Jericho Creative Studios

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Jericode is the story of the man I was before the walls fell, the experience that tore that identity apart, and the man who emerged afterward.

My name is Jericho Walls.

It wasn’t always.

Before that name found me, I had already lived through enough versions of myself to fill several lives. I was raised in a world where God was introduced to me through religion, fear, punishment, violence and control. I spent decades rejecting Christianity because I associated it with the cage that had been built around me, only to discover much later that some of the teachings I had been searching for were buried inside the very tradition I had walked away from.

Before the awakening, there was a lifetime of cracks.

My mother left when I was seven. There was violence in the house. There were beatings, poverty, instability, grief and things a child learns to bury because there is nowhere else to put them. I learned how to survive. I learned how to perform. I learned how to become whatever version of myself seemed necessary in the moment.

Those walls worked for a long time.

Until they didn’t.

I spent years trying on different lives. I became a musician. I chased Nashville. I performed, recorded, toured and lived for the stage. I became a firefighter for a time. I went to school for mechanics, earned a CDL, drove over the road, studied graphic design and business, built things, abandoned things, reinvented myself and kept searching for the life that would finally feel like mine. The_Jericode_Final-Final

Music came closer than almost anything.

There were shows, reviews, people around me, the appearance that something was happening. But even in the middle of all of it, there was still a void underneath. Eventually the lifestyle became part of the problem. Prescription pills became harder drugs. Drinking, partying and trying to keep up with the world around me became normal. The addiction escalated until I no longer felt normal without something in my system. I became angry. I became destructive. I became someone I barely recognized. The_Jericode_Final-Final

I also became the very thing I had once been hurt by.

I abandoned my children.

That is one of the hardest truths in this book, and I don’t soften it. I know what it looks like. I know what it cost. There are things I can explain, but explanation is not the same thing as excuse. The_Jericode_Final-Final

There were other addictions too. Attention. Sex. Noise. Being seen. Being wanted. Being at the center of the room. For years I thought I was chasing pleasure or success or freedom. Looking back, I think I was trying to fill something I didn’t yet know how to name. The_Jericode_Final-Final

Then came loss.

My mother died when I was twenty-five. My father died six months later. Two of the people who had shaped me more than anyone else were gone before I had made sense of what they had left inside me. By then the wall had already been cracking for years—the abandonment, the violence, my aunt’s murder, the grief, the marriages, the children, the addiction, all of it accumulating beneath the surface.

Eventually there was nowhere left for it to go.

In 2020, standing in a shower with water too hot to feel, I reached the end of myself.

I didn’t pray politely.

I gave the universe an ultimatum.

Is this it? Because if this is it, I can’t do it anymore.

You’ve got to show me something. Because I’m done.

That moment became the dividing line of my life. Not the end of my life. The end of the illusion I had been living inside. The_Jericode_Final_10

What followed is harder to explain.

There were psychedelic experiences, fasting, days without food, the stripping away of ordinary consciousness and eventually an experience I can only call the void.

No body.

No sound.

No walls.

No direction.

No memory of who I was.

And then a thought.

And light.

I had read the words Let there be light my entire life. For the first time, I felt as though I understood them from the inside. Whether someone interprets what happened to me spiritually, psychologically, neurologically or in some other way is up to them. I can only tell you what I experienced and what it did to me. The_Jericode_Final-Final

The LSD had opened the door earlier in that weekend, but the experience I describe as the void came later, after the drug itself had left my system and after days of fasting. I have since reached versions of that same place through meditation and fasting without psychedelics at all. I’m not telling anyone to repeat what I did. I’m telling you what happened to me. The_Jericode_Final-Final

And something changed.

The hard drugs stopped.

Not because I suddenly became disciplined. Not because I found religion. Not because somebody scared me straight.

The hunger changed.

Things that had controlled me began losing their grip. The man who once needed the room became increasingly comfortable without it. The noise got quieter. The performance began to fall away. The_Jericode_Final-Final

Only after the collapse, the void and the return did the name Jericho Walls appear.

I didn’t choose it because it sounded good.

I recognized it.

Jericho—the city whose walls fell.

Walls—because they had been mine.

The name became a declaration that the old container had broken and whatever came next could not be built from the same identity that had created the life before it. The_Jericode_Final-Final

From there I began looking again at everything I had rejected.

God.

Jesus.

The Gospel of Thomas.

The Nag Hammadi writings.

Hermeticism.

Consciousness.

Manifestation.

Synchronicity.

Identity.

The possibility that the kingdom we have spent centuries looking for somewhere outside ourselves may have been pointing inward the entire time.

I didn’t find a new religion.

I found language for something I felt I had already experienced.

And then I began building.

Books. Music. Jericho Creative Studios. Jericho Records. The Jericho Experiment. The Mystery School. The Well. What began as a collapse became a creative life I could not have imagined while I was still trying to preserve the old one. The_Jericode_Final-Final

But I’m careful with the word awakening.

It sounds too final.

Like you wake up once, understand everything and never fall asleep again.

That has not been my experience.

You wake up.

You drift.

You remember.

You forget.

Another layer breaks.

Another wall falls.

And you keep going.

I’m still going.

The Jericode is not the story of a man who figured everything out.

It is the story of a man who spent nearly forty years constructing an identity strong enough to survive his life, only to discover that the same walls protecting him had eventually become his prison.

It is about the boy who learned to hide.

The musician who tried to be seen.

The addict trying not to feel.

The father who repeated wounds he swore he never would.

The husband.

The dreamer.

The man standing in the shower demanding an answer.

The consciousness that disappeared into the void.

And the person who came back carrying a different name.

The walls fell. The real work began.