WHO I WRITE FOR

I write for people who intuit that there is more to reality than meets the eye.

The poet Paul Eluard famously said “There is another world, but it is in this one,” but you don’t have to believe in the objective existence of any otherworld to begin this journey. You need only intuit that neither we nor the world are wholly explained (or contained) by the limits of our five physical senses, or by the rules inherent in the cultural stories (science, history, religion, etc.) imposed on us from childhood. If you experience either of those things – the limits of our senses or the stories that define us – even a little bit as cages, you’re in the right place.

Another poet, David Whyte, said “To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.” Let’s call that the goal, then. To live in our true inheritance as human beings by escaping the cages that claim to explain and contain us.

Pursuing this goal has been my constant obsession since the tender age of 11.

That’s right, 11.

WHO IS JACK PRESTON KING?

There’s nothing particularly remarkable about me. I don’t claim to be an enlightened Buddha, a faultless saint, or even an intellectual genius. But I am pretty smart, and I became so by the most honest of paths.

I grew up in a lower middle class, Midwest USA small town. I attended the local Methodist Church and went to public schools within walking distance of my house. My family was “dirt poor,” but so was everybody else in my home town. My parents were divorced (and Dad flew the coop), a rarity in 1960s-1970s small town America, so we were a bit poorer than our neighbors, living on just Mom’s income. But my (working single) mother made up for our low circumstances in many creative ways.

The most impactful thing my mother ever did for me – and I choose to believe this was her intention; she made this decision with me and my future in mind – was to buy a small house in which to raise her 3 children, a house only half a block from our large-and- quite-impressive-for-a-small-town public library.

Growing up, I practically lived in that library. In part because it was air-conditioned, which my home was not. In part because I had a mean older brother who thought books were for nerds and wouldn’t be caught dead there (ah, the great escape!). But most of all, I grew up in the library because I couldn’t get enough of reading. Books transported me to other worlds, both here on Earth (other times, other places, other cultures), and to worlds of the imagination (science fiction and fantasy, mostly). The three elderly librarians who ran the place adopted me as their own and let me read anything I wanted, with no age or subject restrictions. They introduced me to Books in Print and ordered anything I requested through the Interlibrary Loan System. That library, and those librarians, basically co-parented me for the first 18 years of my life. It was bliss.

WHAT HAPPENED AT 11

When I was 11, I fell catastrophically ill. I was told I may die, though I had no real idea what that meant. A difficult surgery saved me and I’ve been fine ever since. But I was bedridden for months, missed most of the 5th Grade, and found in the aftermath of that illness that my “spiritual imagination” had been set ablaze. I became obsessed with religion, which for me was synonymous at the time with Christianity. But it was the mid-1970s, when the New Age was new, and my mind was on fire. My spiritual search quickly expanded to include non-Christian religions (especially Buddhism), New Age spirituality, mysticism, psychic powers, UFOs, the paranormal, magic, witchcraft, even serious philosophy (I remember reading the library's dusty copy of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra around the age of 12). With the help of my library/librarian co-parents I read hundreds of books on all of these subjects. I was ravenous, desperately cramming every spiritual morsel I could find into what I experienced as a growing hole inside me.

In search of… what?

I didn’t know. But I’d recognize it when I found it, 11 year old me assured himself.

WHAT HAPPENED AT 24

That spiritual fire raged for the next 13 years. I “specialized” in my teens and early 20s in the Toltec shamanism/sorcery of Carlos Castaneda, and the spiritual “Work” of Greco-Armenian mystic George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff – though I continued to dabble in other spiritual teachings around the edges.

Then, at the age of 24, in the summer of 1988, this happened:

I was pulling an afternoon shift at the store [where I worked], 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.

-- An excerpt from Autobiography of an Earthling: My Funky Spiritual Memoir, which you can read free on jackprestonking.com.

I came to refer to this incident as “my cosmic download.” I learned after the fact that such downloads are actually fairly common. Mine did not instantly “enlighten” me, but it did immediately launch a dramatic reorganization of my priorities. I acquired a bold new sense of direction, along with the confidence to pursue it. Following that "inner leading," I quit my dead-end retail job, enrolled in a college writing program (majoring in English Lit/Creative Writing with a minor in Comparative Religions), and launched what would become a ten-year self-directed study of the Collected Works of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

By the fall of 1989 I was living a new life.

My spiritual quest became something completely different from the ravening fire that had driven me since the age of 11. I was still deeply interested in spiritual things, but I found myself comparing ideas encountered in the outside world with a new and reliable “inner compass” my download had planted inside me. I found I could almost instantly identify which spiritual propositions were true and which were false, which were useful and which were a distraction, by their “flavor.” I knew what spiritual truth felt/tasted like. I was still spiritually curious, devoted even, but I was no longer ravenous. The hole in my psyche was filled.

My newfound compass set me on a steady, independent spiritual path that I am still following all these years later.

WHAT AND HOW I WRITE

I share the above not to brag, but to make clear what I write about and how I write it.

My main essay topics are:

Spirituality Philosophy Psychology (especially Jungian) Mythology #LifeLessons Creativity (remember, I was an English major in a writing program. I think, read and write a lot about writing and creativity in general)

I also write poetry, flash fiction, and short stories. I have published one novel and am working on another.

Most of my essays (and book reviews, which I’ll be publishing here, as well) are essentially conversations between my inner compass and some book or Great Courses lecture series or other public source of ideas in the world. I imbibe the work of others and the compass spins. I test other authors’ ideas for what is true, new, exciting, liberating, then weave those ideas with my own personal stories and insights to reach sometimes startling (even to me) conclusions that challenge consensus reality and awaken readers to new ways of seeing themselves and the world.

Then there’s fiction and poetry. Remember that otherworld I mentioned at the beginning? I practice writing fiction and poetry as shamanic descent directly into that otherworld. Writing fiction/poetry for me is a journey and a playground, a way of entering the unconscious (think Jung) and retrieving artifacts from that otherworld to share with the community.

FOLLOW ME

I hope you will join me in this quest “To remember the other world in this world” and thus “to live in [our] true inheritance” as human beings. Let’s test the learned limits of consensus reality together. Let’s shake some cages.

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