Same Picture, Different Lens · Book One
What If
The first look through the lens — the question the whole series is named for, asked where it belongs: at the gate, on the first day.
The Author’s Portal · Showyourmap.com
Show me your map.
God would like you to read the Bible.
One house, four rooms, and a path down the middle of it. Everything here is given, not sold — the books in pieces small enough to carry, the temple open, the journal unlocked. Only one door in the house asks your name.
The Middle Path
This house is built on a middle path — not the ditch on the left, not the ditch on the right, but the surveyed line between: see the same picture whole, then take the next honest step. The author’s working rule rides over the whole road: see clearly · serve willingly · rest without guilt. Walk it in order, or step in anywhere — three of the rooms stand open, and the fourth is worth the walk.
First Station · The Books
The Library
The manuscripts, free to any traveler who asks. No book here is sold whole or held back — each one is given in pieces, a few chapters at a time, so you can carry exactly as much as the road asks. Take a piece, or take the whole book at the bottom of its card.
Open · no sign-in · downloads in piecesA note on the people in these pages: the named characters in these stories are fictional, written as case studies and companions for the road. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Where the author writes of his own family, he writes of ‘my sons or my nephew’ — their names are theirs to give, not his to publish.
The series — Same Picture, Different Lens
Five books, one picture, a new lens each time. Read them in order, or start where the light catches you.
Same Picture, Different Lens · Book Two
Beyond the Model
What the model holds, and what it cannot. The second lens is the one you pick up when the first map stops matching the ground.
Same Picture, Different Lens · Book Three
Representation
How a thing is written down changes what it can be. The longest of the five — the lens turned on the record itself.
Same Picture, Different Lens · Book Four
Refined
The lens, ground finer. The same picture again — and it is not the same picture at all.
Same Picture, Different Lens · Book Five
One More Lens
One more lens, for the road still ahead. The series closes the way it opened — with the picture unchanged and the seeing changed.
The guide & the manual
The book this house is named for, and the field manual its author works by.
A Map-Maker’s Guide
Show Me Your Map
How to draw the map of a situation — or a life — so another traveler can read it: compare, follow the differences, find where it breaks, and keep what still fits.
A Field Manual
The Shaolin System Engineer Field Manual
A Shaolin-inspired field manual: disciplined stewardship for a living system — biology, safety, governance, people, method, build, handoff. Its first law stands at the front: no node may become a throne.
Second Station · The Practice
The Temple
The practice rooms. Here live the year of days and the journal that walks beside it — the devotional in twelve monthly pieces, the companion in four quarterly pieces, so the year can be carried a season at a time.
Open · no sign-in · downloads in pieces
A Shaolin-Inspired Devotional
365 Days at the Temple Gate
A full year at the gate — positive affirmations for accurate hope, one day at a time, in weekly themes that run from The Ground to the year’s integration. Take a month, or take the whole year.
The Guided Companion
The Temple Gate Journal
The book gives you the day’s lens; this journal is where you keep the evidence. Fifty-two weeks with two companions beside you who are very good at looking — gathered here by the quarter.
Third Station · The Sky
The Emotional Journal
Where you draw your own map, one day’s sky at a time. Six environments in complementary pairs around a heart — the Gate, the Hearth, the Garden, the Bond, the Storm, and the Center where 💜 harmony sits. Your entries are written in your own browser and never uploaded; nothing about your sky is kept here. What is kept here, open to all, is the key: the glossary and the heart keys for each environment, in pieces.
Open · no sign-in · keys download in piecesThe Keys
The Heart Glossary & the Keys of the Six Environments
His code, in his words: the family order — 🤍 peace, ❤️ love, 💙 joy, 💜 harmony, because love plus joy equals harmony — the one-tap weather signals, and the key to every heart in every environment.
Harmony Compensation Tools
For the days the sky is storm. Virtual Hope Box (free, Defense Health Agency) — a pocket kit of coping tools that works even when you can’t remember that you need it:
Virtual Hope Box for iPhone Virtual Hope Box for Android
Veterans Crisis Line — call 988 and press 1 · text 838255 · chat at veteranscrisisline.net
Last Station · The Talking Room
The Forum
Every other room in this house is reading, and reading stays open. The Forum is talking — and talking needs names. So this is the one place in the portal where information sits behind a sign-in: the only locked door on the path.
What waits inside
A room where readers answer back: questions about the books and the lenses they change, waypoints reported from the road, skies compared in the Journal’s weather. Threads are kept by name so a conversation can be found again — and so a name carries the weight of its words.
No throne in the forum, either. The author reads as a traveler among travelers; the middle path runs through this room too.
Sign in to the Forum
The only sign-in in the house. Everything else is already yours.
The door is built; the key is not cut yet. Forum accounts open when this portal takes its own home at showyourmap.com — the last piece of wiring, and the author’s hand is the one that throws it. Until that day, nothing is lost: the Library, the Temple, and the Journal above are open, and they are the larger part of the house.