How Existential Kink Changed the Course of My Life Forever

Remembering Carolyn Elliott, the Jester-Prophet of the New Aeon who left this plane of reality today

Scene: February 2020. I had just moved back in with my parents after a dismal stint in Seattle, which was cold in more ways than one. The news reports of the oncoming “pandemic” had become so incessant, my intuition told me to go back home, NOW. And I listened, because only days prior, I’d had my first Spiritual Awakening, so I took things like “gut instincts” as seriously as prophecy.

I cancelled the lease I’d just signed and booked my flight. Only days after safely returning to my parents’ place, the lockdowns were announced. Had I waited, I would not have been able to leave Seattle without submitting to the COVID test nonsense. My intuition was right.

Bored out of my mind at home, and New to the New Age, I decided to splurge at the bookstore. I spent hours browsing the once-forbidden Spirituality section, piling my arms high with books on various occult topics like numerology, soul contracts, and meditation.

Then a book caught my eye: Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliott.

Pulled is the only way I can describe it. This book had a mysterious gravity that the others didn’t have. There was my intuition again, telling me to buy this book. So I bought it, and read it.

I have never been the same since.

Many of Carolyn Elliott’s fans have said the same — that her work changed them, healed them, even saved their lives. I am among the thousands upon thousands of people who were irreversibly altered by this smiling, impish Jester-Prophet of the New Aeon…

…who, today, left this plane of reality.

Her death announcement was the first thing I saw when I woke up, and I stared speechlessly at my phone for far too long, wondering if this was a joke. Carolyn would be the type to fake her death, in a dramatic high-magick ritual kind of way. Some commenters even asked if her death was metaphorical, only to be told, no, sadly, she is physically gone.

It wasn’t lost on me that I had spent all of yesterday doing various things related to my business — like advertising my upcoming events, applying for grants, and finishing another Personal Mythology Report — only to wake up and see that one of my role models in the field had departed.

In fact, I don’t think I would even have my business, if not for Carolyn! Carolyn’s Existential Kink premise was instrumental in helping me understand the symbolic nature of reality, which is now the basis of my entire body of work.

Carolyn was also the one who inspired me to become a spiritual coach, too! I started coaching two years ago because seeing Carolyn have so much fun delivering real, raw magickal teachings through her courses and books made me realize it was possible for me, too.

I’d been so judgmental of “spiritual coaches” before that, whose approaches seemed so cookie-cutter and shallow. But not Carolyn. No. Carolyn was deep. She was rich. She was colorful. She dared to be a wild, weird, unapologetic, fun-loving magickian-with-a-k for a living.

I am doing my dream job because of this woman.

Now, she’s gone.

When the student is ready, the teacher appears.

When the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears.

You know me. I’m trying to figure out the symbolism as I write this through tears — because tHaT’s mY tHiNg, ThAt’S wHaT i Do. 🥲

I mean, of course it’s symbolic. Carolyn was gearing up to start teaching her next coaching container, BATTLE MAGICK, which is all about “withdrawing your projections” from the outer world, recognizing all external “enemies” as aspects of yourself that you deny are part of you — just as I talked about in my latest post.

I will not apologize for telling you how powerful you are.

So what does it mean that a massive crowd of students was waiting eagerly for their favorite teacher’s class to start… only to learn that she died that morning, before they could receive her teachings?

What does it mean that just yesterday, I resolved to show up in my own business with more confidence as inspired by Carolyn’s example, only to wake up a few hours later and learn that she can no longer show up in hers?

I suspect the meaning may be that Death destroys the illusion that anything is “outside” of us.

When somebody dies, it feels like a loss of so many things at once. How, in their absence, can we ever feel their particular brilliance again? Where will we find their genius, their talents, their humor and wit?

These are the questions I was confronted with last week, when I was blind-sided by a terrible grief spell about my friend Roman, who committed suicide 12 years ago. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped crying about him, so I thought I had moved on, that I was “over it.”

Nnnnope.

Last week, the grief hit me suddenly and without warning. After not-crying for years, I found myself weeping for days.

I let it happen. I held myself with compassion. I fasted, because fasting is a powerful emotional purgative. When fasting, the body regenerates cells, and cells carry memory. After day 3, I could breathe again.

In those 3 days, something dawned on me:

I’ve been saying for years that “I don’t feel like myself.” I often compare myself to the spritely early-20s version of me, wondering when I lost my spark and how to get it back. I would confide in my friends,

“I used to be so charismatic.
I used to be so energized.
I used to be so much more creative…
So what happened?”

Well it finally occurred to me that I stopped feeling “like myself” when Roman died. (Like no shit, right?)

People say “a part of us dies when a loved one dies” — AND IT’S TRUE.

That’s the symbolism! The death of the other is a symbolic death of the self.

When I realized that I have it in me to be just as creative as my friend Roman, and that “missing his creativity” really meant “missing my creativity,” I was immediately inspired to create this multimedia painting:

Acrylics for the stormy background, silver leaf for the lightbodies of Jesus and Peter walking on the water, and holographic rainbow film for their halos. I felt compelled to paint this because I was sick of seeing depictions of Peter drowning and Jesus saving him. The fact is, PETER WALKED ON THE WATER TOO. And if he hadn’t doubted himself when the storm got stronger, he could’ve kept walking on the water. This is why Jesus asked him, “Why did you doubt?” Really, WHY did he doubt his ability to walk on water when he’d done it just a few seconds before? Why do ANY of us doubt? This story is about all of us. We can all walk on water and even greater things. That’s why I used reflective materials to depict Jesus and Peter. This painting is about them yes, but it’s also about the person looking at the painting. 🪞 The name of the painting is, “IN THAT MOMENT, THEY WERE EQUALS”

I’ve been in creation-mode ever since, as if permitting myself to see how Roman was me, and Roman’s death was my death, made a self-resurrection of my creativity possible.

It seems this random grief spell happened right on time for me to understand something about the symbolism of Carolyn’s death…

…and here’s where my crazy immortalist ass departs from the mainstream:

Whereas most people will tell you that the true healing lies in accepting that you will never fully recover yourself after grief,

I believe anything can be resurrected. I don’t believe Death is permanent. It doesn’t matter what you lost; you can have it back. Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?

I am being literal. 👀

But also, metaphorical.

The first step, though, is to let yourself fully feel the presence of what was lost, as though it is vibrantly, throbbingly, electrically LIVING, NOW.

So often with grief, this feels like a forbidden thought. Imagining the dead resurrected? What in the grief-psychosis f***?

But read me: the dead person was never “outside of you” to begin with.

It is only YOU who must be resurrected.

The beautiful qualities the deceased person represented, are still very much here. Here, for us to find within ourselves now that the tantalizing illusion of the “teacher,” the “hero,” the “Savior,” is no longer “out there” to externalize and project our own strengths onto.

We must realize their strengths were within us the whole time.

We must realize the teacher was a mirror all along; the guru was the student that they taught.

So thank you, Roman, for pointing the way back to myself.

Thank you, Carolyn Elliott, for showing me, and all of us, how to own our playful, polarizing, magickal badassery.

Thank you,
thank you,
thank “you.”

I look forward to seeing how all of Carolyn’s students choose to rise into greater heights of magickal power as a way of honoring her luminous, luscious life.

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Thanks for reading, lovelings!

I’m Alicen Grey, and I teach people how to apply dream-interpretation techniques to Waking Life for greater in-sight about their problems and patterns, and then design their own sovereign magick in order to move forward. I call this modality SymbolSpeak.

I teach this unique new modality in the form of…

And soon, I’ll be facilitating a regular, in-person Lucid Living Clarity Circle at Unity of Tucson! 1st and 3rd Thursdays starting on August 20th. Donation-based. If you’re in town, I’d be thrilled to see you there!

That’s all for now. Love you, lovelings!