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Beryll 28, PSG at 7yrs (Schooling P&P), FEI # 106KM35 Sold to Olympic Gold Medalist Hubertus Schmidt
David L. Collins, originator of Veritas Opportunus, is a Grand Prix–level dressage rider and trainer, researcher, and author of books and articles on classical dressage and perception, with a background in physics and mathematics. His work explores how humans experience time, movement, and meaning at the intersection of biology and physics, informed by high-performance embodied practice, formal scientific training, and the practical discipline of building and maintaining structures—both conceptual and physical—including his own barn. Across riding, research, and construction, Collins’s work reflects a consistent focus on continuity, integration, and the lived construction of the present moment.
Collins’s equestrian career includes competing at Grand Prix, with a 10th-place finish at Grand Prix in an Olympic screening trial in Florida. He also trained and developed many upper-level horses. Among these was Beryll 28, purchased by Collins at age 4. Beryll became an international Grand Prix horse after receiving his basic training through Intermediate I. Beryll also started piaffe and the fundamentals of passage in the United States under Collins. Beryl 28 later achieved top placings at CDI3* and CDI4* competitions in Europe and Mexico, including performances under Olympic gold medalist Hubertus Schmidt. According to FEI records, Beryll 28 (FEI# 106KM35) is the highest-placing Grand Prix horse in international dressage to have received his foundational training in the United States. Decades in classical dressage—where timing, balance, and feel unfold across a continuous present rather than isolated instants—directly inform Collins’s research.
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That same principle runs through Collins’s long-term practice of Tai Chi and traditional Shaolin Kung Fu, internal martial arts in which movement, intention, and perception must remain continuous to be effective. In these disciplines, action cannot be executed at an instant; it emerges through sustained integration of posture, breath, awareness, and timing. Errors are not instantaneous failures but breakdowns in continuity—further reinforcing the experiential reality of a temporally extended “now.”
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This embodied understanding of continuity was complemented early on by full language immersion in advanced mathematics and physics during Collins’s secondary studies in Germany, where working entirely in a non-native language sharpened his sensitivity to translation, structure, and the non-instantaneous construction of meaning.
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Collins’s current work focuses on Veritas Opportunus (Latin for useful reality), a framework proposing that the present moment humans experience is not an instantaneous point, but a biologically evolved temporal integration window. The work draws on perceptual neuroscience, motion stabilization in high-performance movement, evolutionary biology, and delayed-choice experiments in quantum mechanics. It does not propose new physical laws, but explains why experienced reality is not instantaneous, even though physics can model it that way.
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That perspective is reinforced in everyday life. Collins lives and works in Pawling, New York, in the Harlem River Valley, in a house built in 1790, where continuity is not abstract but practical. Maintaining a structure that has endured for more than two centuries makes the passage of time tangible and underscores that the present is something we inhabit, interpret, and actively maintain rather than merely measure.