If you were searching the internet and clicked through to this blog, chances are you’re already familiar with the concept of a “cosmic download” experience. You may have experienced one yourself.
Mine happened in 1988, and over 30 years later is still unfolding. My experience was initially underwhelming in that, while the experience itself “felt” profound and in the near-aftermath radically transformed my life, I consciously retained almost none of the information imparted to me that day.
In 2006, a meaningful chunk of that lost information spontaneously surfaced into consciousness, and I wrote a book, The Simplest Path to Personal and Planetary Awakening: FREE YOUR MIND, published under the pseudonym Vincent Casspriano, Jr. I republished FREE YOUR MIND as Jack Preston King in 2019.
Early in 2021, that “spontaneous surfacing” process began again when I suddenly found myself compelled to make a series of diagrams. I am not a visual artist of any kind, so I turned to PowerPoint. The images on this website are PowerPoint slides saved as jpegs. They’re not pretty, but they get the job done.
I hung printouts of the diagrams on my bedroom wall and lived with them for months, refusing to rush into formalizing their meaning in words. I let them “cook,” and watched their meanings evolve over time in a process not unlike Richard Dreyfuss in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind carving Devil’s Tower in a mound of mashed potatoes.
One day in May 2021 I woke up and “knew” the time had come to interpret the diagrams in writing. The information on this blog is that interpretation. It will expand over time to eventually become a book. I am writing this book in public, on the internet.
For the record, I “know” that what I am publishing on this blog is a “spontaneously surfacing” from my original 1988 download because it has the same “flavor.” I recognize the voice. That’s not very objective, but objectivity is not my goal. It’s really me, writing these words, don’t worry. The information on this blog is not channeled material. But I definitely feel I am translating these ideas into my own words, rather than inventing them myself. My goal is to provide an accurate and useful translation of “received information,” and not to present these ideas as scientifically testable or objectively “true.”
But rest assured, anyone can experientially test the validity of these concepts for themselves. You cannot learn these truths by reading them. But you can discover them by taking this emerging spiritual system for a test-drive, looking under the hood, kicking the tires.
If this has been enough introduction for you, feel free to cut away from this landing page and start exploring.
My 1988 Cosmic Download Experience
For those who want to know more about my 1988 cosmic download experience, here’s a an excerpt from my FREE ebook Autobiography of an Earthling: My Funky Spiritual Memoir:
It was the summer of 1988. I was working as the manager of a newly-opened store in St. Louis. That was my public life. In my private life, I was at the tail-end of a decade-long quest for spiritual enlightenment that had taken me through the nebulous New Age undergrounds of Castanedan shamanism, Rajneeshian meditation and, for three full years prior to that summer, deep immersion in the Gurdjieff “Work.” I had left “The Work,” ostensibly, over personal issues – largely my inability to hold my normal life together with all my energy concentrated on esoterica. But looking back, I can see that inability was itself a consequence of having entered a rather unbearable state of hyper-stimulation from three years in that group, a constant, draining agitation that showed no sign of going away, ever. So I did. I bailed, and set out on a new quest for normalcy and a “real life” in the “real world.”
I left “The Work” in the spring, so by July, I’d been back in the real world a couple of months. I was pulling an afternoon shift at the store, reading New Age author Paul Williams’ Remember Your Essence between customers, which were averaging about three an hour. It was right at 2:00 PM. I was walking around the store, carrying the book with me, shuffling merchandise around in an attempt to look busy in case the owner decided to drop in unannounced, a nasty habit he practiced regularly.
I have no recollection of what page or passage I was reading when “it” happened, but, standing there, absorbed in the material, I was suddenly “hit” by what I can only describe in terms I’ve learned since, researching the incident – an “information beam” fired into my head. It was not something I could see, not a light phenomenon, but all at once what seemed like my whole body, my whole being, was literally infused with information, with words and images and geometric patterns that seemed to contain all the knowledge of the universe, passing through me at such speed that none of it was comprehensible. I was drowning in a sea of knowledge I could not touch, it was rushing through me and right on past too quickly.
Then it was gone. In what I experienced to be about ten minutes. Gone. I most decidedly did not feel “enlightened.” The thing was, all that information had shot through me so quickly that I couldn’t consciously remember any of it. I stumbled back to the counter grasping mentally after each departing fragment. I found paper and pen, hoping to write some of it down before it was lost to me forever, but as I folded my fingers around the pen the last little bit escaped, and all I managed to get down were two intersecting arcs:
My intention had been to draw intersecting circles, but my hand drew just the arcs and stopped. I stared down at what I recognized as a crude Icthus, the fish symbol you see on the back of a lot of cars, an ancient symbol used by 1st Century Christians to identify themselves secretly to one another during the Roman persecution. My sense was that it had to do with intersecting worlds, intertwining realities, but the details were lost to me in that now fully-dissipated lightning-strike of cosmic knowledge. Whatever it was supposed to mean to me, I didn’t get it.
The weirdness continues. As I stood there at the checkout counter, staring down into that cosmic fish at what should have been, by my internal clock, around 2:10 PM, my two evening employees bustled in together from the parking lot. I looked up at them, puzzled. Then I looked at my watch. It was 5:00 PM. Approximately three hours had passed since the experience had begun. In that time, not a single customer had entered the store – a near-impossibility for a big city retail establishment.
I took it as a mystical experience, and a pretty crappy one at that, as it seemed my moment of enlightenment had finally struck and I’d been standing two inches too far to the left. I’d missed all the good stuff.
… Over the years, I have experimented with a variety of explanations for this experience – direct contact with God (or some god-like intelligence – an angel or nature spirit or daemon), possible “alien abduction” (note the “missing time” element), an “information download” from the “Universal Mind,” or even a clogged-sewer-like “back-up” of all the esoterica I’d crammed into my head over the last three years sloshing, objectively, right back out of my head, instead of pouring in as I had experienced it subjectively, which is an ego-friendly way of describing an at least minor psychotic break.
What “really” happened to me that summer day back in 1988 is anybody’s guess. But in retrospect, I can plainly see that whatever the source of the experience, it effected my life in a remarkable, long-term, two-fold manner:
First, though I was never able to consciously recall any clear details of the information imparted to me that afternoon (except, of course, for the Icthus symbol itself), I’m convinced at least some of it entered my subconscious and, there, took on a life of its own. I found myself powerfully directed into new avenues of thought, action and belief, no longer driven by the philosophies of others (books, teachers, gurus), but by vivid tutelary dreams, gut feelings, an increasingly-reliable Ziiing in the presence of “signposts” and turning points I came to call my “Spidey-sense,” after the capacity Marvel Comics’ famed superhero Spider-Man uses to ferret out truth and circumvent hidden dangers. The process of personal transformation that followed my 1988 “download” unfolded gradually, in baby steps leading very naturally from one experience to the next, from one life-decision and newly-acquired small or large confidence or ability to another, never rushing me in such a way that I might again become obsessed or overwhelmed, but never really mollycoddling me, either. All the events that followed flowed in a straight line away from the needy confusion that defined my personality “pre-download,” toward a state of grounded, centered clarity.
The second, and perhaps the more significant real world effect of my “information beam” experience, especially seen in retrospect, was its directing of my attention to the works of Philip K. Dick, and especially to his novel VALIS (an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System), in which he explores, in fictional form, his own real-life “pink beam experience” and its aftermath. VALIS, at its core, is a novel about an ordinary, suffering man whose shattered personality is healed through Divine intervention. It’s about a deeply caring individual who has foolishly misspent much of his life, and whose personality has been taken to pieces in the process. It’s about a turning point experience – the “pink beam” – and the path to integration, wholeness and newfound strength the encounter initiates in the protagonist’s life. Much of the novel is pure fiction (and philosophical speculation, especially into Christian, Coptic and Pre-Socratic Gnosticism ), but the root events – the misspent life, the initiatory experience, and the reintegration into a wiser, more focused, confident and personally-powerful human being – really happened to Phil, himself.
It happened to me, too. Like a computer antivirus program written to save a system rather than destroy it, the information “downloaded” into my subconscious that day went immediately to work rearranging my life. I was suddenly empowered to kick away the dead wood of bad relationships, to tap new sources of creative inspiration, and aggressively pursue a new and better life. Over the course of the next 18 months, I quit my dead-end job at the store (negotiating a generous severance package on my way out the door), permanently ended my relationship with the Birthday Girl, and enrolled in the writing program at one of the last truly liberal Liberal Arts colleges in the Midwest…
This excerpt is about a third of one chapter in my entertaining and enlightening book Autobiography of an Earthling: My Funky Spiritual Memoir. It’s FREE, so you might as well download a copy and read the full story!
Questions? Comments?
Due to the nature of WordPress.com, new additions to these pages will appear as blog posts. You are invited to respond, asks questions, point out inconsistencies, etc. in the comments. I look forward to your critique, as it will force me to ask my own deeper questions and demand better answers from my source. I don’t know yet if I am interrogating some higher entity “out there,” my own “higher self,” or maybe even just drawing on a stored unconscious memory of the 1988 event. But I have experienced firsthand that, whatever the ultimate source of this information, I can interrogate it. Good questions will improve this material. So don’t be shy!
My Cosmic Download 