By KEN KORZCAK
U.S. Navy Veteran, Nuclear Engineer and Computer Systems Designer Kevin Cann Pens a Profound Autobiography of Pain, Wonderment & Triumph
Kevin Cann’s new book, Autobiography of an Experiencer, is a slim volume, but after turning the last page, I have no qualms about labeling this book an “instant classic.” I place it beside similar landmark books of metaphysical-leaning philosophy, both from centuries past and contemporary literature.
Autobiography of an Experiencer has resonances with these long-standing tracts from earlier times, which were also short manuscripts:
- Discourse on Metaphysics by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1689)
- Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
- Doorways of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
But I would also compare Kevin Cann’s book to the following titles. This latter set may bear far less intellectual gravitas than the list above but, for me, they make up for it by providing a brighter shimmer of authentic magic that is more accessible to the masses.
- Illusions by Richard Bach. (1977)
- The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas. (1971)
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
I hasten to add: Kevin Cann’s ‘Autobiography’ is different from all the titles in groups one and two listed above. It’s a custom-crafted gem that stands alone.
Part of its power is delivered by the writing style. The author favors clear, precise declarative sentences that are punchy and deliver maximum impact, one thought at a time.
It’s like the author is expertly tossing sharp darts that pierce the hardened outer shell of our language-centric minds, sending new concepts directly into a greater, deeper awareness that we all possess, whether we know it or not.
Another aspect that imbues this book with an unusual quality of vividness is the author’s choice to write in the third person, even though it’s an autobiography. A first-person narrative would be like:
“I walked down the street. I saw the sunset.”
But third-person is:
“He walked down the street. He saw the sunset.”
But wait — Kevin Cann also switches between first- and third-person at selected points in his narrative. This is to indicate two different modes of conscious awareness; one is tied to the more mundane “word-dominated” perception of reality — and the other indicates a nonlinear … and … well, I’ll just call it a “transcendent observer” perspective.
This is not merely to select a literary artifice to affect a style. Rather, it gets at the heart of and demonstrates how the writer has viewed, encountered, and confronted his world. These latter modes of action have shaped the outcomes and discoveries he has made about life, and informed the meaningfulness of his place in our society & culture.
A CRUEL, MUNDANE REALITY — BUT DARK AND BRIGHT WONDERMENTS WAITING IN THE WINGS
This is a work that blends the often harsh, brutal reality of a difficult life with remarkable descriptions of supernatural experience. For Kevin Cann, the latter has included an array of unexpected intrusions in a series of bizarre and exotic events, hyper-objects, activities and non-human entities.
And, yes, I’m happy to say that lineup includes at least one UFO!
Some of these events, entities and hyper-objects — and even “hyper-beings” or “hyper-entities” — came knocking on Kevin’s door uninvited and without warning. It wasn’t always a “fun time” — to say the least!
However, as Kevin grew incrementally toward ever greater levels of understanding and “mastery,” he began to seek out transnormal human perception/experiences in a forward-leaning, proactive manner as the depths of his experiences and knowledge increased and then blossomed.
The arc of his journey starts in a dark, dismal hole of early-life despair, bewilderment, torment and misery — but that arc is one destined to bend inexorably upward. As Kevin Cann moves doggedly forward, taking on what life handed to him, he migrates ever more toward wonderment, but better yet, the basic contentment and happiness all of us seek.
A CENTRAL CONTRIBUTING FACTOR TO A LIFE STORY
It might be fair to say there is one specific contributing factor that shaped everything that happened in Kevin Cann’s life. It’s woven into the fabric of his story. That factor is the unique cognitive profile Kevin was born into. Today, the medical community has a name for it: ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder. ASD was not well understood in the early 1960s when Kevin came into the world, and not much more so through much of his formative years.
As Kevin Cann would discover, ASD brought as many gifts as it created roadblocks to a life that made sense, and to an existence with a potential to be a happy one.
Reading about Kevin’s life prompted an inner voice lurking deep inside my mind to fish out that famous line by 18th-Century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the first man in history to hold a professorship in experimental physics. He said:
“Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.”
Is Kevin Cann a genius? At the very least, my notion is that his flashes of brilliance happen far more often than once a year — and probably a lot more frequently than they do for the average person.
As for me, well, I’m just a simple country journalist, and that made it a vexing challenge for me not just to review this book, but to do so in a way that faithfully conveys the innovative ideas, depths of perspective, and concepts readers will encounter in these pages.
To help myself out, I decided to deploy a tool — a method — to flesh out some central aspects and themes of Cann’s ‘Autobiography.’ And that method is …
USING COMPARATIVE LITERATURE TO GAIN INSIGHT
So, I am going to grasp a discipline my “literary snob” friends call “comparative literature” and apply it to Autobiography of an Experiencer. I adopted this tactic for two reasons:
1. Instead of looking at one book in isolation, comparative literature allows us to contrast and correlate two (or many more) different works side-by-side to find hidden connections, patterns, and differences that might otherwise remain invisible.
2. For me, this method became irresistible in this case because, as I read Kevin’s book, another groundbreaking book clamored in my mind, demanding to be heard.
That book is Black Boy, published in 1945 by author Richard Wright. I read it more than 40 years ago, but its powerful effect on me remains undiminished to this day. It’s a literary work that shares a certain “soul” with Kevin Cann’s ‘Autobiography.’
Richard Wright was an African American author, perhaps best known for penning the classic of American literature Native Son. Wright died in 1960, very close to the time when Kevin Cann was born.
Black Boy is also Wright’s autobiography, but it’s not a book that trucks in metaphysics or philosophy, although I would argue it contains “accidental” examples of such.
It’s the story of a child who had the audacity to be born black to a grindingly poor mother and grindingly poor and violent father. They lived in a dingy, fire-hazard clapboard shack amid the profoundly racist society of Mississippi of the early 20th Century.
Kevin Cann is white, but he had the audacity to be born with autism. As I said, ASD was at yet not well-understood in the early 1960s. One might say Mr. Cann’s rare cognitive profile caused him to stand out like the only “black boy” in an all-white society.
Both Richard Wright and Kevin Cann’s serious troubles began at the age of four.
Richard Wright was four when his mother beat him to a state of unconsciousness with a tree branch. She kept hammering away at him to the very edge of death. He was being punished for making a truly terrible mistake, albeit he had only done so with the naïve innocence of a child.
Kevin Cann was four years old when his mother brought a violent man into his life. That man would soon establish a regime of regular brutal beatings of her son. The result was a daily existence akin to a bewildering hell for a child, and maybe more so for a youth who did not frame his reality in the same way as the majority of other children.
Like Richard Wright, Kevin Cann would also be mystified by people of his community who proclaimed to be Christians.
Wright’s family were Bible-slinging fundamentalists whose interpretations of Scripture were meted out as vicious psychological attacks against anyone they deemed somehow not in compliance or “gone astray” from what they deemed a proper orientation vis-à-vis “The Word.” The adults used it like an all-pervasive battering ram against that little child who was Richard Wright.
Interestingly, for Kevin Cann, the problem with Christians manifested in almost an opposite way. That’s because his small-town Minnesota Christian-majority community was almost bizarrely 100% passive, in the sense that even when they could clearly identify an innocent child existing in a state of profound distress, their reaction was to simply look the other way and ignore that child’s plight.
By the way, I recognize this demographic milieu well because Kevin Cann and I are the same age, and like him, I grew up in a Minnesota small town where 97% of everyone was either a basic, no-frills — and very staid, reserved and unemotional — Lutheran or Catholic.
I only mention this because it means I can understand and relate to the way Kevin Cann reports his experience based on living within the same environment in the same era that I did. As far as I can tell, my own small town was not terribly geographically far from where he lived.
Indeed, Kevin and I may have even strolled past one another later on when we were in our late teens or early twenties on some random sidewalk in St. Cloud or St. Paul, just two anonymous young men passing each other by like any accidental strangers in cities named for saints in the Land of Sky Blue Waters.
But, anyway, it baffled Kevin to be living among a self-described community of Christians who, despite their insular devotion, could also display a cold indifference to the quandary of suffering people around them. It was just so much easier — a default mode — to “see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil” — or in this case — simply never speak up at all.
The impoverished and black Richard Wright coped by becoming an alcoholic by age six. That’s right! At just age 6, he was already getting drunk — a lot. If you find that difficult to believe, you’ll see how it could happen — and how it did happen — if you read the book. (It’s available free online HERE).
Also, as a child, Richard Wright learned to “fight with a knife” out of sheer necessity. The first person he fended off with a kitchen knife was his own aunt, who was attempting to beat him with a metal rod. Like Kevin, Richard Wright was also intensely bullied at school and endured uncounted violent brawls — and more than a few knife fights.
He knew other profound miseries as well — the foremost of which was hunger. His family was so poor, not eating for two or three days at a time was commonplace.
Kevin Cann’s childhood and early life were scarcely better, and maybe even worse in some respects. In addition to school bullying, Kevin would also come to know the grinding pain of hunger, along with another dark and powerful ache — loneliness — including the isolation of “being different.”
Kevin Cann has a word for all these miseries that he, Richard Wright and countless others have suffered. Kevin calls them “wounds.” He writes:
“The experiencers are the wounded, the traumatized, the ones who got broken early and never sealed back up, and the breakage is not a coincidence sitting beside the gift; it is the gift’s doorway. To teach a whole and healthy person to see what he sees, he would first have to break them badly, because the signal comes only through a crack and the crack is the wound.”
Now ponder this quote from Wright’s Black Boy:
“At the age of twelve, before I had one year of formal schooling, I had a conception of life that no experience would ever erase, a predilection for what was real that no argument could ever gainsay, a sense of the world that was mine and mine alone, a notion as to what life meant that no education could ever alter, a conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering.”
Yes, “the wound” and “meaningless suffering.” For me, the resonance these two statements share is moving and profound— each issued from different types of people leading two very different lives in different locations and eras.
Furthermore, what they both “drew forth” from their wounds and suffering would be beautiful.
Note that both men had “a conception of life” that originated not from mundane experience, but from something before that. Kevin Cann tells us that a kind of self-awareness was present within himself while he still inhabited his mother’s womb, pre-birth.
(Side note: The great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury also reported that he achieved awareness inside his mother’s womb, that he had “total recall” of his time in the womb, and that he remembers the intricate details of his birth, including passing through the birth canal).
In a sense, Richard Wright experienced similar experiences, but that was when he was four and clinging to life after his severe beating. As he clung to life in a “nether state,” between life and death, Wright encountered transcendent flights of “higher realizations.” It embedded within him a sense of a world that he said was, “mine and mine alone.”
I find that description striking in this case, because it seems that Kevin might also know what it’s like to have a world that was “his and his alone.”
For Kevin Cann and Richard Wright, no matter what happened after these — I’ll call them — “Initiation Events” — nothing that occurred going forward in mundane life could erase “that which came before.”
Both Richard Wright and Kevin Cann eked out pathways through their darkness. Kevin was aware of something remarkable that accompanied him before the heavy gloom of his post-birth life began — he describes it as a “golden light.” He became aware of this golden light in utero. However, this gilded, auric “force” receded from his outer awareness after birth, and would only come upon him again unbidden, and when “It” wanted to but…
… nevertheless, they both found the entrance to what Kevin calls “the gift’s doorway,” and they both stepped through it. As Kevin Cann writes in his book, “a wound” can be considered “a gift” because it is what forms “the crack” — and it is through this crack that magic and grace emerge, leading to healing, growth and “wholeness.”
Richard Wright achieved a kind of secular salvation born from a desperate attempt to escape from the misery of his reality. His route to that escape was to immerse his mind in reading, absorbing every book he could get his hands on.
Much like Kevin Cann, nothing could deny the reality that Richard Wright possessed from birth. That would be a brain that just seemed hard-wired to be brilliant.
It’s amazing! No external exigency could tarnish the power of the gift of intellectual brilliance in Kevin or Richard— not violent beatings, not hunger, not alcoholism, not harsh religious assaults — nothing.
Richard Wright’s intense love of books, in turn, manifested as an intense desire to create his own “escape hatches” for his fellow human beings by learning to write his own books. He found that an immersion into the fantastically difficult mechanics and intellectual challenge of learning to write was a “place for his mind to go,” where it could find peace and respite from an unimaginably cruel world.
Kevin Cann’s salvation, on the other hand, is not secular, at least not entirely.
It’s cosmic!
It’s transcendent!
However, his “flavor” of salvation could also be blunt, utilitarian and amenable to an application of intense focus that perhaps only a person configured to the autistic spectrum could achieve. On the other hand, Richard Wright also possessed an ability to focus intensely and to establish self-discipline, a strength borne out of years of brutal trauma.
Kevin Cann’s unique abilities enable him to act as a kind of Prometheus — someone who can access, confront, navigate and explain extraordinary experience — and then bring back gifts for the benefit of humankind.
Richard Wright did something similar by taming and then commanding the art of literary creation. Interestingly, words and language were also taken up by Kevin Cann, albeit later in life. (Before that, he mastered things like nuclear engineering and computer science). However, he picked up wordsmithing to produce 15 books that can show the rest of us, if not necessarily “Thee Way” … a good way, a practical way, and an accessible way.
A fine example of one of those “ways” is a philosophical and experimental framework he developed and calls Platonic Surrealism. (Note: You can read my brief analysis of Platonic Surrealism in my article, HERE.
(Here ends the comparative literature portion of my article. I hoped to show through a comparison of two distinctive works produced by two disparate lives that universal principles can be identified, and where one finds the latter, authenticity of experience can also be said to exist).
I will move on now and touch upon three other aspects of Autobiography of an Experiencer that I found intriguing.
1. COSMIC HUMORIST? KEVIN CANN THE TRICKSTER?
I was captivated years ago by what one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead, said about the Bible. Here is how he put it:
“… the total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all of literature.”
For the mighty thinker Alfred Whitehead, a lack of humor casts doubt on any tract’s reputation as a divinely inspired document because humor is so universal and seems a fundamental attribute of the human psyche.
I read this comment many moons ago in the 1954 book, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. I’ve applied it ever since to books of philosophy, mysticism, and religion. Generally, the inclusion of humor, for me, bolsters the authenticity of a document. I don’t say it’s a perfect measure, but like Occam’s Razor, Whitehead’s litmus test is useful if not always accurate or fair.
(Important note: My added rule is that, even if a document contains unintentional humor, it still counts as “points” toward authenticity.)
Well, then, here is an example of humor in Kevin Cann’s book that doubles as an intriguing story. It involves someone who is arguably the world’s most recognized “UFO abductee” and/or “authentic mystical experiencer.”
That man is Whitley Strieber.
Strieber published his groundbreaking book, Communion, in 1985. Probably no other book has done more to raise the consciousness among the public about human-alien interaction/encounters. It struck a chord with the masses and penetrated the zeitgeist of mainstream society. Communion rode the New York Times bestseller list for 15 weeks. It was made into a movie starring Christopher Walken as Whitley.
Strieber’s follow-up book to Communion was Transformation, published in 1989. I read it shortly after it came out. One of the things I found unusual about Transformation was a running theme wherein Whitley describes his long-standing battle with an “addiction” to sweets.
Bizarrely, the alien entities or “Visitors” strongly disapproved of his love for candy bars, ice cream, maple syrup, and the rest. The Visitors admonished Whitley frequently, urging him to stop eating sugary foods, to the point of warning him of death if he did not stop! The Visitors even upped the ante by telling him they had “physically altered his metabolism” — and this would make sugar even more deadly than before!
Whitley was terrified by what his Visitors told him about the dire consequences of his love for sweets. Consequently, he made heroic efforts to beat his habit — but his cravings for confections and sugarplums always proved stronger than his terror of The Visitors.
Sometimes he paced a room and sweated nervously as he struggled to resist, for example, a delicious chocolate-coated ice cream bar calling to him like a mythological siren from his freezer. He was constantly torn between his tremendous fear of The Visitors and his intense desire to enjoy one of life’s greatest pleasures, a delicious vanilla Häagen Daz bar.
Well …
In Autobiography of the Experiencer, Kevin Cann informs his readers that he rarely dreams, and that he can count remembering perhaps just 5 or 6 dreams in his lifetime. However, each of those rare dreams was unusually vivid and striking in content.
In one of these dreams, Kevin finds himself in a public establishment, shopping with his mother. Suddenly, the bell over the shop door rings and Kevin is surprised to see walking into the store none other than Whitley Strieber!
Oh, by the way, did I tell you that this shop in Kevin’s dreanscape was a candy store? Well, it was.
When I read this, I thought: “LOL! What a shock! Whitley Strieber is walking into a candy store! No doubt looking over his shoulder, roiling with uncertainty and guilt and fretting the approbation of The Visitors!”
Kevin recognizes Whitley for who he is, even though he has never met him in real life. That’s not usual because Whitley is famous. He is especially well-known in the UFO-consciousness-exploration community. But now here’s the kicker:
In his dream, Kevin observed Whitley in the candy shop, and notes that he seems confused, nervous, and uncertain about where he is. The dream ends when Kevin Cann steps up to Whitley Strieber and … wait for it … wait for it … hands him a piece of candy!
I have a strong theory about what this dream means, but I’m sure readers will thank me for sparing them my explanation. However, at the very least, this scene satisfies my Alfred North Whitehead litmus test for humor found in books of authentic cosmic significance. Remember, even unintentional humor counts.
2. A TRIANGULAR UFO CLOSE-UP
In a chapter titled The Summoning, Kevin Cann describes his attempt to summon a UFO.
To make a long story short, his effort succeeds. Standing out in his yard, Kevin is stunned to see a massive triangular-shaped UFO. He described it as “enormous and silent, three solid red lights set along it and a single arc-light beam burning at it center.” It was the size of two or three jumbo jets. He estimated its height above ground at 500 feet.
However, there was a certain peculiar effect that intrigued Kevin the most. Even after the triangular craft moved off into the distance, he found that he could still see small details on the craft, the same as if it was much nearer to his location. Her writes:
“About halfway across the sky it gave itself away. He saw the rivets in its underside, and the rivets stayed the same size whether the craft sat directly overhead, it slid off toward the horizon, which is not a thing that distance lets objects do.”
For me, this bolsters the idea that his experience was authentic. That’s because the peculiar aspect of an ability to see the intricate details of such objects up close — even when they are far away — is characteristic of many triangular UFO sightings.
One man who documented this phenomenon well is a British fellow by the name of Colin Saunders. A solid working man, a technical draughting expert and schematic designer, Saunders was oblivious to the world of UFO phenomenon until the day his worldview was shattered by an astoundingly up-close UFO encounter.
Driving along in the English Midlands with his family one day, Saunders was stunned to suddenly see an absolutely massive, black triangular craft hovering silently and magnificently just a few hundred feet away.
His experience prompted him to write a book, Triangular UFOs of the United Kingdom. (See my review here: Triangular UFOs).
In it, he describes the strange phenomenon of the observer being able to see close-up details of the craft, no matter what the distance and changing distance between the object and the viewer. Saunders writes in his book:
“As the craft floated its nose up into the air, I was looking at the surface and could see box sections interlocking quite clearly. I was then looking at the nose when I thought to myself, “This nose is very round and also very big.” In fact, I realized it was out of proportion with the rest of the craft. It was like someone had put a pair of binoculars in front of my eyes. I then realized I was so close to the nose (maybe six feet?), I couldn’t see the rest of the craft’s surface or any of the box sections, just a big, round grey nose stuck in front of me.”
Note that Saunders said he could see details on the craft as if he was six feet away from it, even when it was hundreds or thousands of feet away, or even a mile away.
Furthermore, Saunders doggedly records dozens of other witness testimonies, people in the U.K. who also sighted gigantic black triangles. A significant percentage of them report the same “close-up” view of intricate details on the craft, no matter the distance.
In one instance, a witness reported a “strange out-of-body-like” experience in which they seemingly “flew toward the triangular UFO” and observed it as if they were right next to it. One witness stated she felt as if she was “purposefully transported” near the object because “it wanted her to have a close-up look.”
Thus, this adds authenticity to Kevin Cann’s experience with a triangular UFO.
3. THE PERCEPTIONS OF MANTIS BEINGS AND THE HATHORS
I was thrilled that Kevin Cann included a story about his encounter with a type of alien being (or non-human entity) well known among the UFO community as “Mantis Aliens” or “Mantis Types.”
These are non-human entities with an uncanny resemblance to praying mantis insects. They’re like “humanoid praying mantises.” They tend to be quite tall, 6 to 10 feet tall or larger, stand upright like bipedal humans, and sometimes have human-like hands, but not always.
Well …
Kevin finds himself lying in bed one night when he becomes aware of two Mantis entities standing by his bed and gazing intently at his sleeping form. But then something unusual happens. Kevin is suddenly able to perceive himself from the perspective of the way the Mantis beings perceive him.
Kevin writes:
“What drew them was the thing around him (Kevin). A brilliant shape hung over his sleeping body, white and blue and bright, a cocoon of light, and his body inside it was so small a speck that the cocoon was the only part worth a look … it looked to them (the Mantis beings) like a baby universe.”
I found this strikingly similar to how another “brand” of aliens described the way they perceive the human body. These extraterrestrials are the “Hathors” as documented and described in a1994 book titled The Hathor Material.
The book was co-written by Virginia Essene and Tom Kenyon. After Ms. Essene made contact with the Hathors, she later asked Tom Kenyon to work as a channel to communicate with the Hathors and record the information they wished to pass on to humanity.
To make a long story short, this is the way the Hathors said they perceived the human body:
“However, when we see your physical body, we see it mostly in terms of empty space. We see it as a galaxy of stars, for each atom unto itself is much like a solar system with the central sun as the nucleus and the planets as electrons spinning around … as your solar system is mostly space, so are you.”
The Hathors said further:
“There is a tremendous amount of space within your physical body, and it is an illusion that you are solid … we see it as spatial, not solid … we literally see you as a walking, moving galaxy of stars.”
So, this to me adds weight to Kevin Cann’s perception of himself after he shifted to gain the perception of the Mantis beings as they saw him.
Additionally, I have even more reason to accept this modeling the human form based on my own experience. Like Kevin Cann, one of my life experiences was that of a near-death experience. This came about when I was nine years old. I was shot through the stomach in a hunting accident out on a remote, frigid Minnesota farm field on an 11-below-zero (Fahrenheit) January day.
To make a long story short, after six days in a coma, I emerged into a state of semi-awareness and consciousness for another three days, and in this state, I sometimes perceived people as their “energy forms.”
Each person I saw was characterized by a central “unwavering band of light” (Note: I borrowed this great term from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions, because it fits what I saw so well), making for an axis around which emanated a kind of torsion field as described by physics. This torsion field, depending on how you looked at it, could easily be described as a universe or energy cloud, which could be vast, depending on how one chooses to perceive it. The physical human form itself could be insignificant or invisible.
Much later on, I would learn from reading about ancient Hindu traditions that this “unwavering band of light” is the “prana tube” or Sushumna Nadi, the central subtle energy channel in yogic philosophy. It runs from the base of the spine up to the crown of the head, passing through the chakras.
I’ll stop here, but not before giving my strongest recommendation to Autobiography of an Experiencer by Kevin Cann.
I also offer my apology for writing such a long article, and note that I offer this apology in the spirit of the Alfred North Whitehead litmus test.
NOTE: FOR MORE IN-DEPTH REVIEWS & ANALYSIS OF PARANORMAL, MYSTICAL BOOK & UFOs, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM.
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