My Spiritual Awakening: The Beginning

I hale from Detroit, Michigan, a symbol of industrialized America’s collapse. Once a thriving manufacturing center, it has now fallen into disrepair. Since 1967’s race riot, the population dropped nearly 50%. Crooked mayors, hardened killers, and racial tension compliment vast tracts of unused land with 33,000 abandoned homes and 90,000 vacant lots adding up to 40 square miles of lost neighborhoods. In 2010, Detroit ranked as America’s most stressful place to live and work with the highest number of murders per capita, robberies, heart attacks, and families in poverty.

I spent my early years in suburbia. After failing at domesticity, I entered the inner city to search for wisdom amongst bohemian culture. While I ventured through a metaphysical crisis, I discovered a deeper relationship with reality. Spiritual emancipation became my obsession as I searched for divinity within literature. Henry Miller, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and William Blake inspired my transformation as their struggles against bourgeoisie morality resonated with me, greatly influencing my writing identity. In the end, I became a storyteller who drew upon the city’s mysterious energy.

With limited opportunities, I moved to Portland to attend the Oregon College of Art and Craft, an intensive school inspired by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. With a book arts concentration, I focused heavily on the book’s physicality through structure, binding, and letterpress printing. Eventually, the content became more important than the vessel as I focused on creative writing. During my thesis, I honed my craft by writing and editing my first novel for publication, The Invisible Histories of the Spiral Mountain; or The Hymns of Melchizedek (the video above details this process). I leave you with an excerpt that shows the beginning of my journey into spirit:

Until I entered the city, I lived life as a somnambulist. I was asleep. I didn’t understand sacred reality. I barely understood the profanities of society, let alone its angelic heights. Now, I want magic. I want proof. The life of a suburbanite won’t satisfy my thirst for experience. In my innocence, I don’t realize three guardians defend the Wall of Being, the barrier between anthropologist/philosopher Mircea Eliade’s concept of sacred and profane space. Systematically, I must face and conquer each one. After I defeat the three guardians, the real test begins.

The first guardian manifests as a direct confrontation with death. I search out my mortality (my affair with Hanna was only the beginning). I wander the treacherous streets until the latest hours of night, searching for the lethal animal that might confront me. I want to prove to my detractors, as well as to myself, that I’m not afraid. The journey begins in areas I deem safe; I then proceed into sketchy districts. After this tour becomes commonplace, I take hallucinogenic drugs to make my experience random and chaotic—a white boy wandering into the darkest of alleys, places he doesn’t belong, and shouldn’t be entering.

Most of the night stalkers spot me and do a double take, not quite sure if I’m crazy or lost. Many of them come up and try to intimidate me. A few spit in my direction.
One actually attacks me, trying to choke me with my scarf. He asks me for bus fare, his patchy voice burned by crack addiction. It’s late. About 4:00 am. I say I don’t have any money—I lie (I have two-hundred one-dollar bills in my pocket from my take-home pay). Puss runs from his eyes and the sour scent of piss radiates out from him like an unholy aura. I struggle with him, until I break free. I run. On several similar occasions, I’m followed, wondering if I’ll be jumped around the next corner.

On these nightly excursions, I witness every manner of atrocity. I see three astute men beat the tar out of a homeless man, his only crime being he wet himself and was sleeping on their porch. I see a man frozen-to-death in an alley, his contorted body looking like a disjointed Expressionist sculpture. I see a decapitated dog in the middle of a rarely used boulevard. Despite these horrible experiences, my mortality is left unchallenged. I want to die, but I remain untouched. The residents of the night respect my fearlessness.

One evening, I return to my tenement to find my electrical equipment destroyed, either by a mundane power surge, or by an alchemical thought bomb—since my awakening, I’ve noticed random episodes of uncontrolled psychic force influencing my surroundings. In my heart, I’m certain this energy was responsible for the demise of my electrical equipment. Without my computer, radio, or television, I become silent and alone with only books and nightly walks to entertain me.
 
A strong force is at work—either within me or in tandem with the universe. This force, through some form of universal intelligence, is separating me from the thought constructs of my society. People usually associate dogma with religion, but in my case, dogma contradicts existential law, and I’m shirking names and shackles at an alarming rate.

The book becomes a tool for re-education. I reread the classics searching for evidence of magic within the writings of the past. I relate with the various author’s struggle toward emancipation.

My change becomes exponential as I proceed to the next phase. In the silence of my cockroach-infested Sanctuary, I face the second guardian: the aligning of the Self with destiny. Confronting the fear of the street is a minor accomplishment; confronting the blankness of the empty page is terrifying. The emptiness is a catalyst for my spiritual transformation. I need to discover the poetic spirit within my subconscious. The medium of collage chooses me as its avatar.

I sit at a small makeshift desk for hours, obsessively cutting and pasting mythological beasts, eroticized demons, and the eternal children of my magical imagination. The images well up from the void, a blank threshold of paper tries to bar them from reality like a locked doorway, but my will is strong and they’re allowed to manifest. In my current state of mind, I have the audacity to summon them.

Representations of Barbie, lewd pornographic acts, ferocious dinosaurs, anatomical cross-sections, and teenage sticker assortments dominate my mind. The page becomes the barrier between magic and revelation: a comprehensive doorway of prophecy. The materials scatter throughout my room becoming a tempest, whirling and evoking image correlations concerning regeneration, synchronicity, and fate. In that initial movement, I leap from art into what transcends art. Miraculously, I realize the simplicity of identity, the deepest building blocks of what makes me an individual.
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In the third and final trial, I confront mutation. I methodically alter my awareness through controlled experiments and it’s exhilarating. I orchestrate my own personal evolution. It’s the first time in my life where I feel in control of my destiny. It’s beyond satisfying.

While venturing through the decadence and inner workings of a metaphysical crisis, my mind becomes an exact replica of the Ruined City: a vast macrocosm engulfed by the reclamation of nature.

After a month of living with the psychic adjustment, I realize the implications of what I’ve started. The majority of people I meet are distrustful of my forceful energy and mysterious silence. I become a Stranger.

Nevertheless, progress is in control. I begin to trust in the universe in a way I never thought possible. The natural world initiates me into its mysteries. It becomes obvious—if one goes against the natural order one becomes trapped within a prison of illusion, negativity, and stagnation. If you go with the flow, however, wondrous events can occur.

Confrontations with fear are the cornerstones of any alteration in the fabric of reality, whether within or without. Desiring something without acting upon it is the gravest mistake because it causes confusion, doubt, and uncertainty. A desire unfulfilled is a small death in the tapestry of existence, a possibility lost for all time, a sin of the greatest magnitude.

The strength I develop by facing the beastly terrors that appear within my newfound percipience is gratifying—the mind of a caged boy is freed from his prison. The unification of the spirit of a child and the psyche of an adult can lead us into the center of our personal passageway which culminates in a sense of a purified space within the world. Looking beyond the great walls of the superficial parcel our world creates teaches my senses how to truly see—to be a seer and a doer. If we ignore what is being shown to us beyond the Wall of Being, we disregard the inherent truth within ourselves—as unappealing as this truth might be.
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With liberty on my mind, the adventure begins.