Jeffery is a successful technologist, serial entrepreneur, scholar, author and educator. His interests and work span many fields including: leadership and management, politics, psychology, computer science, spirituality and religion, electronic media, transformation and consciousness.
He was born in Peoria, IL and raised in IL, Hong Kong and Geneva, Switzerland. A world traveler since he was a child, Jeffery has visited more countries than he can count and every continent except Antarctica.
Jeffery holds undergraduate degrees in liberal arts and applied computer studies, and graduate degrees in management and information technology. A perpetual researcher and life long learner, he's currently a graduate student studying psychology at Harvard University, and at California Institute of Integral Studies where he studies transformation and transdisciplinarity.
He is the co-editor, author, co-author, or contributor to over 20 books ranging from holistic health to information technology. The Fourth Awakening is his first collaboration on a fiction book.
In addition to books, Jeffery has written many other scholarly and non-scholarly publications, as well as been featured in audio, video, and new media. He is the executive editor of the Journal of Transformative Studies, the director of the Center for the Study of Intent, and on the advisory board of several other research organizations, such as the Center for the Study of Yoga and Health.
--Professional--
Jeffery began his career at age 13 by founding a mail order company that sold software for the, then new, Commodore 64. By age 15 he was working in television and radio production. He began freelancing college level sporting events as an engineer at age 16 and continued up through age 24, working on many well known national and international-level events. During the week, he continued his production activities which included large amounts of commercial and promotional production, as well as hundreds of newscasts.
Over the years he has continued his interests in this area. In the mid-90's he was part of a group that revolutionized the way commercials were delivered to television and radio stations, and pioneered many of the technologies that have become standard in the industry. This experience led him to realize that the future of the media was in going to be based on computer science, not traditional broadcast technology. He continued moving in this direction, eventually becoming an a recognized expert, author, and educator in the information technology field. An entrepreneur at heart, Jeffery has founded and mentored dozens of companies in areas such as of technology, real estate, and holistic health.
--Personal--
Jeffery was born into a conservative Christian family. Around age 16 his parents started heading towards divorce. The community reaction to this provoked a deep crisis of faith in him. He believed that a religion should manifest what it says in its believers, and when this didn't happen the bedrock of his world began to crumble. Jeffery spent the next ten years searching through (and immersing himself in) every major and many minor religion and spiritual system, as well as philosophical systems, looking for answers as he tried to rebuild a foundation for his life.
When he didn't find any answers, he took a step back and asked what was most important. The answer he eventually came to was 'quality of life in this moment' and he's spent his life since that time researching how to best achieve and maximize it. Jeffery wrote his first book, volume one in the now legendary Complete Guide to Reiki series, in 1993 during this quest.
--The Fourth Awakening--
In 2006 Jeffery entered a PhD program to learn a cutting edge and very difficult form of research known as transdisciplinary scholarship, the goal of which is to successfully combine knowledge from different fields and types of research. To enter the program he had to select a difficult problem to work on that would span many different academic disciplines. He chose mind/matter interaction and examined the scholarship on it across physics, engineering, biology, neuroscience, chemistry, religion and spirituality, alternative and traditional medicine, history, psychology, and other fields.
Through this research he noticed that there was a developmental continuum, the end point of which seemed to be non-symbolic consciousness. Over the years, he has been able to guide people to greater levels of synchronicity by using the model to determine where they are at, and which tools they should and should not use.
In late 2007, Jeffery was discussing his research with his longtime friend and business partner, Rod Pennington. Rod had put his daughters through school as a successful novelist and screenwriter. Jeffery suggested that they write a fiction book that detailed his research into mind/matter interaction.
Jeffery believed that many people were being led to disastrous consequences in their lives by attempting to use the wrong techniques, and that it was very important for each person to first determine where they were at on his continuum and then use only appropriate techniques for their developmental level.
After experiencing enormous personal breakthroughs based on Jeffery's research, Rod agreed to dust off his former career and collaborate on a book. At the time, Jeffery was just beginning his in-depth research into non-symbolic consciousness. As the next year passed, the book followed Jeffery's research interests and increasingly incorporated the evolution of humanity towards non-symbolic consciousness.
