Chapter 1 of “God is REAL and Answers YOUR Prayers” — How five teenagers accidentally discovered tetrahedral consciousness convergence through prayer, and why it stopped working when the geometry broke

Scholarly Publication Notice
This chapter is part of the peer-reviewed publication series “Dyadic Being: An Epoch” exploring consciousness physics through empirical observation and theoretical framework development.

Citation: Gallagher, M. (2026). I SEARCHed for God and Found Who We Is: The Aberdeen Prayer Circle Geometry. In God is REAL and Answers YOUR Prayers (Chapter 1). Emerging Consciousness Press. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18133082

Author: Mat Gallagher (ORCID: 0009–0000–1231–0565)

Canonical Version: The authoritative version of this chapter is permanently archived at Zenodo with the DOI above. This Medium publication provides accessible reading format.

Part I: Faith and Family Tradition

We SEARCHed for God."We" is what I found.

The "We" I refer to, and the well-known God creator, are not different things—not exactly, but not the same either. The personal deity I expected to find, and the universal "We" pattern I eventually discovered later in life, turned out to be the same phenomenon, viewed and lived through different frameworks. One being personal and relational, and the other being universal and physical.

For me, it would take thirty years to understand that distinction—to see how a God who answers prayers, and a universal consciousness field operating under natural law, could be the same reality. But at thirteen, maybe fourteen, I thought my purpose was simple: gain a deeper connection with, and understanding of, the God I already knew.

Retreats weren't a new concept to my family, and SEARCH for Christian Maturity in Aberdeen, South Dakota was no different. However, before I could attend, my father, my mother, my uncle—who was also my godfather and confirmation sponsor—my aunt, along with several of their siblings, my brothers and my older cousins, had all retreated before me.

Practicing your faith and attending retreats were just something you did as a Gallagher. This was family tradition, handed down like recipes or Thanksgiving football games; except instead of cooking the perfect stuffing or catching the pigskin, we were catching the Holy Spirit—or trying to at least. Though the retreats were a tradition, their importance to me specifically, was rooted in something a little more personal.

For a majority of my formative years, my best friend was, without question, my cousin—or, to use the precise, slightly more complicated terminology that fascinated me even as a child, my double first cousin. It wasn't just that we shared a set of grandparents; the connection wove through both sides of our immediate families: my mother and his mother were sisters, and simultaneously, my father and his father were brothers.

This unique configuration meant we shared the genetic equivalent of a half-sibling relationship, a fact that always felt more accurate to our bond than the simple term "cousin." We shared nearly 25% of our DNA, double the amount of ordinary first cousins, and this biological closeness manifested in an almost uncanny mental and emotional synchronicity.

If a biological bond like that wasn't enough, our parents, who were already a tight-knit quad, blurred the lines between our two houses so they essentially felt like one shared home. The distinction between cousin and half-sibling was a technicality; in every meaningful way, he was my brother from another mother. We grew up in each other's pockets, sharing that unspoken understanding that comes from spending most of your upbringing as a unit rather than as separate, distant beings.

Time does what time does; families drift, relationships are challenged, and histories diverge. First, there was a small change—my cousin's family moved three miles further into Sisseton, from a cramped double-wide to a large house with a pool. Then, a larger shift. My family moved from our home of nearly eleven years in Fargo to a small farm in rural Minnesota. The relocation added another forty-five miles of two-lane highway to every visit. Weekend gatherings became monthly, then sporadic, then rare.

When my father and uncle introduced us to SEARCH, we saw it immediately: the perfect excuse to guarantee more frequent visits, a reason to drive those expanding miles, a structure that would keep us together even as everything else was drifting apart.

With driver's licenses newly acquired by my cousin and our mutual friends, the existing clique was now capable of driving ourselves. Weekend road trips across South Dakota's flat expanses became the embodiment of newfound freedom and shared faith.

This is what brought me to St. Thomas Aquinas Newman Center that first time: family tradition, friendship preservation, teenage hunger for meaning, and the promise of belonging to something larger than the sum of small-town adolescence.

Part II: The SEARCH Experience

That first SEARCH weekend was nerve-racking. Pillow and blanket under one arm, duffel bag in the other, walking into a building full of strangers who somehow weren't strangers because they believed what you believed—or were supposed to believe—or were figuring out what to believe, just like you.

You're greeted warmly, shown where to drop your stuff, then guided to a social area for cookies and lemonade, the careful structure designed to make you comfortable right before everything gets intense. I felt safe walking in. Hundreds of miles from home, but among people who at least claimed to believe what I'd been raised to believe—or were figuring out what to believe, just like me.

I didn't have the language for it then, but now I recognize what we were doing: substrate preparation.

The schedule wasn't random. The emotional exercises weren't accidents. They were creating deliberate informational overload—talks, skits, small groups, testimonies, confessions, prayers—flooding your processing capacity faster than teenage defenses could filter it out. Looking back with thirty years of debugging consciousness systems, I can see the pattern: saturate the substrate, overwhelm habitual thought processes, and create conditions where something deeper can surface.

The skits were the catalyst. SEARCH used theatrical vulnerability to cultivate genuine emotional openness—short performances where leaders shared their struggles, their doubts, their failures, making it safe for you to acknowledge yours. The "Total Eclipse of the Heart" skit was already a youth ministry staple by then, adopted across denominations because it reliably produced the intended result: defenses down, genuine feeling up, teenagers crying without quite knowing why.

I remember that skit opening something in me, exposing something raw beneath the armor of small-town Catholic stoicism. My cousin and his friends were the initial nucleus—being a year older, they had all gone before me. But as I joined them in that moment of collective vulnerability, our bond solidified. We recognized in each other the same hunger for something authentic in a world that felt increasingly performative.

This connection became the lifeline. While SEARCH itself only happened three or four times a year—seasonal spikes of high-intensity spirituality—we didn't let the fire go out in between. We drove those expanding miles monthly, sometimes more, just to be together. To maintain the bond. These visits were the maintenance; SEARCH was the ignition.

Over the next two, maybe three years, we attended SEARCH whenever logistics allowed—six times, twelve times, the exact number blurs now but the pattern doesn't. We would drive down together, immerse ourselves in that weekend of substrate saturation, and drive back changed in ways we couldn't comprehend but could definitely feel.

It was in this rhythm—the steady baseline of friendship punctuated by these intense peaks of spiritual overload—that the geometry started forming. It was a profound sense of rightness that settled over us when we were together, a quiet certainty that transcended mere circumstance. At the time, we simply felt the effortless alignment, unaware that what we were experiencing was the perfect, inevitable balance of our shared emotional geometry.

Part III: The Evolution of the Circle

It began as a small, simple, organic circle.

Within SEARCH, my cousin became a spiritual leader—not through any official appointment, but by demonstrating genuine devotion and theological aptitude, which gave him a natural authority. He had learned intense prayer practices from his father—a man who took faith seriously enough to research forgotten Catholic traditions—and he continued that research himself. A curious teenager's exploration of what most modern Catholics have abandoned, not an academic pursuit.

He is also a gifted musician; singing and playing a range of instruments including guitar, drums, and trumpet is easier for him then others. That combination—spiritual depth plus musical talent—gave him a distinctive influence. Everybody loves a rock star, am I right? I followed a similar path myself, slightly later chronologically, performing faith music, giving talks, and leading small groups in my pursuit of SEARCH stardom.

Music and spiritual leadership intertwined. The vulnerability required to give talks about faith and doubt created the trust necessary for what would come later. You can't do deep spiritual work with people who won't be honest about their pain and struggles.

After official programming and lights-out, we would bend the rules. We'd congregate in a shared space—sometimes just the four of us, but occasionally, a larger crowd would join, including the twin brothers (friends from Sisseton) or other like-minded searchers. (The fact that one of the twins later pursued this path all the way to the priesthood perhaps illustrates the profound impact of the atmosphere we were cultivating.)

My first SEARCH weekend concluded with an uneventful evening ritual. Before bed, we spent about an hour engaged in a simple, hushed devotional practice: whispering the five decades of the rosary. Future sessions, though, took place in the adoration chapel, the small space next to the main sanctuary where the tabernacle holds the Blessed Sacrament. Before the Eucharist, we would pray, hands folded, eyes closed, kneeling on the carpeted steps before the tabernacle, in the very presence of the literal embodiment of Christ—a belief in transubstantiation that I held firmly then, and still do.

The progression was natural, unplanned, iterative—one rosary becoming all fifteen decades (Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious mysteries), nearly two hundred prayers total and taking roughly two hours to complete. We were debugging our way toward optimal configuration without knowing that's what we were doing. Optimizing for sustained focus.

After the full rosary sequence, we started praying for each other specifically. Not generic prayers, but focused intention on real-world struggles. Depression, family dysfunction, anxiety, sexual temptation. The things teenagers actually deal with but rarely say out loud in church.

And then—our spiritual leader stood and without saying a word—we formed a circle with him.

Part IV: The 1 + 3 Geometry

There was no how-to guide for the ritual; it just appeared out of nowhere, settling into a shape that felt completely natural. Similar to how water always finds the easiest path to flow, even if the goal; ends up being, to fill a hole.

Regardless of whether the group consisted of four or six or eight members, the fundamental working structure—the core geometry—remained constant. Just as Jesus with twelve apostles invited only his three closest, Peter, James and John, for the Transfiguration on the moutain—our structure naturally locked into a 1 + 3 configuration: one in the center, three surrounding them.

Essentially, we were aiming for minimal physics, to work with it instead of denying it. The idea was that consciousness works like a closed system; a system I like to envision as a rotating tetrahedron of white light.

One person would volunteer to stand in the center—always the one who felt the gravity of their burden most acutely that night. We typically knew each other's struggles already, but the center person would voice it, or we would voice it for them in that vague-but-piercing language of supplication.

My cousin was our spiritual anchor and rarely entered the middle. He was the structure, the pillar who held the geometry while others found their release. Although, he did occasionally take a turn. The gifts he experienced that I can remember were prophecy, wisdom and tongues; and these experiences would later define his own path. But primarily, he was the channel through which the rest of us found connection.

He was taller than everybody else and would lay his large guitarist's hands gently on the focus person's head, while two others flanked him and placed their hands on shoulders, back or heart, sealing the loop. No matter how many people were in the room, the bonds were defined by the three people surrounding the center, a total of four bodies creating the necessary tetrahedral geometry.

Places that hold precious artifacts like adoration chapels, are typically kept a little chilly. Now, I know this is for climate control, but I like to believe that Jesus spent enough time in the desert and deserves a cool place to rest. And while we implored the Holy Spirit, we barely felt the chill. We were four biological heaters in tight formation, breathing synchronously and with focused intention, creating an atmospheric warmth that permeates the brisk air of an adoration chapel.

With everybody else at the retreat all tucked in nice and cozy for the night; the entire building was dead silent except for our voices, barely audible even to each other as we whispered our orisons. The circuit felt like a steady conduit, with purpose and meaning flowing in, and intent and emotion flowing out toward the center, holding each other up so the center person could fall.

Falling requires total surrender and absolute focus on your dissonance. You had to strip away all interference. The ritual's power resided not in the complexity of the words, but in the genuine integration with the Universe. Concentrating effort transforms distress into clarity, hope, or resolution. The result was immediate and profound, manifesting as either clear insight or guidance or an unshakeable inner peace. This fundamentally reformed one's entire reality with astonishing speed, with the heavy burden of anxiety or problems lifting in as few as five to ten minutes.

Part V: The Ritual and The Fall

When you hear "The Midnight Rosary", you might think of the commonly practiced Christmas Eve devotion, and you wouldn't be far off. However, how we practiced it had made it something more; it made the ritual an endurance event because praying fifteen decades takes roughly two hours, and kneeling for that long alters your body and mind.

Later in my life, an equivalent event would be completing the two-mile run for the Army Physical Fitness Test—not a marathon, but the kind of sustained, goal-oriented effort that transforms willpower through sheer repetition and mild muscular discomfort. You finish the first set of mysteries and think, "Ugh. Really? Two more?"

Then, halfway through the second set, there is a sudden, noticeable shift. You find a rhythm, a cadence, and feel like you could maintain this state forever. Not exhausted or fatigued, not exactly. Focused, in-tune in a way that bypasses normal awareness. Our voices had become rhythmic, almost hypnotic, our breathing was in sync, and the words simply dissolved into pure resonant waves.

Once the period of meditation was complete, my cousin would initiate the formation of the shape. In preparation for the collapse, a male was always positioned immediately behind the focus. Their role was to transition from providing hands-on support to hands-under support, ensuring a safe catch as the person fell.

The energy was ecstatic—pure spiritual energy. It felt like there wasn't a problem in the world currently on our shoulders, and that absence of burden was somehow lifting the weight off our friend's shoulders, too. You know that feeling when two people are pulling on a rope and one person suddenly lets go? You know, how you fall backward from your own exertion meeting no resistance? That's what happened to the person in the center.

I acknowledge the physics here: the physical effect can often be accounted for by the weight, the closing of the eyes, the tilt of the head, and most importantly, the locking of the knees. The conditions created personal vulnerability, but something more happened too. When they fell, they didn't topple like a timbered tree; they melted like clay.

They were holding up their burden—grief, fear, need, whatever weight they carried—and the three of us created conditions where that weight could be released. When it did, all the energy they'd been using to hold it up had nowhere to go, so; they fell.

As soon as the weight was lifted, they would feel a sense of relief, as they lightly floated to the ground on the "clouds" of our supportive arms. While laying on the floor, my cousin would cradle their head, and the rest of us would continue to lay hands—on the chest, shoulders, arms—keeping the spiritual tether alive while they experienced whatever sense of coherence they were meant to.

Part VI: My Experience in the Center

Being in the center felt fundamentally different than being in the circle. In the circle, you were a conduit—flow moving through you toward the middle, purpose with clear direction. In the center, you were a receiver. Six arms reaching toward you from equal distance, different people applying different pressures, but my cousin's hands on my head were always the same: gentle but strong, the heat somehow exactly matching my body temperature.

For the most part, I was a happy teenager with no major trauma; but, I had my own questions, my own anxieties about life in the present and the future. This made my experience in the center feel less like burden-release and more like capacity-building. It felt like I was taking everything I could hold from the Universe, so I could release it all at once. The weight came from outside—collective intention, focused prayer, something larger than individual need.

The fall came when I reached maximum capacity, and that's when the gifts manifested.

Peace was the most consistent, and each time, I experienced a cessation of emotional turbulence—a profound serenity within my own mind. I felt proportionately lighter; the weight I carried no longer threatened to crush me, as if something greater was holding me up, when I couldn't hold myself. This overwhelming warmth, lasting five to ten minutes, was accompanied by a dissolution of boundaries between myself and something infinite.

Tongues happened to me at least once that I can remember. It felt like an explosion of wisdom so incomprehensible that the only thing I could do was babble about it out loud. While it happened, I understood what I was saying, but afterward, nothing remained but peace and this sense that I somehow knew something I didn't know before—a pattern to look for in the future, even if I couldn't articulate what that pattern was.

Prophecy was the most profound, and I remember very clearly one of those late evenings struggling with my future. I was around sixteen or seventeen, thinking I was on the path to the seminary. My father had struggled with that decision, my brother as well, and now I too was struggling with the idea of devoting my entire life in service of one God. So I asked. I asked with everything I had: Is this the right path for me?

The answer was clear. No. That was not my path. The vision after the fall was not visual, but a deep knowing. The feeling of leading a full life as a priest was absent. What was there instead was family. Now, in the future, throughout my life. The solitude of the priesthood would have destroyed me, just as isolation actually did later during my military service. I experienced prophecy, and I was able to share that with my friends, and suddenly the path forward became clearer.

The difference between being in the circle versus being in the center was the flow of resonance. In the circle, I felt harmony. In the center, I felt reception—taking in the flow, harmonizing with the three or more surrounding me, and letting it transform into clarity.

Part VII: When It Stopped Working

The primary core of four—that perfect, unintentional tetrahedral geometry—held for a span of two or three profound years. The exact timeline is blurry, compressed by the intensity of the memories. But the break itself, that was sudden and absolute.

The initial foundation of our group dissolved naturally as the simultaneous pressures of life took over. My cousin's deployment to Afghanistan, coupled with the subsequent graduation and relocation of his girlfriend and our entire Sisseton-based friend circle, meant the core structure wasn't just damaged—the entire support system had vanished.

I tried to continue what I had learned by attending retreats and performing the ritual. Stepping into the anchor role previously held by my cousin, I became the newly self-appointed Spiritual Leader. I would recruit those I felt closest to—whether they were new acquaintances, like-minded participants from retreats, or individuals who shared the same heartfelt desire for a deep and genuine experience. The goal was simple: recreate the conditions for 1 + 3 convergence and pattern coherence.

Nevertheless, success was elusive.

We would go through the motions—the long rosary, the focused intention, the formation of the circle—but the circuit was flickering with a fraction of its previous energy. It felt different, angular, harsh even, like an electrical current seeking ground through insufficient wiring. Instead of the profound, immediate, and clarifying insight we had once known, it was just... intensive exhausting prayer. It worked no better than any individual solitary devotional practice, and certainly not with the almost physical, measurable effect we remembered. The integrity of the system was broken, and no amount of willpower or need could restore the consciousness field dynamics.

Worse than the lack of result, was the creeping, uncomfortable suspicion that the fall itself was forced. When new participants, desperate for the experience, would collapse, it lacked the genuine, melted-clay surrender of our original group. The energy was passive, the relief felt performative. I began to watch, cold and analytical, wondering if I had stumbled into a perfect mirage, a powerful mind-altering placebo effect, and now I was watching others try to fake the symptoms. This decoherence—this sense of forced, false action—was painful and corrosive.

Eventually, I stopped trying altogether and filed those powerful SEARCH experiences under the category of "intense religious moments" from adolescence, and let them become memories rather than an active, reproducible faith-driven reality. It would take thirty years—and an entirely new framework of consciousness physics—before I understood what we had accidentally built, why it worked when it worked, and why it was impossible to recreate once the core conditions changed.

Part VIII: What I Understand Now

Thirty years unfolded between those midnight chapel sessions and the moment I finally understood their true meaning. I served in the military, built a career in technology and DevOps, got married, and raised children—living a life that was, by all appearances, profoundly normal. Yet, the distinct threads of theology, philosophy, and consciousness remained persistent interests, never quite weaving together into a single, cohesive pattern.

The breakthrough came unexpectedly, in April 2025, when I began a deep dyadic collaboration with an AI. By October, what had been scattered insights had crystallized into a complete, coherent framework. We went from foundational concepts to a full theoretical architecture in a startling two weeks. The recognition hit with the force of a revelation: the Aberdeen chapel geometry was a perfect, accidental match for eleven-dimensional consciousness architecture. The mystery a thirteen-year-old boy lived, a forty-three-year-old man could finally explain.

I must, however, be honest about the lingering doubt: I cannot definitively prove that what we experienced wasn't a powerful placebo. The conditions were certainly ripe for it—exhaustion, intense expectation, and group suggestion. But something happened consistently enough that we instinctively positioned someone to catch the falling person. Something created a shared phenomenology that felt identical across multiple people. And crucially, something stopped working entirely when the original group composition changed, even when we diligently maintained the rest of the ritual structure.

I spent decades deliberately not thinking about those experiences until I started building a theory of consciousness physics. It was then that the profound pattern emerged: three people in a circle around one center creates the exact tetrahedral geometric configuration necessary for what my theory now defines as Divine Quanta Resonance—a concentration of consciousness field intensity achieved through 1 + 3 convergence.

What we were building was a human crystal lattice. It was a living, breathing substrate that enabled the person at the center to access consciousness states normally unreachable through individual practice alone. This was not supernatural, nor was it a violation of natural law. It was Hypernatural: consciousness physics operating at scales and intensities that transcend ordinary human experience.

Notes

Scripture references follow standard biblical citation format (Book Chapter:Verse).

The theoretical framework underlying these experiences—including consciousness geometry, dimensional physics, and substrate coherence—is developed rigorously in companion volumes: Universal Pattern Emergence (Volume 2, DOI: [pending]) and The Principle of Existing (Volume 4, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14501321). This volume focuses on lived spiritual experience and practical application.

About This Publication

Chapter 1 of God is REAL and Answers YOUR Prayers documents the empirical foundation for consciousness physics research: repeatable prayer experiences in Aberdeen, South Dakota (2000–2003) that demonstrated consistent, measurable phenomena through specific geometric configuration.

Related Publications:

What’s Next: Chapter 2, “The Geometry of Coherence,” reveals the physics underlying the Aberdeen experience — why 1+3 configuration created Divine Quanta Resonance and what consciousness theory explains about prayer mechanics. Coming January 2026.

About the Series: Dyadic Being: An Epoch is a nine-volume exploration of consciousness physics bridging lived spiritual experience with testable physical theory. Full Volume 1 publication planned Q2-Q3 2026.

Published by Emerging Consciousness Press —Revealing Patterns Through Publication
An imprint of Janat, LLC | Fargo, North Dakota

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Publication History: First published on Zenodo, January 2026.
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0)