At 12 years old, home alone in Brooksville, Florida, Jason Rigby felt someone grab his sunburned shoulder hard. He turned around. No one was there, but a white handprint was fading on his skin. Years later, fresh out of the Marine Corps after Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti and no longer believing in God, he was replacing a well pump in the pump house of an old white church in Winlock, Washington, when an overwhelming presence filled the room.

This episode opens the Higher Density Living series on angels, and it starts with the hardest question: how would you ever know you'd had an angel encounter?

The Christian mystics took that question more seriously than almost anyone. Teresa of Ávila distinguished experiences that come through the physical senses from a quieter knowing of presence with no image or voice. John of the Cross warned people not to chase or cling to visions, even ones that might truly come from God. Their test wasn't "was it real?" It was "what did it produce?" Did it make you more humble, more loving, more honest, or did it make you feel spiritually superior?

Jason also takes on the skeptic's side: William James's research on mystical states, ecstatic seizures linked to the anterior insula, and why finding where an experience happens in the brain doesn't settle where it came from.

In this episode:

• The handprint experience and the Winlock pump house encounter
• Combat, PTSD, and losing faith in the God he was raised with
• Teresa of Ávila's kinds of spiritual vision
• John of the Cross on why you shouldn't worship the doorway
• The brain as instrument: what neuroscience can and can't tell us
• A simple two-column practice for working with your own unexplained experiences

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:00 The handprint at 12 years old
• 04:00 Combat, PTSD, and losing faith
• 05:15 The Winlock pump house
• 07:50 Teresa of Ávila and the kinds of vision
• 10:10 John of the Cross: don't cling
• 13:30 William James, the brain, and ecstatic seizures
• 16:50 The mystics' real test
• 20:40 The two-column practice
• 23:00 Next episode: what early Christians believed angels were

Links:

• Read the companion article on Substack: https://higherdensityliving.substack.com/p/i-felt-a-hand-on-my-shoulder-nobody

VR can fool your nervous system into responding as if a constructed environment is completely real. If perception is an actively constructed model, and reality is essentially a shared hallucination, what exactly are we living in?

Dr. Eric Cunningham—professor of history, specialist in modern Japanese intellectual history, and author of Tarot Meditations and the Gospel of John —returns to Higher Density Living to explore the ancient architectures of our modern simulation.

In this deep dive, we connect the dots between Gnostic cosmology, Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, and the explosive rise of artificial intelligence. We examine how AI large language models function as procedural generation engines, mimicking consciousness without actually possessing it—a perfect digital reflection of the Demiurge.

What we explore in this episode:

• The Gnostic Matrix: A look into the Nag Hammadi library, the creation of the material prison by the Demiurge (Yaldabaoth), and why salvation comes through direct interior knowledge (Gnosis) rather than blind faith.

  
  

• Steiner’s Warnings: How Rudolf Steiner viewed the physical universe as "Maya" (a projected interface) and foresaw the spiritual dangers of mechanization and Ahrimanic technologies over a century ago.

  
  

• Consciousness & Physics: Unpacking Donald Hoffman’s interface theory, the hard problem of consciousness, and the Cambridge review paper detailing how our universe is mathematically fine-tuned to an impossible degree.

  
  

• AI as Demiurgic Mimicry: Why artificial intelligence is the ultimate mirror of a blind god—generating outputs and patterns without true meaning or a pneumatic spark.

  
  

• The Path Forward: Practical applications of Steiner’s threefold path of imagination, inspiration, and intuition, and how we can act as "lucid dreamers" to beautify and redeem the simulation we find ourselves in.

  Pick up Dr. Cunningham's new book, Tarot Meditations and the Gospel of John, available in paperback through Ethics Press International and Amazon. Other referenced works include Hallucinating the End of History and the Lucifer Versus... series

You know the conversation you haven't had yet.

Maybe it's with your partner — the one where you finally say what's been building for months. Maybe it's with your boss about a boundary that keeps getting crossed. Maybe it's with someone you love about something that's been quietly eroding the relationship from the inside.

You're not avoiding it because you're weak. You're avoiding it because some part of you already tried — and it went badly, or nothing changed — and you quietly decided it was safer to go silent.

But here's what that silence is actually doing. It's not protecting the relationship. It's hollowing it out. Slowly. Without drama. Until one day you look up and realize you're living next to someone you used to know.

In this episode, I get personal.

I came back from the Marine Corps carrying something I didn't have a name for yet. Depression doesn't announce itself. It just makes everything heavier and quieter and creates distance between you and the people you love so gradually you don't notice until the gap is already there. And I did what I was trained to do — I managed it alone. Stayed functional. Kept the weight internal. Don't burden anyone.

Until I couldn't anymore.

At some point I had to stop and ask myself a question I had been avoiding for years: What do I actually need? Not what do I want to project. Not what would make this easier today. What do I genuinely, honestly need?

And then I had to bring that to my wife. I had to say what I was carrying, say what I needed, and then — this is the part that required even more courage — stop talking and ask what she needed. Because a one-way disclosure is a confession. What I needed was a conversation. Those are not the same thing.

What came out of that conversation was clarity. Trust. The kind of intimacy you cannot buy, cannot manufacture, and cannot get from any retreat or practice or podcast. You can only get it from the honest conversation with the real person in front of you.

In this episode we cover:

— The two questions to ask yourself before any high-stakes conversation that will completely change how it goes

— The difference between a spiritual need and an ego need — and why confusing the two will wreck even the most well-intentioned conversation before it starts

— Why "what does the other person need?" is not just an empathy exercise — it's actually a diagnostic tool that tells you whether this relationship can hold what you need it to hold

— The doormat clause — why endlessly extending yourself toward someone who won't reciprocate is not spiritual growth, it's a different kind of bypass

— The 2-minute practice to do before any hard conversation — with your partner, your boss, a parent, anyone

— What David, Elijah, Moses, and Peter teach us about spiritual maturity that the wellness industry never will: the most spiritually advanced people in history were not the ones who had it together — they were the ones who were honest about how much they didn't

The hard conversation is not the danger.

The silence is.

This episode is for the person who is done carrying something they were never meant to carry alone — and who is almost ready to say the true thing out loud.

Higher Density Living is a podcast at the intersection of consciousness, Jungian psychology, neuroscience, and ancient wisdom — for spiritual seekers who are done being sold to and ready to do the actual work. Hosted by Jason Rigby.

New episodes every Tuesday. Micro-Dose episodes every Friday.

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