Lava and the Phoenix
Kramer: You know, Frank, you could take a break.
Frank Constanza: No breaks! I feel reborn. I’m like a phoenix, rising from Arizona.1
– Seinfeld
They say some people are volcanic—driven by chaos under the surface, always moments from eruption. If you read my article Going Nuclear, you’ll know exactly how I mean. However, that’s not me; not really.
My nickname is “Lava” but my heat doesn’t destroy, it transforms. When I began writing the Herd Immunity book in the spring of 2020, my goal wasn’t to create a self-actualization movement. It was a joke project while the world was shut down. However, once I began to walk through my own life lessons and processes, I noticed a deeper transformation occurring. After facing my own mortality, my father’s death, and my inability to be present and process grief, I felt stunted and impotent, and at times, a slave to my base emotions. I felt things, but I lacked the emotional vocabulary to describe them. This changed with my spiritual journey. The process was slow, but eventually, like a volcano, all of those emotions boiled under the surface until one day, I could no longer hold them in.
Lava isn’t an explosion, it’s a slow, inevitable process of becoming. It reshapes the land it touches. It burns away the false, carves out the real, and hardens into real ground.
Throughout this journey, my brain has moved from a place of snap judgment to empathy. As such, the writings on this page not only reflect the old way in which I saw the world, but as a natural evolution of my spiritual journey from sleepwalking through life to living with greater purpose.
As William V. Pietsch writes (and illustrates) in his classic tome Human Be-Ing:
Like the phoenix, I don’t believe in controlling human nature through shame, guilt, or fear. We are organic, purposeful, and intelligent. We don’t need to be repressed; we need to be realized. I am Lava because I move slowly, deliberately, and irreversibly. The phoenix is my avatar because I faced death and have been reborn better, intuitive, and with greater purpose.
From Ashes to Origin: My Path Begins
When I was 21, I walked into a tattoo shop and etched my second mark into my skin: A Phoenix—wings spread wide, flames licking its silhouette. Beneath the feathers, my grandparents’ initials rest quietly, like embers buried in ash. My parents separated before I was conscious, and because both parents worked, my grandparents were the only people I felt safe around. I didn’t understand it then, but the Phoenix wasn’t just the symbol of remembrance. It was a prophecy.
Fire Signs and Funeral Pyres
The Geat people built a pyre for Beowulf,
Stacked and decked it until it stood four-square,
Hung with helmets, heavy war-shields
And shining armor, just as he had ordered.
Then his warriors laid him in the middle of it,
Mourning a lord far-famed and beloved.
On a height they kindled the hugest of all
Funeral fires; fumes of wood smoke
Billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
And drowned out their weeping, wind died down
And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
Burning it to the core.3
— Beowulf
My name is J “Lava” Leffel, and I am fire sign to the core. “Lava” isn’t some hokey PUA moniker or edgy online alias, it’s a nickname that has become a point of pride and identity. During the COVID lockdowns (while I was brainstorming Herd Immunity), we were doing sales trainings via Zoom. My lava lamps were in the background. One day, my sales trainer called me “Lava,” and it stuck. Like most things born in fire, it had a way of claiming space. I wear lava rock bracelets on my wrists; I wear a Tree of Life pendant and an ankh—symbols of regeneration, immortality, and balance.
In November 2020, I walked away from a brakes failure and car fire that should have killed me. The next morning, my father passed away in his sleep, succumbing to cancer. My entire family lineage was almost destroyed in a period of a few hours.
That moment—like so many I ignored before—was a flare from the deeper self, trying to get out. The man I needed to burn so that J “Lava” Leffel could finally emerge. I escaped my physical death, but it was the first of many ego deaths on my journey of becoming…
The Phoenix: Gnosis and Secret Fire
The phœnix (which is the mythological Persian roc) is also the name of a Southern constellation, and therefore it has both an astronomical and an astrological significance. In all probability, the phœnix was the swan of the Greeks, the eagle of the Romans, and the peacock of the Far East. To the ancient mystics the phœnix was a most appropriate symbol of the immortality of the human soul, for just as the phœnix was reborn out of its own dead self seven times seven, so again and again the spiritual nature of man rises triumphant from his dead physical body.4
— Manly P. Hall., The Secret Teachings of All Ages
The phoenix isn’t just an avatar or a trendy symbol for resilience. It’s the ancient emblem of spiritual alchemy. In The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P. Hall writes, “In the Mysteries, it was customary to refer to initiates as phœnixes or men who had been born again, for just as physical birth gives man consciousness in the physical world, so the neophyte, after nine degrees in the womb of the Mysteries, was born into a consciousness of the spiritual world.” That regenerative fire isn’t comfort, it’s confrontation. From an early age, I’ve made confrontation my playground. Between a playground bully, an internet troll, or being steeped in deviance decision-making, confrontation is my various breads and butters.
Regenerative fire is the soul reclaiming itself through destruction, ego deaths, and the end of false-identities. Through Herd Immunity and my social media history, I became world-class at calling out others’ shortcomings, but the time came to call out my own. My writings were the vehicle for this. I was calling out society for its foibles, but within that regenerative fire, I had to turn the pointed finger inward.
According to Gnostic teachings, the Phoenix represents the eternal soul’s ability to transcend time and illusion, dying not once, but repeatedly as it sheds layers of falsehood and returns to its essential self. “This mythical bird rises anew from its ashes after undergoing fiery trials—metaphorically illustrating how individuals can emerge transformed after facing personal hardships & challenges encountered during their own journeys toward spiritual awakening.”
Speaking of spiritual awakening, the Qabbalists have a name for the Supreme Deity, “signifying the expanse of the heavens, or spiritual fiery waters. Schamayim is ‘The Ocean of Spirit,’ within which all created and uncreated things exist and by the life of which they are animated. In the lower worlds Schamayim becomes the astral light.” It’s not enough to say we are beings of light or “made of stars” to cite Moby. Some argue we are made of spiritual fiery waters and that we don’t die, we are just recreated within the universe.
The Two-Headed Phoenix: Death and Desire
The double-headed Phoenix, as described in esoteric traditions, is a reminder that spiritual transformation isn’t about blind optimism. It’s about witnessing your own funeral and choosing to walk away. One head looks back, mourning what was; the other looks forward, burning with what could be. As SpiritualMojo puts it:
The Double Headed Phoenix is a powerful symbol of rebirth and renewal, embodying the cyclic nature of life, death, and regeneration.
This majestic creature, with its two heads facing opposite directions, signifies the continual process of self-transformation and the potential for rebirth from one’s ashes.
It serves as a potent reminder that endings are merely beginnings in disguise, and that growth often comes from periods of difficulty and destruction.
Just as a phoenix rises from the ashes, stronger and more beautiful than before, so too can individuals experience spiritual renewal and transformation after periods of adversity.9
Writing the Herd Immunity series has become that for me. Every page kills another part of whom I used to be—addicted to hyperreality, chasing illusions, hiding behind vices and dopamine scrolls. The work is a crucible; the book itself is fire. And every time I author another work, I’m changed. Regeneration “is the key to spiritual existence…a redemption of man through the union of a lower temporal nature with a higher eternal figure.”
It sounds pretentious, but so does the notion of physical reincarnation. The birth of my spiritual understanding of the universe occurred after the death of my literal, bookish knowledge of existence.
Alchemy Begins in Ashes
Alchemy is the science of multiplication and is based upon the natural phenomenon of growth. “Nothing from nothing comes,” is an extremely ancient adage. Alchemy is not the process of making something from nothing; it is the process of increasing and improving that which already exists.11
— Manly P. Hall., The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Whether the medieval practitioners of alchemy meant alchemy to be a discussion of the literal transmutation of metal or a metaphysical transformation of the soul is heavily debated. Manly P. Hall discussed this while researching the plurality of information regarding the origins of the Rosicrucian Order: “…adepts possessed the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone and knew the process of transmuting the base metals into gold, but taught that these were only allegorical terms concealing the true mystery of human regeneration through the transmutation of the ‘base elements’ of man’s lower nature into the ‘gold’ of intellectual and spiritual realization.”
He also directly cites the Confessio Fraternitatis, a sacred Rosicrucian tome:
When to a man is given power to heal disease, to overcome poverty, and to reach a position of worldly dignity, that man is beset by numerous temptations and unless he possesses true knowledge and full understanding, he will become a terrible menace to mankind. The alchemist who attains to the art of transmuting base metals can do all manner of evil unless his understanding be as great as his self-created wealth.13
Hall also argues that a popular theory of Rosicrucian origins is that Sir Francis Bacon had a hand in writing the Fama and the Confessio Fraternitatis, “on the basis that the rhetorical style of these works is similar to that of Bacon’s New Atlantis.” As a fan of Bacon and of renegades, I could see many of my favorite authors being “illuminated” or having belonged to the ancient Mysteries. It’s also argued that Hall himself was a 33rd degree Mason. While I don’t belong to any of these societies, nor was I schooled in the ancient Mysteries, as a historian and philosopher I see value in learning from both the ancient and modern philosophers. I can’t just cite Seinfeld and The Simpsons all the time…
RealityUnveiled: The Fire Has a Name
This site represents the next phase in my evolution as a writer and educator. It’s not another hokey influencer brand or mask. This is where I live out what I’ve written.
No more sleepwalking. No more hiding behind irony or aesthetic. Just fire, focus, and truth.
From the past Herd Immunity, to the present RealityUnveiled, and to the future Phoenix…