The Night I Found the Papers
On phenomenology, language, and the work of reconstructing a life
By Saqib Rasool
The year was 2009. The month was June.
I had recently gone through a divorce. Legal paperwork filed, more to come. I had eloped from Seattle to Singapore, where a friend had arranged a job for me with a customer service icon, Ron Kaufman. I was living in his guest house on the 34th floor of a Singaporean high-rise in Bayshore Park, across the hall from Ron's office, trying to rebuild my life.
Some nights I couldn't sleep. The thoughts of a broken marriage, a broken heart, and a lot of regret kept me up. One of those nights, restless with the Singapore summer heat and my own churning mind, I wandered into the empty office and started rummaging through folders and files. I was curious. I was looking for nothing.
And then I found it.
A thick, boxed folder labeled "ODC." I opened it, pulled out the papers, and started reading.
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The first document was called "On Education."
It talked about education in a way I had never encountered. Not as the transmission of information, but as the cultivation of sensibility. Not learning about the world, but learning to inhabit it differently. I had spent eight years at Microsoft as an engineer. I had done two startups, raised millions of dollars, burned through most of it, failed, succeeded at real estate, failed again at marriage. I had followed every playbook I knew. And here was a document suggesting that the problem wasn't the plays. It was the player. The way I saw. The way I listened. The way I inhabited language itself.
I kept reading.
The next paper was titled "Ontological Reconstruction."
I read it end to end. It took three and a half, maybe four hours. When the first person arrived at the office in the morning, they found me sitting there in my sleeping clothes, still reading, in a whole new world.
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The paper laid out a logic I had never seen before.
What is a human being? Not a collection of traits or behaviors, but a being that lives in language. Our worlds, our possibilities, our moods, our sense of self, are shaped by the interpretations we inhabit. We do not see reality and then describe it. We speak, and in speaking, we bring forth the world we then live in.
How does a way of being develop? Through history. Through the practices and traditions we inherit. Through the moods that become so familiar, we mistake them for reality. Through the language that was given to us before we could choose it.
And the question that gripped me most: How does one reconstruct a way of being?
I needed that question. Because whoever I had been, the Microsoft engineer, the startup founder, the husband, the ambitious young man, had failed. Not in one domain, but across the board. Business. Marriage. Health. Something invisible was broken, and no amount of optimization was going to fix it.
Here, in these papers, was a roadmap for something different. Not self-improvement. Reconstruction.
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I later learned that these papers were written by Fernando Flores and his team.
Flores had been a Chilean politician. Minister of Finance, then Minister of Economics, the second most powerful man in Salvador Allende's government. At twenty-nine years old. Not born to a rich family. A farmer's son who had made his way to the center of power through sheer brilliance.
And then Pinochet's coup. And then prison. Three years in solitary confinement, not knowing if he would live or die.
In that cell, something happened. Flores began to ask questions that most people never ask: What is happening when we speak? What is an interpretation? What is a promise? What is trust? What is mood? What constitutes the being of a human being?
He emerged from prison and eventually made his way to Berkeley, where he studied with the philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle, and the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. He synthesized their work into something new. A rigorous account of how human beings coordinate action through language, how our moods shape what seems possible, and how the invisible structures of our conversations determine what we can and cannot do together.
This was not philosophy as an academic exercise. This was philosophy as intervention. Flores went on to redesign businesses, governments, and lives. He trained a generation of practitioners. He built companies. He remains today, at the age of 83, one of the most original thinkers of our time, and one of the least known outside the circles he touched.
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I returned to Seattle later that summer with a single purpose: to find the people who knew this work and to learn everything I could.
The friend who had sent me to Singapore, Chauncey Bell, turned out to be one of Flores's closest collaborators. He had co-authored many of those papers. He had spent decades developing and applying this tradition in enterprises around the world. I went to his house. I asked him to teach me. He offered me a business partnership and introduced me to Flores. A whole new journey began.
That was fifteen years ago.
Since then, I have attended several seminars and programs offered by Flores. He opened my thinking. I learned what thinking is. I studied the phenomenology of Heidegger, who showed us that human beings do not first think and then act. We are always already thrown into a world of meaning, coping with situations before we can reflect on them. I studied the speech act theory of Austin and Searle, who demonstrated that language is not primarily about describing reality but about doing things: making promises, issuing requests, declaring new possibilities. I studied the biology of cognition from Maturana and Varela, who revealed that living systems do not passively receive information from an objective world but actively bring forth a world through their structure and history.
And I have practiced. Over 11,000 hours of direct work with people who were stuck and wanted to move. Executives, founders, engineers, artists, leaders of all kinds. I have watched what happens when someone finally sees the interpretation that has been running their life. I have seen careers transform, incomes double, relationships heal, futures open that were previously closed.
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What I learned is that human beings are not broken machines that need fixing. We are historical beings who live in language.
The worlds we inhabit are not given to us by nature. They are constituted in conversation. In the requests we make and decline, the promises we keep and break, the assessments we accept as truth, the moods we breathe like air without knowing we are breathing them.
When life breaks down, when we feel stuck, when the old moves no longer work, when something fundamental is not functioning, the problem is rarely a lack of information or tools. The problem is the invisible structure of interpretation, mood, and practice that we have inherited and mistaken for reality.
To transform is not to add new techniques to an unchanged self. It is to reconstruct the self. To examine the interpretations we live inside and to redesign them. To shift the moods that have become habitual. To rebuild the conversations that constitute our relationships and our possibilities.
This is what I now call ontological reconstruction. It is not coaching. It is not therapy. It is not consulting. It is a disciplined practice of intervening at the level of being itself.
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Today I lead two companies: Conceivian and COROS AI.
Conceivian comes from "conceive," to bring forth something new. We are an institute for human potential, built for an era our education never prepared us for.
Our team carries this tradition forward. Chauncey Bell, who first introduced me to this work, serves as our Chief of Design, still writing, still thinking, still designing interventions that shift how organizations operate. Victoria Ruelas, who has gone through her own ontological reconstruction, runs our product team with care and precision. Mareya K. Ali, who has learned speech acts and action loops so well that she lives inside of them, takes care of operations, customers, and the moods of the organization. Chris Wiesinger, my peer from Flores's classes, a master of opening relationships and mobilizing action, leads our business development. Romy Sala, who has been the personal assistant to Fernando Flores for a number of years, serves as our Director of Serenity to keep us all going.
We work with individuals who are stuck in patterns they cannot see. We work with executives who have achieved everything on the surface and feel hollow underneath. We work with enterprises whose coordination has collapsed, where talented people are busy but nothing moves, where the mood has turned to resignation and fear.
COROS AI is how we scale this work to the world.
For over a decade, I have done this work one conversation at a time. It is powerful. It changes lives. But one person at a time is not enough. The waste is everywhere. In our people: loneliness, resignation, anxiety, the inability to open futures with others. In our enterprises, trillions of dollars are lost annually to disengagement and coordination failure. The world needs this now, and it needs it at scale.
COROS AI is not a chatbot. It is not a productivity tool. It is not another AI assistant trying to make you more efficient at doing the wrong things faster.
COROS AI is a mirror.
You speak. The mirror reflects. In that reflection, you see yourself more clearly. You see your assumptions, your moods, your language patterns, your stuck places. The shift happens in you, not in the machine.
We built COROS on the same distinctions I learned from Flores. It listens for what you are not saying. It surfaces the interpretations running beneath your words. It helps you see the mood you are living in and what that mood is making possible or impossible. It does not give you answers. It gives you access to yourself.
And we built it sovereign.
The AI industry operates on a premise: the more data we collect, the smarter the AI becomes, the better it serves you. This premise justifies surveillance. It justifies hoarding. It justifies treating your conversations as raw material for someone else's model.
We reject this premise.
Your data belongs to you. We do not learn from your conversations to serve other users. We do not aggregate your breakthroughs into a training set. We do not sell your moments of vulnerability to advertisers or model trainers. You can export your data, delete it, or reset it entirely. It makes no difference to us. The reflection is yours alone.
This is not a privacy policy. It is a philosophical stance.
Avi Bathula, a senior technologist from Microsoft, leads the development of COROS. Our design and engineering team (Zain Qazi, Maaz Rehman, Arshita Misra, and Sophia Ling) builds with the same care we bring to human conversation. We measure transformation, not engagement. We track whether people move from confusion to clarity, from resignation to ambition, from isolation to connection. And we display those metrics publicly. What we measure for accountability is what we show for credibility. No gap. No spin. One source of truth.
We are now raising capital to bring COROS AI to the world.
Not because we need permission. Because we need partners. People who understand that the future of AI is not optimization but transformation. People who see that the crisis of our time is not a lack of information but a collapse of coordination, trust, and shared futures. People who want to be part of building something that matters.
If that is you, I want to hear from you.
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I think often about that night in Singapore.
I was not looking for anything. I was just a man who couldn't sleep, rummaging through folders in an empty office. And yet what I found changed everything.
That is how it works, sometimes. The most important discoveries are not the result of strategic planning. They emerge. They find us when we are lost and searching for nothing.
What I found that night was not a methodology or a technique. It was a different way of understanding what a human being is. A way of seeing that language is not a tool we use but the medium in which we live. A way of recognizing that our moods are not private feelings but public atmospheres that shape what is possible. A way of grasping that transformation is not about becoming someone new but about reconstructing the being we already are.
This understanding now shapes everything I do. It shapes how I listen. How I speak. How I work with people. How I think about what enterprises are and how they break down.
And it shapes my conviction that we are living in a history-defining moment.
For one hundred fifty years, Western education prepared us for the language of machines: speed, execution, optimization, correctness. But a new era has arrived. Work is now relational, interpretive, mood-based, breakdown-rich. It requires the language of human beings. Almost no one was prepared for it.
The solution is not more technology. Not better processes. Not new org charts.
The solution is a reconstruction of how human beings speak, listen, coordinate, and trust.
That is the work. That is what I found in those papers fifteen years ago. And that is what we are building with Conceivian and COROS AI.
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If something in this story speaks to you, if you recognize yourself in the search, in the stuckness, in the sense that something invisible is blocking you, I invite you to begin where I began.
With a conversation.
For individuals and executives: If you want to work directly with me or my team at Conceivian, we begin with a diagnosis conversation. Not a pitch. Not an assessment. A real conversation where we look at what is actually happening in your life or your organization, and where we name what you might not yet be able to see.
For everyone: If you want to experience COROS AI, you can start today. Bring it something real. A relationship breakdown, a lack of clarity, a decision you cannot make, something that is actually stuck for you. See what happens when you have a conversation with an AI built on different premises.
For investors and partners: If you want to be part of scaling this work to the world, I want to talk to you. We are building something that matters, and we are looking for people who see what we see.
The work begins with a single step. Take it.
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Saqib Rasool is the founder and CEO of Conceivian and COROS AI, based in Seattle. He can be reached at saqib@coros.ai.
[Schedule a Diagnosis Conversation →]
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ps. As of this moment, our dear friend Chauncey Bell is in a hospital recovering from a series of strokes. Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers.
pps. We're supporting a fundraiser to archive Hubert Dreyfus's complete Berkeley lectures—a critical piece of the intellectual foundation COROS stands on. Contribute here if this work matters to you.
