Please read part 1 first:

Did you read Part I? If you didn’t, please do, to read the whole malodorous experience.

The Watcher(s)

I’ll never know for sure if that experience was actually an encounter, or if it was some aberration in my environment—or gut. But the half-lidded memories and fuzzy logic remained echoing whispers of something more profound. The raised hackles and chill-bumps up and down my back suggested I was being watched…like prey.

This experience would help shape how I think and view reality itself.

Before I begin, a brief comment on what I mean when I refer to myself versus others. In a Paranormal context, I see no difference between the two, be they aliens/NHI, UFOs, cryptids, ghosts, or whatever. Whether NHI (non-human intelligences) are truly “other”—archetypes, psychological projections, or mere fantasy—is irrelevant to me.

For me, in a spiritual context, the Self encompasses the other and the other encompasses the Self.

They are us. We are them.

I believe something did visit me that day. It even bore the blue light signature of later transformative experiences that would follow. But the smell that lingered when I woke up was unique and unmistakable: that of lit matches infused with burning sulfur.

So, was it from the Jinn/Djinn, the Greys from UFOlogy lore, or did I or my attic appliances… “fart”? That was the suggestion from ChatGPT 4o, although it didn’t word it quite that way; the AI-generated hypothesis was that it could have been a plume of sulfur dioxide from somewhere in the attic, or my bowels.

I got the answer, but it came to me as layers, like peeling back an onion—which incidentally contains sulfur-rich chemical compounds galore.

The first layer straddles the fuzzy line between truth and story:

Although I’d mostly become a believer in aliens (NHI) through the lens of UFOlogy, I’d held onto some degree of skepticism, which offered little comfort. About a month later, I had one of the most transformative spiritual/metaphysical experiences of my life, and it was the kick I needed to finally peel back the onion—but with someone’s help.

I should comment on my emotional state at this point. Intellectually, I remained skeptical, but my angst about whether the Phenomenon was real or imaginary—and even more broadly, the afterlife—gradually worsened my ability to focus at work, as my lack of knowledge fueled both late-night and work-time research into the Phenomenon. I was heavily burnt out in the wake of two home remodels, a cross-state move, a layoff, two family deaths (my mother’s cancer and death, before that my mother-in-law’s passing), Hurricane Beryl (which toppled a huge oak onto the corner of my house and wrecked my roof and shed, narrowly missing my wife), the loss of my Mormon faith, and growing unease about my career in an AI-dominated future.

Enter the Shaman

In the r/Experiencers subreddit, I eventually found Daniel Rekshan of DSETI.org, who had been posting a lot about his hypnosis work, and I was happy that he didn’t deny the “false memory” problem inherent to using hypnosis for “repressed memory retrieval.” Another huge plus is that he wasn’t a strong proponent of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis. Dan is a paradox, gracefully holding a nuanced space between skepticism and mysticism, and his psychology and computer science background appealed to me, as the social scientist/engineer type that I am.

Dan is a licensed hypnotist (in both the Depth Hypnosis and Quantum Healing methodologies), so I booked him right away and bought his book on the Shamanic Dreaming Hypothesis of ET/NHI contact.

His book was eye-opening. It helped me reconcile the skepticism I held with the veracity of my experiences, while offering me a metaphysical framework to mediate between my subconscious mind and spiritual world.

I had two sessions with him. The first, though brief, was transformative. I may write on it later.

The first onion layer came off during my second hypnosis session, wherein I’m pretty sure I “channeled” other beings for the first time. The hypnosis felt like a semi-consciously led dream. Over a Zoom video call, Dan helped me solidify my intention for the session, put me under trance, then facilitated by asking me the questions I’d prepared. Among the questions was this:

Below is an answer, perhaps this onion’s outer layer, straight from the transcript.

In the transcript, note how I blur myself with the other. Here, I’d begun channeling a sleep paralysis entity who appeared to me next to my childhood bed at night as my older brother, before transforming into an axe-murdering, greasy, long-haired, smiling Viking guy who jumped at me in slow motion, large half-moon axe raised high above his head (my scream woke the whole house)

Transcript:

Greasy Axe-Murdering Entity (G.A.M.E.): The experience was meant to scare you. We have fun.

Me: Do you feed off the fear?

G.A.M.E.: Only in the sense that a bully…[trails off]

Me: Are you evil?

Me (voicing an intuition): I think it’s part of the play—we’re part of the play.

G.A.M.E.: We wear the masks. We don the costumes.

Dan (hypnotist): Is that the nature of good and evil—the sense of participating in a play that has comedy and tragedy? Could you speak more about the nature of good and evil?

G.A.M.E./Me: We’re the stage technicians as I said earlier. The feelings associated with good and evil are attached to the material world. They’re attached to the imprinting of your experience on our psyche.

Dan: Is the sulfur smell experience explained in the same way? …how do you understand that “stage scene”?

Me: It was a physical contact—a visitation. It was meant to scare me. I’d like to know what happened to me during that time. Was I taken somewhere else? Was I just visited in my space? Was I studied, observed? Who were they? How could I know who they were? Does it matter?

The Watcher(s): Doesn’t matter—if you want to think of us as Greys, then you can also think of us as the Fae. You’ve read so much on these subjects. Your mind can’t coalesce us into a particular form because you know that our forms are infinite.

The Mask Stays On

The session offered an answer. It was a “true-enough” story whose ambiguity was as foggy as the mist that clouded that room’s single-paned windows that smelly night. Whether the Watchers were faceless projections of my subconscious mind or something genuinely other, they refused to remove their mask.

So, were my visitors Greys, Jinn, stage technicians, archetypes, or all of the above? Although my fear of them had subsided thanks to that new framing, the ambiguity kept me wondering:

I’d listened to a few Jinn reports on Islamic podcasts, I’d also read a few sulfur smell reports from Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia, whose latest edition’s cover incidentally mirrors its thesis that the UFO phenomenon may be an extension or evolution of folklore from ages past:

I didn’t know it then, but the truest answer was hiding in the gaps of my questioning.

It’s one thing to “know” the source of the smell; it’s entirely another to ask, “What does it mean?” I was so focused on entities and UFOs, I didn’t think to wonder about its symbolism.

A spiritual awakening doesn’t just awaken you to the existence of spirit. It instills a new way of looking at the world and at truth writ large. It’s a paradigm shift that shows you how life is replete with omens (symbols), just as dreams are. It awakens you to the dream that is life itself. You realize that regardless of the material provenance of unexplainable events, there is a design behind them, and we are the designers—architects building scaffolds of meaning as we climb upward out of the Void.

In shamanism, omen work looks beyond prosaic cause and effect thinking. Maybe my attic water heaters had actually “passed gas.” But the synchronicity of it—coinciding with the memory of my space being lit up by blue light on the wall above—matters more, hinting at greater lessons to unpack.

The Color Blue

The essential lesson came by way of color.

During that session, in delving into yet another experience, I arrived at an Earth-like planet orbiting a blue star in the Pleiades star cluster. There, I saw and described a majestic blue being lounging on an obsidian floor in a “star sanctum,” on a space station tethered to the planet. A blue and green spectrum of color flooded the room through the floor, and the walls were etched with hieroglyphics that told the stories of lifetimes of acquired knowledge and experience.

The colors’ vibrancy and ray-like movements felt significant, though I didn’t yet know how to interpret them. Some quick searching led me into a patchwork of metaphysical color systems, including New Age ideas about “Blue Ray Starseeds” and broader esoteric traditions of the Seven Rays, which appear in both Theosophical teachings and some later interpretations of Hindu thought.

My research led me to @officialthealchemist (Youtube), whose video “Who Are the Blue Ray Starseeds? Are YOU One of Them?” got me thinking about how color in the imaginal realm can be a vehicle for self-discovery and self-knowledge.

The hypnosis was my bridge from the materialist “alien” interpretation to a more personal, psychological one.

Suddenly everything felt so new and wonderful.

Rays of Creation? Cool! I thought. If that Blue Being was me, does that mean I’m a Pleiadian starseed?

What color does sulfur burn again?

In her other videos, The Alchemist (Sarah Elkhaldy) talks about how so-called Blue Ray Starseeds have an inherent ability to “transmute” pain and trauma into higher vibrational forms. Here was another new term: Transmutation. Though I've come to see it overused ad nauseam in esoterica, the word is often uttered in the same breath of Shadow Work, which got me learning more about Carl Jung. At the same time my wife, a psychologist, had been reading books on Jung’s life and works, sharing them with me.

Elkhaldy explains that Jung, drawing partly from his own intense inner experiences, visions, and “fantasies,” interpreted alchemical symbolism through the psychological lens he built into his concepts of The Shadow, the Self, integration, and individuation. His work also engaged deeply with Gnostic and Hermetic currents; his work reframed those older spiritual ideas into a more acceptable framework for modern psychology.

That was when I suspected it: the smell could be a real-world metaphor for my own alchemy.

Lead into Gold

Spiritual alchemy turns lead into gold, symbolically. It’s the process of the psyche’s transformation.

For Jung, alchemy became the symbolic language for inner transformation. My question shifted from,

What visited me, if anything at all?

to

What in me was being transformed?

Sulfur matters here, because in the alchemical tradition, sulfur is one of the core elements of transformation.

Zosimos of Panopolis was one of the first major alchemical writers. He wrote of alchemy in visionary and spiritual terms; for him, material transformation and spiritual transformation appear deeply entangled.

In Visions of Zosimos, sulfur was part of his “divine water” symbolism, in which his use of the Greek word theion carried a double meaning of “divine” and “sulfurous.” Like water, sulfur is a transforming medium, and it's used as an agent of coloration, dissolution, and pneuma—invoking breath/spirit, or the bridge between body (soma) and soul (psyche).

Zosimos’s was a visionary approach to alchemy, but Paracelsus made the sulfur symbolism much more explicit. Paracelsus described sulfur as the soul itself, linking spirit and body. His tria prima system consisted of sulfur, mercury, and salt, and sulfur was the combustible, “animating” principle.

Nigredo, Dark Night, Void

The smell of burning brimstone is an uncanny omen of ignition.

Burning it produces a mostly “smokeless” fire (with nasty fumes, certainly), best seen—in the dark—at night. And that period of my life—the hurricane, cancer and death, ADHD burnout, and the existential crisis threaded through all of it—had been the dark night of my soul, my own alchemical nigredo, during which the old me had been smelted down by the furnace.

In the alchemical tradition, the prima materia—the raw material of transformation—first passes through nigredo, the blackening stage of putrefaction and dissolution. The smell wasn’t proof of anything. It was an omen of the transformation I’d begun, and sulfur burns blue.

The fear I felt that night, and throughout that longer soul’s night, was my teacher. The beings I channeled may have been the masks over my own fear—the parts of myself that scared me into silence my whole life, the indoctrination that kept me submissive to a church I could no longer believe in, submissive to a version of myself that kept me safe by staying small and quiet.

Maybe they were the liminal stagehands, waiting in the wings for my unbecoming.

Thanks for reading!

Here’s the full hypnosis session report:

Here’s another piece on where this all led me, and how it brought me here to Substack:

Share Enter Nyxus

The Watchers were curious about me. How could I know there was someone there, if I never saw them—not even once? Maybe it was the Jinn, but I’m not a Muslim, or Persian. Maybe it was the Greys, or the Fae. Supernaturalists depict cryptids and egregores as various as the colors of the electromagnetic spectrum. Mine must have come from the part of the spectrum humans can’t see. Perhaps they were born from me, from within my bowels. They did carry a sulfur smell after all—a smell that lingered in my nose.

It was the smell that woke me at 4:30 A.M. Brimstone, burning sulfur.

Whitley Strieber, who wrote “Communion”—Christopher Walken played him in the movie, you know—claims 4:00 A.M. in the summer is the witching hour if it’s Daylight Savings. It was a smell I could have dismissed were it not for the dreamtime memories poking through the night’s fog. The misty, single-paned windows stretched above the opposite armrest of my second bed, the family room couch, which flanked a windowless wall next to my son’s room. The couch is my friend. I wasn’t in the dog house or anything; I just sleep so darn well there. I don’t have to worry about my snoring disturbing my wife.

I did go to bed meaning to catch a glimpse of moonlight through the window above my feet. I did hold an intention for contact, the same I’d been holding for about a month or so of slowly letting the ineffable erase my nihilism and materialism that year. The comfort I’d held for years was now peeling away.

No blankets in the summer, here. We try to give the AC a break, but no luck with that in this Houston heat. That same fog curled up next to me on that couch that night, it's weight pressed against me who knows how long. Restlessness bubbled up through the miasma in fits and starts.

Three more memories rode those bubbles all the way to the top of my awareness:

The first, before the smell, was of a light, familiar, bright blue, electric white, on the windowless wall. I peeped it through half-lidded eyes, sensing how it stayed “on” throughout the fuzziness. What’s uncanny is that I rationalized it away as Oscar’s light, just reflecting off the wall. Oscar is my pool robot. It has a blue LED, but to reach me it would have had to shine up boldly through the pergola, the oak tree’s leaves, bend around the balcony the windows overlooked, then curve again into the window and reflect off the wall I saw it on. Impossible, yet I believed it. The mad story made sense, but I wasn’t awake.

The second memory was of the smell, which, obviously, had to come from my kiddos, sound asleep in their rooms. Bless their little hearts—what did they eat? I remember smiling, half-conscious.

The third memory was when the blue light went out. Finally, I thought. I’ll sleep better now that Oscar’s done. The smell had made its home in my nostrils, but there was a heat to it.

That was the trigger.

NO, it couldn’t be them—their rooms are too far away! I thought, while stirring, but I couldn’t open my eyes. I struggled and wiggled until finally I woke up with a grunt.

And there it was, the hot, egg-rot reek. I stood up with a jolt and looked around. Someone was there with me. There go those fucking chills again. The red-glowing night light on the far wall added to the sinister feeling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up with me.

Shit, the kids! I ran into each of their rooms. They were all sound asleep.

I returned to the couch, sat down, stood up, walked all around the room, letting my nose guide me, drawing in deep sniffs—a strange meditation. The smell seemed to move. It was first strongest above and the left of where I’d had lain, near my head. The ceiling vent was pushing out gentle cool air, moving the fan, which I thought I’d left off? It was still there, just as strong as two minutes earlier, but it was over the couch now, dwindling still as olfactory fatigue set in. The smell was behind the couch now, along the windowless wall. Was I their quarry? Did they do anything to me?

I saw the lamplight from my actual room downstairs and knew my wife was having insomnia, so I went downstairs, feeling like a coward. If there was something there, I’d just left my kids to them, but I took the shrinking smell to be absence. Of course it was nothing. That’s what my wife told me. It had to be my nasty ass. Occam's razor and all that.

I wish I would have taken her upstairs to smell it, because the smell persisted weakly in my nose for about an hour.

To cap off the experience, my wife said she thought she saw a swirling light in the corner of her eye after I told her everything. Once she looked at it, it was gone. She immediately changed the subject as if she never saw it. Just last week, I asked her if she remembers saying she’d seen that that morning, and she tells me, “No.”

That morning, a palpable humidity permeated the East Texas home. Outside, the late-summer air felt like dank doldrums over land. After sunrise, I posted about it in the r/Experiencers subreddit. One redditor advised I call the gas company, but I knew the smell wasn’t natural gas. Nevertheless, I called them out right away and had them check everywhere—no leaks. I also wondered if the smell was a spontaneous sulfur dioxide plume from either my water heater or my AC drain pan. That remains a small possibility, but I have zero proof. I snooped in the attic, smelled around the appliances. Yes, they put water heaters in the attic here!

There was no trace or whiff of it anywhere. I even considered if a stink bug or cockroach—good luck avoiding them in East Texas!—could have gotten fried in a wall socket.

The phenomenon wanted me to know it was real, giving me one more piece of evidence (but only for me, no one else should take my word for this). That’s how the Phenomenon works. They play with perception and probabilities. The proof is only for the experiencer(s). I could concede that the smell could have come from me.

What had I eaten? Laugh it up.

Some believers claim a sulfur smell could be the residue of a portal. In the famous Varginha, Brazil UFO case, the beings and their bodies, had a sulfuric smell in some reports, but most who claim to have seen those beings attest to their very foul ammonia smell. The crashed craft had a mix of ammonia and sulfur.

The Roswell crash smell was also clocked as “putrid”, a mix of decay and sulfur. I’ve been down rabbit holes on this one, friends. Jacques Vallée’s “Passport to Magonia” catalogues close encounters and in it, a sulfur smell is mentioned 3 times, either in reference to a UFO craft or abduction encounters with the Greys. But the Greys have been described as having a cinnamon smell, or a pleasant smell as well. The smells run the gamut, with the Greys.

Of course, the Jinn (Djinn) seem to have the strongest link to a sulfuric smell in all phenomenology. I do have some Arabic ancestry perhaps via the Moorish occupation of the Iberian peninsula (via my mother’s Spanish line).

One more possibility, apart from it being all “in my head”. If they are extraterrestrials who somehow have an interest in “awakening” souls like me (I hate that term, by the way; it’s too ego-loaded), there should be some hypothesis for the hellish fart odor, right? Well, there just may be:

A molecule [Phosphine] that’s known for its smelly and poisonous nature on Earth may be a sure-fire sign of extraterrestrial life.

I held onto this nugget during my era when I half-believed in the Extraterrestrial UFO hypothesis, which just refers to the notion that UFO experiencers have interacted with physical ET beings from outer space.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It turns out when you dig into UAP sightings, abduction reports, stigmata (anomalous body marks), and even crop circles, often there are indeed prosaic explanations, which unfortunately are then used to discredit the very real impact of the experience. That they have such a profound effect on the experiencer leads me to see the synchronicity as both that impact and the anomaly together.

Do the Watchers, the nonhuman intelligences (called “NHI” in UFO research), toy with the edges of these phenomena? What if they recruit the dreaming faculties of the experiencer to interact with us? Could that explain it all? This is a key premise of the Shamanic Dreaming Hypothesis of ET/NHI contact, one which I’ve come to hold myself.

But I digress.

I never found the source. Only the memories stayed behind once the smell left and the day broke. These were breadcrumbs towards a more expansive cosmology. Stuff no gas meter could show me. Whatever it was, it was a guest that intruded on the peace of my world then slipped away, leaving only my questions.

The investigation wasn’t over.

Read Part II, the conclusion of my investigation:

In keeping with my commitment to not write another word of poetry or my novel until I get caught up with sleep and actually figure out how to carve out meaningful creative time from my week as a tech professional and a father of 4, I’ve focused a bit more on putting down my phone and reading here and there.

I’m reading one of the foundational works of the Western esoteric tradition, “The Corpus Hermeticum,” but I also began re-reading the first chapter of a fantasy saga I was working on at the age of 18. Reading both has been eye-opening for different reasons. The Corpus alerted me to fascinating synchronicities with how I’ve opened my science fiction novel, containing startling parallels with attributes of the story’s setting and characters. Its working title is “A Game of Life”, on creating life with language in the Void, much how the Logos acts upon the Moist Nature in Poimandres, the first passage of the Corpus.

But what I want to share with you are some insights I’ve had after reading my fiction writings from 23 years ago.

On Retroactive Compassion

Here’s the passage:

“Taris Tomere, are you going to keep ignoring me or will you have some sense and listen?” By this time his mother was facing him, arms folded and staring down at him.
“Oh, uh, I was just thinking—“
“You were just thinking about three months ago.” He and Bekwin had agreed that they would not tell anyone save family.
“Yes.” He hesitated. “Mother, would you advise seeing beyond what the eyes do? You know, looking into things that can’t be explained?”
“Of course, Taris.” Where there is belief in the Lifelord, you can always think the unnatural possible.” This was a question on which she never had to think. Practical thinking was something that came very naturally to her.
“Thanks, Mother. I guess I’ll go and run in the Race.”

You know that cringey feeling you get when you read shit you wrote years ago? There was an inkling of that—I thought I could be the next Robert Jordan—but mostly, I feel compassion for myself and nostalgia for a time I will never get back. A time when I viewed the world with innocent eyes but still knew there were layers to reality I hadn’t peeled back. A time when my mom was alive.

Taris was me, and his mother was how I wished my mom could be, accepting of differing viewpoints, open-minded. She was a devout God-fearing woman who never dared question God or the purpose which the Church had instilled in her.

I’d planned for Taris’s story to be a Hero’s Journey, where strange happenings and traumatic experiences left mysterious traces as clues—a Campbellian Call-to-Adventure that the protagonist would follow with the aid of a wise mentor or two.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that my life would follow my protagonist’s path. Where instead of triumph over evil, I’ve gained wisdom through deconstructing illusion. My triumphs happened on my inward journey, in conquering the blockage in my own psyche to speak and write my mind and stand up for what I know is right (for me, at least). I still wrestle with the fear of self-expression, a survival instinct honed after years of suppressing my emotions out of a desire to manage the emotions of others.

But my greatest triumph has been discovering that under all that fear and conditioning, I am already held by love both pure and simple. That insight has pierced the illusion of unworthiness.

On LDS Worthiness (Mormon Purity Culture)

Self-expression was a problem made worse by the sexual shame I experienced as a teen inculcated in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This affected my life in a profound way. I was taught and urged to confess and repent for masturbation and porn use to men (my dad included) who in all statistical likelihood also looked at it or struggled with it. Because the alternative was that dying in sin would relegate us to the lower kingdoms of heaven, separating us from our loved ones, FOR ETERNITY.

I always felt broken, defective, an addict-in-denial. My healthy curiosity about and interest in sex was weaponized against me by an institution that coerces loyalty from its most impressionable population: Children.

Adding to the shame was the fact that my bishop (the one I had to confess to) was my own dad throughout most of my adolescence.

Children and Teens are the first casualties in many cases. The second is marriages. Sexual purity culture plants fissures in the devout married and betrothed. I was found out to have looked at porn by my wife after she had returned from traveling out of the country. What followed was traumatic—an understatement. For both of us, for different reasons.

I was a failure, a disappointment, a liar, and a pervert not to be trusted. My wife stopped talking to me for weeks. I attended overcrowded 12-step addiction recovery programs 1-2 times a week for 6 months after that to try and fix whatever was broken in me. I was living just off campus of the church’s private university, Brigham Young University, and the vast majority there was Mormon, and the numbers of “porn addicts” in those meetings help you to see the extent of the shame and suffering that faithful Mormon men carry.

My stake president (the one that bishops report to) told me fasting would be like chemotherapy to root out the cancer of impurity/addiction. I fasted for 24 hours once a week to purge my system of sin. I was told porn addiction was “worse than heroin”. The 12-step program encouraged me to take inventory of everything I had ever done, and confess it. When I did that, my bishop gave me a silent stare, reminded me of the heroin myth. I felt like a lost cause.

In desperation not to lose my wife and kids, I embraced radical honesty. My wife assured me I would lose her and my daughter if I ever looked at porn again. Years later, I began confessing even seeing boobs online by accident to my wife. Each confession, I risked resurfacing the trauma my original sin caused in her, for different Mormon reasons. Ex-mormon women, I know you understand. Not to mention one of my wife’s exes (an almost fiancé, also Mormon) had groomed and had sex with his younger sister while my wife was dating him. My transgression, mostly the lies of omission, resurfaced profound feelings of betrayal—and disgust—in her.

My greatest teacher

One morning, in the aftermath of being “discovered”, I was with my firstborn daughter, keeping her quietly asleep in her rocker to allow my wife to sleep a little extra after a bout of insomnia. I was depressed, thinking how much longer would I have to repent for my sins, when my daughter woke up and smiled at me.

A feeling of being unworthy of divine love, of my daughter’s love, crashed around me, pulling me down to the floor in tears. Sobbing racked my body for a minute before I looked at her again and returned her smile.

My daughter’s love was God’s love. They were no different.

Was I unworthy? Her love was the answer. I was not unworthy of God’s love. I was never unworthy. I was not “forgiven” by God, because my daughter was God, and God was me. I held this truth as a secret for years, keeping it even from myself.

Love ≠ Blessings

The idea itself of being worthy of God’s blessings is the greatest illusion in Mormonism. Blessings get conflated with love in the minds of the faithful. It did for me, anyway. We’re taught God loves us always, but that we shouldn’t expect any blessings (including material prosperity) if we’re unworthy. In fact, we’re promised blessings for complete obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel. We’re taught that godlike love is unconditional, but in practice it’s conditional, and the faithful carry that model into their familial relationships. Those are the fissures in the foundation.

Self-Compassion = Divine Love

These experiences taught me to have compassion for myself. They also taught me how to read my own past differently. Where before, I felt finally forgiven in that moment on the floor, I can rewrite that moment with divine love as the focal point, not a fear of eternal separation from my family, from my daughter.

When I look back at my fantasy main character Taris, I don’t see the cringe. I see a kid trying to write himself out of a world where every stray thought and urge could damn him forever. His “call to adventure” wasn’t a dragon or a dark lord; it was the quiet, stubborn sense that there had to be more mercy in the universe than the adults around him could imagine.

Hermeticism talks about the world as mind-made, about Logos as the creative word. I used to think that meant I had to speak the right words, live the right story, confess the right sins. The story I’m telling with my life is changing because I’m asserting I was never broken. I am, and have always been, whole.

Faith Beyond the Binary

James Fowler was a psychologist who created one of the first modern psycho-spiritual frameworks for the Stages of Faith. His work gave me my first glimpse of a faith beyond organized religion, beyond the binary of whether “The Church is True.” Instead of feeling like I was failing, it led me to consider that I was instead on a trajectory. Fowler wrote that faith encompasses the values and virtues that guide our perspectives and choices.

For brevity, I won’t map my journey to Fowler’s stages, but consider how the stages reflect your own alchemical journey. I’m sure it doesn’t ever end. The journey isn’t a closed loop but a spiral. We may keep returning to the same point, but in a new dimension.

The Crisis

My faith deconstruction was punctuated by panic attacks, anger at spiritual abuse, and grief for the years I suppressed my Self. I became an agnostic-atheist, closeting that truth from my orthodox loved ones and trickle-feeding fragments of my story into the void: ex-Mormon Reddit, Discord servers, Google Docs.

During this time, my mother was dying of late-stage cancer. The grief of losing her—compounded by feeling unseen for so many years—collided with an ontological crisis that raised important questions, and a new obsession with learning about UFOs, the Paranormal, and the weird rushed in to fill the gaps.

Doorways

I won’t drag you down my own UFO rabbit hole (that’s a future Post), but I’ll just say this: it cracked something open, teaching me how damn accessible hidden knowledge can be just through earnest intention. Along the way, I stumbled into kundalini activations during meditation, lucid dreams of aliens, dream-time experiences that left physical traces, and orbs of light seen both day and night. In my quest for answers, I found community, friends, and support from strangers who validated what I’d long buried.

Gradually, I lost all motivation to work, despite feeling immense pressure to provide for my family. After trying ADHD medications (stimulants) which didn’t have the effect they’d had years prior, I sought Depth Hypnosis and Quantum Healing Hypnosis to help me integrate these perplexing events to better know myself—all while trudging through the monotony of my then monotonous data engineering job.

The Void

Then came the Void.

Peeling back layers of the Acquired Self showed me my truth: I’m a healer, a creator, and a lover. In trance, I asked my Higher Self: Surprise me!

Immediately I was blanketed in the silent womb of the Void—an impossible expanse of infinite nothingness and eternal possibility. I laughed out loud, because I recognized it. I was inside the very motif—this Void—a novel idea I began 17 years earlier.

As a younger man, I just thought it was a cool idea from S2E2 of Star Trek, The Next Generation. A void in space with a foreign physics that the Enterprise crew needed to escape.

But what if someone were exiled to one? What if they chose it? What if they could seed the Void with holographic life?

I got the cosmic joke.

My protagonist was me. I had unknowingly been a channel already, and my spiritual and creative odyssey was foreshadowed years earlier. I felt cradled in the loving Deep of the Void. Gratitude filled my breast.

The message was clear: Get back in touch with your creative side.

It was a breakthrough, an allegory of soul-retrieval, the incubator of my individuality.

I’d planned to put off writing until retirement in favor of building wealth, supporting my family, but the Void showed me my soul had been dormant far too long. It was time for me to hatch.

Alchemy

The Void isn’t a trap. It’s a womb, a cosmic egg, a milestone on the spiral. Life’s creative spark is the seed that grows in its fertile soil.

Nihilism led me to its door. Staring into it long enough stripped away the certainties, ideas, prejudices, and narratives that no longer served me. What remained was a blank canvas upon which my Muse could paint. And yet I return again and again—there’s always more to slough off.

—Cael