Then the call came. The same friends who had brought me *Ikigai*—they sounded broken, quiet, shaken. I asked what was wrong. They said they were calling to say their final goodbyes. I asked, “What do you mean?” They said, “We heard the bad news. From your business partners. They were emotionally wrecked. Said you were very sick. That you wouldn't make it through the week.”
I told them I was fine.
But the confusion in their voices hit me like a cold wind. That was the moment the puzzle snapped together—the estate planning, the supplements, the summit theft, the call. I was being written off. They had prepped a narrative. One that didn’t include my survival.
Still unsure of my own sanity, I went to the ex-employer of one of my business partners. I laid out everything. I said, “I just need to know if this is real. Am I crazy?” They looked me in the eye and said, “Why do you think we fired him?”
I asked what they meant.
“He was caught manipulating business records. We believe he was trying to poison the owner to take over the company,” they said. And the former CIA agent who ran security for the organization confirmed it.
That was it. I locked them out of the systems. Every single one of them. Anyone tied to that network. I went straight to the FBI and filed a report. The record is there.
It was almost impossible to accept—that anyone would orchestrate something so dark, so calculated, just to seize control of a company worth only twenty or thirty million dollars.
And especially unbearable because it was all coming from the very people who had told me, more than anyone else, that they loved me.
For those who doubt, a few things should be made unmistakably clear:
- **Phone recordings** still exist—calls from people who contacted me to say their final goodbyes, believing I was dying, because that’s what they had been told by my business partners.
- **Photos of the supplements** I was given remain intact—alongside **documentation of the dosages** I was instructed to take, which independent research confirmed could induce cardiac arrest.
- **A direct statement** from the former employer who fired one of my business partners, affirming they believed he was attempting to poison the owner to seize control of the company—this was corroborated by a former CIA operative in charge of security.
- **Copies of the estate planning documents** are preserved—six months of relentless pressure to sign over my legacy to individuals who, in hindsight, seemed to be laying the groundwork for my absence.
- **FBI report** on file—official documentation that I submitted as soon as the full scope of what was unfolding became clear.
If someone can review all of that and still feel “comfortable,” fantastic. I couldn’t.
Anyone who thinks it’s paranoia is welcome to review the materials themselves. And if they still can’t see it, well, I suppose I don't need friends like that.
Because even if someone believes the conclusion is “crazy,” the *evidence itself*—the recordings, the documents, the dosages, the lies—should still provoke serious concern in any sane person.
To dismiss me wholesale is to bypass the hard facts, and if the reflex is to label me insane and walk away—just like everyone else did in the feeding frenzy to scavenge the remaining assets—then I’ll do what I’ve always done when faced with abandonment masked as judgment. I’ll continue going it alone.
Because no one stood up for me. No one tried to protect me. And while I don’t like it—while it hurts more than I let on—I’ve had to accept that my safety, my truth, and my life are mine alone to defend.
Ken’s book, *Ikigai*, was later stolen—along with many of my personal effects—after the attempt. I haven’t replaced it. Not because I don’t care to read it, but because it reminds me of that forked moment, that strange convergence of philosophy, mortality, betrayal, and survival.
I was supposed to die that week. But I didn’t.
And in the wreckage of that betrayal, *living*—in defiance, in clarity, in devotion to purpose—became my *Ikigai*: not as a philosophy, but as a visceral imperative to protect what matters, to speak what must be said, and to remain here, alive, because presence itself had become the revolution.
```note
Sep 7 2017 Started reading.
Oct 28 2017 Received Ominous Warning (Skyhouse Lounge, Austin Texas)
That response—choosing silence to *minimize group trauma*—is not a mistake. It is a deeply human, ethical impulse. A form of *protective containment*, often made by those who bear a disproportionate share of awareness. It reflects not failure, but a higher-order decision: to hold the rupture within oneself rather than detonate it across the collective psyche.
But in environments where **malignant actors** operate through charm, obfuscation, and triangulation, silence becomes *their camouflage*. And in that vacuum, they narrate. They curate the perception field. They preemptively shape the narrative so that when—or if—the truth surfaces, it appears *disruptive*, *unbalanced*, or *self-serving*. They count on the restraint of the ethical person. They count on it *not to be spoken*.
This isn’t about blame. The decision to go quiet was forged from a place of integrity. But the structural lesson is now visible: **silence protects the wrong people**, because power fills vacuums. And in human systems, those vacuums are narrative, emotional, informational.
To speak the unspeakable is violent to the status quo, but the status quo—when corrupted—is itself a kind of ambient violence. One simply chose not to amplify it. Until survival made the choice for them.
Not a mistake. A moment in the arc of awakening.
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