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In the inaugural episode of "Spontaneous Phantasm," I share the story of how I first became curious about consciousness and our relationship with it. I chat about the ways my consciousness has trapped me and the ways it has liberated me, and explain why I chose the name "Spontaneous Phantasm" and what topics I intend to discuss on the podcast. Sign up for the newsletter | https://mailchi.mp/jessihuntenburg/radicalresonanceseries   Podcast Transcript   I suppose it began with a catechism lesson and the words that lesson burned into my brain. “After you die, you will live with God forever.” The priest said them to comfort us and strengthen our faith, but I left his sermon uneasy. There was something about the idea of forever that gnawed at me, and the gnawing persisted through dinner and followed me to bed. As I lay in the darkness, I decided to try and perceive forever with god, to create a picture in my mind of what that might look like. I conjured a vast, billowing cloud spanning the diameter of the earth and floating above that orb itself. Behind lay the vast blackness of the universe. I concentrated on this image for as long as I could, returning to it when my mind decided to wander. The more I focused on it, the more my unease became a disturbance. Finally, I was filled with such a deep, empty, encompassing fear that decided right then and there that I had no interest spending eternity with God in heaven. I didn’t want my consciousness to exist for an indeterminate amount of time and I wondered if my opinion would matter to the almighty. I suppose you could say that that was the day I met death. I was seven years old.   From the time I was twelve to the time I was eighteen (with a brief sojourn my ninth-grade year), I lived under the proverbial bell jar. If my family believed in treating invisible illnesses, I’d likely have been diagnosed with dysthymia—a persistent, low-grade depression. I bemoaned the awful state of the world. I sulked and suffered. I look back at my younger self and I feel deeply for her—she was in such pain and could find no way to relieve it. She accepted her perspective and couldn’t believe that anything would change it, and there was nothing anyone could do to convince her otherwise.   It wasn’t until her senior year that she emerged, and she did so because she largely stopped caring about things that had never been important. She dared get a “C” in a class. She skipped nine days of school to make day trips with friends, to experience the world as it was meant to be experienced. She lost her best friend. She got her first boyfriend and had sex for the first time. Her perspective shifted from impossibility to possibility, and because she thought things possible, she began to get them. She also started living for herself for the very first time in her life, and as the bell jar lifted, everything became illuminated.   Nothing changed, and yet everything changed. The conditions of her life remained the same, but for the first time, she could see a way out.   It’s amazing the power that an idea has to shift our very way of being in this world. I’m inclined to believe that our perception of our experience is far more important than the experience itself, that our perception is the true reality.   During that ninth-grade year I deliciously lost myself in astral travel. As I write this, it occurs to me that my astral practice may very well have been one of the main reasons why I experienced a sojourn in my depressive symptoms. I was also walking to and from school with good friends rather than taking the bus with strangers. The school’s facilities were old and comfy (no stark white paint) and I felt free to be myself.   Before I went to sleep, I would conjure worlds. I would take the trips I longed to take in my mind. I would speak to the folks I’d long to speak to. I’d have hours long adventures that took me to spaces of my consciousness that I didn’t even know existed. I called it “mind-tripping” and I went to bed earlier and earlier each night so I could revel in it and drink it in.   I’d always been one to live in the recessed of my mind, but those recesses hadn’t always been comforting places. Through astral tripping, I took control. I declared my agency. I made a conscious decision to drive out the demon thoughts that had hijacked my consciousness to make space for what I desired to be there. I didn’t keep them away forever, but I created a mind-space I could refer back to when things got rough. “It was wonderful once,” I told myself. “That means it can be wonderful again.”   This is a podcast about thoughts. Visions. Perceptions. Metaphysics. Consciousness. No matter what I do on the objective plane, I always return to the vast, ever-changing landscape of the mind because the mind is where everything begins. The mind is where we may exercise our greatest level of control. The mind can make us miserable, and it can set us free. The mind is powerfully elusive—scientists have been studying it for years, and they’ll be the first to admit they know very little about it. It fascinates me, this mind that is mine and that, at times, feels so much bigger than me. It shrinks and expands sometimes at whim, and sometimes according to my personal design. There are times that its thoughts creep up upon me unawares, and I have to set aside time to process, to analyze, to understand. Other times it becomes swept up in the moment and my mind is part of everything that exists (swimming in the ocean consistently gives me this feeling).   This podcast is also about the uncommon ways our mind works—about the exceptions, not the rules. I’ve been a practicing witch for the past six years, and working with personified deity, crafting spells, and demystifying my shadow has been instrumental in helping me gain a better understanding of my particular mind. I’m also a professional tarot reader and spiritual advisor, and I use the tools of tarot and craft to help others explore the caverns of their unconscious so they can process, heal, and step into their power. Before that, I studied critical theory, a discipline that Max Horkheimer described the purpose of as the liberation of human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. My focus was on the mind as captor and the mind as liberator. I guess you could say I’ve been thinking about consciousness for quite some time.   No matter what tangents I’ve taken in my spiritual practice and no matter which interests have caught my fancy over the years, the beautiful and terrifying workings of the mind are a mainstay. I’ve crafted this podcast so I can share the thoughts I’ve gathered over a lifetime of pondering as well as bear witness to the thoughts and meanderings of others. I’m deeply interested in discussing phenomena of consciousness with folks who consider these sorts of things. I’m deeply interested in inviting folks onto the podcast to chat about things they often don’t in other forums; I want them to speak to their own fringe and give them a platform to explore and discuss that which “doesn’t fit,” so to speak. Mostly, I want to have deeply interesting conversations about the nature of consciousness and how it relates to the human condition. I want to feel the goosebumps rise on my skin when we stumble across a thought or idea that’s both new and spot on. I want to play with others in the realm of the mind—to kick around ideas and bounce things off of one another and to learn what it’s like to see the world from another perspective.   I know that there are plenty of podcasts out there that explore the occult, consciousness, and unexplainable phenomena. So why Spontaneous Phantasm? Because I feel that I lie at the crossroad of skepticism and belief in such a way that I can make the wild approachable and the commonplace deeply interesting. I feel like I can coax perspectives out of folks that they themselves may not even have known they held. Do I believe I’m the only person who inhabits this space and has these abilities? Absolutely not. In fact, there are probably many of you listening to this who are deeply similar in many ways. However, if I’ve learned anything in the past six years, it’s this: just because someone else could do a thing doesn’t mean that they will, and the only thing stopping me from doing a thing is my damn self.   I suppose I should spend some time chatting about why I decided to name the podcast Spontaneous Phantasm. I began with the concept of a mirage, of something that appears magickally and disappears just as magickally. That’s the best language I have to describe transpersonal experience—in a moment of gorgeous bliss, we feel connected to something much larger than ourselves, something expansive and sublime, something mysterious and familiar all at once. And then, either by our will or the intrusion of our thoughts, that moment passes and with it the emotion of oneness. In this way, a spontaneous phantasm is the unexpected appearance of something fantastic, something not quite “real” in the traditional sense but deeply moving nonetheless.   The word phantasm is also defined as a creation of the imagination or fancy, and conjuring a phantasm is much like engaging with what Jung would call active imagination and what some woo folk, myself included, call astral tripping. This is what I was doing those early nights in my ninth-grade year, and the potential these sessions hold for self-discovery, healing, and wild, cosmic connection are endlessly interesting and something I’ll likely discuss in many ways and forms here. Finally, phantasm is defined as an illusory likeness of something, as a trick played on the eyes and the mind. So many of our limiting beliefs are phantasms—we often see a wall where there’s a door, and we often conjure doors in walls to justify whatever path we’re hell-bent on taking. It’s all a trick, you see—all an illusion that we can fashion according to our own design. This is where I would normally insert a Matrix reference, but I’m slowly beginning to realize that it’s been twenty years since that movie came out and even though it’s a formative one for me there are likely folks listening to this that haven’t seen it. Public service announcement: if you haven’t seen the Matrix, go see it. Just make sure it’s the first one.   I decided upon the word “spontaneous” because all acts of consciousness and magick are a bit miraculous. With the power of our mind, we create something where there was nothing. Our subconscious drafts the vast landscapes of our dreams without our express influence or permission, and suddenly we’re wandering a spontaneous phantasm while we sleep. Our body responds to our dreams the same way that it does to waking life, begging the following questions: are our dreams any less real than our supposed reality? How heavy are the weight of our thoughts, and how might we use our awareness to lighten and shift them? Are our imaginings the blueprints of potential scenarios, potential lives? What power really lies in these spontaneous phantasms, and how might we use them to liberate us from the circumstances that enslave us? These questions are the soul, the lifeblood of this podcast, and I endeavor to do my best to explore them quizzically, excitedly, wildly, and open-mindedly.   I would love it if you’d join me on this journey, my beauty. There will be many more episodes to come, and although I don’t promise perfection, I can certainly promise thoughts and ideas that set your soul on fire. If you want to hop aboard, feel free to subscribe to this podcast. You can also subscribe to my newsletter to be notified when the latest episode is posted and you can receive a free three-video series to boot—check for the link in the episode notes. If you’re an avid fan and you’d like to give the podcast a nudge in the right direction, feel free to share the podcast link, rate the episodes, and comment. Anything and everything you do to support the work and get the word out is deeply appreciated.   Keep traveling the open caverns of your minds, Beauties. Much love, and I’ll speak with you soon.