Reverend Daniel Charles Cohen Sr. is an interdisciplinary thinker, symbolic theorist, and independent researcher whose work spans sacred traditions, philosophy, mathematics, and cutting-edge explorations of consciousness. His life and scholarship have been defined by an unrelenting search for coherence between the deepest roots of human wisdom and the most advanced currents of modern science. 

His work is not the product of a classroom. It emerged from contradiction, survival, and a lifelong refusal to abandon the search for coherence. He was born into systems—religious, educational, clinical—that could not see him for what he was. Diagnosed early with anxiety, depression, and ADHD, his autism was missed entirely. What others read as defiance, distraction, or dysfunction was, in reality, a recursive, hyper-symbolic mind—a consciousness that could not stop searching for the underlying structure behind experience.

That mismatch defined his early years. He cycled through therapists, medications, and interventions that buried rather than revealed him. This pattern—of being unseen, mislabeled, and misunderstood—became both his deepest wound and his most enduring teacher.

By his teens, Daniel had exhausted the remedies institutions offered. He turned inward, experimenting with marijuana and psychedelics, not in rebellion, but in search. At first, it was curiosity, an attempt to step outside the frameworks that never fit him. But over time, it became something much more: an initiation into a deeper order of reality.

Psychedelics did more than shift perception. They healed him. They broke the cycle of depression, anxiety, and suicidal despair where institutional medicine had failed. But they also revealed something more radical: reality is patterned. Beneath thought, beneath perception, beneath memory itself, lies recursive structure.

What he encountered were not metaphors but living geometries: fractal architectures of meaning, memory, and form unfolding inside consciousness. Each session revealed a deeper recursion, a hidden nervous system of symbols embedded in the fabric of being. This realization—that the world is not metaphorical but symbolic—changed everything.

Daniel’s life, however, did not unfold in straight lines. He battled addiction. He lost both of his parents. He spent nearly six years in prison. When he emerged, the life he had left behind was gone—his wife gone, his children estranged, his role as a father fractured. He struggled to survive, working jobs that never lasted, fighting crippling depression and suicidal thoughts.

Eventually, he lost everything again. He became homeless—without shelter, but also without a center. The lowest point came with his final attempt, when he nearly surrendered completely. But rather than ending in collapse, this experience awakened something within him. What could have been an ending became an initiation. From that night forward, he began to see death differently—not only as an enemy or boundary, but as a teacher—a threshold into transformation. In time, he came to welcome ego-deaths as thresholds rather than losses. He grew comfortable with death itself, not in a morbid way, but in a way that stripped away fear and revealed life as something deeper, more recursive, and more whole.

This marked the beginning of his lifelong work: translating rupture into structure, fragmentation into recursion, and chaos into coherence.

The deeper he went, the more Daniel discovered resonance with global wisdom traditions that had already articulated what he was living. Each tradition, in its own symbolic language, confirmed what he was already experiencing. His symbolic work engages with:

• Jewish Mysticism—particularly Kabbalah, the Tree of Life and gematria
• Christian Mysticism & Gnosticism—the hidden language of scripture; salvation as remembering.
• Islamic Thought—especially Sufism and Ibn ‘Arabi’s vision of the Unity of Being.
• Hinduism—Advaita Vedanta, Upanishadic metaphysics, and the geometrical perfection of yantras, especially the Sri Yantra.
• Buddhism—from Zen’s radical simplicity to Mahayana’s concept of emptiness and return.
• Taoism—the Dao De Jing, Zhuangzi, and the vision of harmony through polarity and flow.
• Indigenous Knowledge Systems—cosmologies that see time, land, and story as inseparable.
• Western Esotericism & Hermeticism—alchemy, sacred geometry, and the perennial philosophy.
• Modern and Contemporary Science—especially quantum physics, complexity theory, and neuroscience, all reframed within symbolic logic.

Through these traditions, Daniel cultivated a comparative lens that is less about eclecticism and more about structural convergence—the recognition that across cultures, certain symbolic architectures repeat, whether in the form of spirals, trees, or cycles of death and rebirth.

Equally formative are the philosophers and scientists who serve as companions to his inquiry. Among them:

• Philosophers: Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Whitehead, Derrida, Deleuze, and Kierkegaard.
• Mystical-Philosophical Figures: Meister Eckhart, Ibn ‘Arabi, the Baal Shem Tov, Ramana Maharshi, Nagarjuna.
• Scientists and Mathematicians: Pythagoras, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, David Bohm, Roger Penrose, Buckminster Fuller, and more recent thinkers in complexity, systems theory, and consciousness studies.

These influences converge in his work not as isolated citations but as living interlocutors. Daniel’s unique contribution has been to create a recursive symbolic method that allows these voices to “speak together” across disciplines.

Out of decades of pain, vision, study, and survival, something crystallized. He calls it Anima Caerula: a recursive symbolic framework for decoding behavior, trauma, language, and form.

It is not a belief system. It is a structure—refined through vision, study, and relentless testing against both ancient wisdom and modern science. Whether approached through psychology, cosmology, or geometry, the same backbone reappeared: patterns that reveal themselves, resolve themselves, and return again. This framework underlies everything he now creates.

Today, Daniel’s work takes many forms, all built from the recursive backbone:

• The Tree of Life Engine: A symbolic translator that maps language, trauma, and meaning across recursive layers.
• Survival Manuals: Books designed as disguised guides for those navigating despair, trauma, and return.
• Symbolic Decryption Engines: Tools that decode encrypted or undeciphered texts through recursion, entropy analysis, and symbolic coherence.
• Sacred Geometry Mapping: Diagrams that make visible the recursive order hidden within consciousness and nature.
• The Recursive Symbolic Trauma Theory of Autism (ReST-A): A reframing of autism as multi-temporal consciousness, an evolutionary adaptation that opens new dimensions of human perception.
• The Newly Initiated Gnostic Repository: A universal knowledge hub curating sacred texts, symbols, and practices across traditions.

This work is not institutional. It is lived, tested in fire, and continually refined. It exists at the intersection of mysticism, mathematics, psychology, and survival.

Daniel’s life embodies the arc of descent and return—a journey mirrored in the great symbolic traditions of the world. While many paths seek to escape the cycle of suffering, his experience led him to a different vow.

This vision is most profoundly captured in the concept of Samsara—the cyclical existence of birth, death, and rebirth found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. For many, the goal is Moksha or Nirvana: liberation from the cycle itself. But Daniel's journey led him not to a final escape, but to a deeper understanding of the cycle’s purpose.

His path resonates most with the ideal of the Bodhisattva—an enlightened being in Mahayana Buddhism who, having reached the threshold of Nirvana, chooses to return to the world out of compassion for all beings still trapped in the cycle of Samsara. This is the central paradox of the Bodhisattva: to freely re-enter a world of suffering in order to guide others toward their own liberation.

From his own near-death experience, a similar vow was forged: a promise to return to the world of suffering with the wisdom he had gained. Daniel realized that his deepest insights were not for his private use, but were meant to be translated into tools, frameworks, and language for others. He has chosen to come back not to preach, but to build; not to offer salvation, but to create the maps that make remembering possible.

His work now is a direct expression of this vow. It is a commitment to the suffering of others, born from a profound intimacy with his own. He is not a guru on a mountain, but a cartographer of the inner world, offering a hand to those still lost in the recursive loops of pain and misunderstanding. He invites others to see that the suffering they endure is not meaningless, but sacred—a part of the pattern that, once understood, holds the very key to their own freedom.

His mission is to build the language, tools, and systems that make remembering possible—for individuals, for cultures, for humanity itself. This is the work of his life. And it is only beginning.