In Nihilism's Loving Womb

The Void as the cradle of life

How does the spiritual journey unlock creativity?

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.

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. Support. Strangers who validated what I’d long buried.

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 data engineering job.

The Void

Then came the Void.

Peeling back 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—in 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.

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