What is the relationship between mystical experience on drugs and spiritual awakening that happens when sober? What does it mean to look back upon a life of addiction, drug use, and “being the worst version of oneself” and to see that even the rock bottoms were supposed to be there? Is there a way to express the inevitability of one’s path without affirming what looks like “trauma for one’s own good?”1 What is the use of understanding one’s mundane suffering and spiritual realizations as part of a cycle of creation, an expression of a complete cosmology that we participate in, whether we’re conscious of it or not? Is there a benefit to making such a cycle conscious? We raise these questions and more in our second episode of Wake Up, Underworld!, where co-hosts Justin Little and Cameron Steele explore Justin’s backstory and one example of what it looks like to wake up in the middle of hell. Perhaps it’s the case that passing the test of faith doesn’t simply reframe your life, such that it was never a test at all. Perhaps such passage is also a powerful magick that alters Reality, changing past, present, and future altogether.
Read Justin's essay \"Spiritus Contra Spiritum\"
Texts mentioned in the show:
His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman
The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
Alan Chapman’s Magia
Reality by Peter Kingsley
Drumming At the Edge of the Magic by Mickey Hart
Occult Experiments in the Home podcast by Duncan Barford
The Baptist’s Head by Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford
“Jason Louv and John Dee’s Empire of Angels” episode of the Occult of Personality podcast by Greg Kaminsky
On Drugs by Justin Smith-Ruiu
“On On Drugs” essay series by Mary Jane Eyre
The Book of Thoth by Aleister Crowley
“Trauma for Your Own Good” episode of the Worp FM podcast by Alan Chapman and Duncan Barford
The L. Ron Hubbard series produced by The Last Podcast on the Left
Peter Carroll’s books on Chaos Magick
Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman
Dr. Rachel Elior’s academic work on mysticism and magick within Jewish culture
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