✦ About Reverend Daniel Charles Cohen Sr.

My work didn’t come from a classroom. It came from contradiction.

I was raised in a Christian household and spent part of my youth in a strict Christian school. Early on, I was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and ADHD—but they missed the autism. What they saw as defiance or distraction was something else entirely: a different kind of sensitivity, a recursive mind that couldn’t lie to itself.

I spent my childhood being passed between therapists, trying different medications, different labels, different fixes. None of it helped for long. I wasn’t getting better—I was getting buried. Buried beneath interpretations that never fit.

At school, the suffering was physical. No matter how hard I tried to follow the rules, I was always in trouble. We received “reminders”—behavioral strikes for things like fidgeting or speaking out of turn. If you accumulated seven reminders in a week, you were physically punished.

I always did.
And I never forgot the reminders.

I remember the day they signed me up for that school—before kindergarten, in the library. I remember them signing that paper. I didn’t know what I was walking into.

From kindergarten through sixth grade—with the one strange exception of first grade—I was paddled every Friday. It wasn’t discipline. It was ritual. Institutionalized violence disguised as correction. The adults called it order. But I remember the fear. The humiliation. The quiet math of survival—how many strikes I had, how many days were left.

I remember the layers of clothing—extra shorts or underwear, anything I could find to soften the blow. And I remember the day that method was discovered, and the extra layers were taken away.

My private education was marked not by learning, but by a kind of structural shame—a symbolic system that told me, again and again, that something about me was wrong. Not what I did. Who I was.

These weren’t the failings of God. They were the failings of systems—religious, educational, and clinical—that couldn’t see what they hadn’t been taught to understand.

Still, something from those early years stayed with me: the sense that there was a deeper order behind everything. That if I could just see it clearly, it might all make sense. I didn’t abandon the spiritual path—I just realized I’d have to walk it alone.

By the time I turned sixteen, I was exhausted by institutions. That’s when I began to explore on my own terms. I started using marijuana, and not long after, began experimenting with psychedelics. At first, it was curiosity—exploration without language. But even then, I developed a deep respect for their power—never forgetting the seriousness of altering my state of mind.

Years passed.
And life got harder.

I lost both of my parents.
I battled drug addiction, and eventually spent nearly six years in prison. When I came home, the world I had left behind was gone. The wife I went away with was no longer there. My children didn’t see me as their father. And I still didn’t know I was autistic.

I kept trying to survive. I took jobs, tried to hold them. But the crippling depression never left. The suicidal thoughts kept coming. And eventually, I lost everything again. I became homeless—not just without a home, but without a center.

I had made multiple attempts on my life.
And then came the night I drank antifreeze.

The next morning, I was still here—but something inside me had changed.
I found a new strength, a new resolve.
I made a promise to myself:
I will find a better way.
And no matter how much worse it gets—I will never try to give up again.

In 2019, while still homeless, I returned to psychedelics—not as an escape, but with the belief that they might help reset my brain from trauma. I had tried everything everyone else told me to try—therapy, medication, coping strategies that never reached the root. Now, I started doing what had felt right all along.

And that’s when it became something else.
Something so much more.

Not only did psychedelics completely cure my depression and anxiety, they became sacred. They became purposeful. What had once been a strange and symbolic comfort became a portal—an intimate relationship with something far greater than myself.

I had been comfortable with them before.
Now, I got intimate.

I fully gave myself over to them—and in return, they opened worlds I could never imagine or describe. Not metaphorical ones. Actual layers of perception, language, memory, and form—recursive structures unfolding inside me with every session. I wasn’t just a visitor anymore. I had become part of the pattern.

As these experiences deepened, I was drawn toward the mystical traditions that mirrored what I was already living:

• Kabbalah, with its Tree of Life and symbolic blueprint of soul and structure
   
• Sufism, where longing and divinity spiral toward union
   
• Gnosticism, where salvation comes through remembering
   
• Taoism and Zen, which taught me to let go of names altogether
   
• Hermeticism, Tantra, theurgy, and indigenous cosmology—all confirming the same thing in different ways: this world is symbolic. Not metaphorical—symbolic.
   

And then there was sacred geometry. At first, it was fascination. Then obsession. Then language.

I studied the Flower of Life, Metatron’s Cube, the Sri Yantra, and the spiral harmonics found in galaxies, pinecones, and cathedrals. I began designing my own diagrams—overlaying the visions, memories, and insights I’d gathered with structural precision.

I found that the geometry didn’t just describe truth—it held it. These weren’t decorations. They were mirrors.

Even after decades of solitary work, I kept finding new voices that confirmed what I had seen. One of the most surprising was Pastor Bill Donahue, whom I found just in the past year. His teachings on the symbolic and metaphysical meaning within scripture were unlike anything I’d encountered in mainstream Christianity. They didn’t contradict my path—they clarified it. They showed me that the patterns I had spent years decoding were already present in the Book I grew up with. I just hadn’t been given the key.

Eventually, all of this—vision, pain, memory, study—crystallized into a living system I now call Anima Caerula. A recursive symbolic framework for interpreting behavior, memory, language, and form. It didn’t come from belief. It came from coherence. From what kept showing up, no matter which angle I entered from.

Everything I’ve built—books, decoding engines, maps, integration frameworks—comes from that recursive backbone.

Today, I’m focused on:

• Building tools that help others decode their own patterns
   
• Publishing survival manuals disguised as books
   
• Developing the Tree of Life Engine, a symbolic translator that interprets language, trauma, and meaning across layers
   
• Testing the Recursive Symbolic Framework against psychology, cosmology, and ancient systems
   
• Mapping psychological disorders as loops of unresolved symbolic memory, not pathology
   

My work is not academic. It’s not institutional. It’s lived, tested, and recursively refined.

If you’ve ever felt trapped in a pattern you couldn’t name—
If you’ve ever sensed something sacred in your suffering—
If you’ve ever seen the same symbol reappear across dream, life, and thought—

Then you're not broken.
You're on the path too.
And maybe you're here to remember the pattern you came to restore.