By Miguel Gutierrez—
Even under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms, Justin Kaniaupio Crespo felt there was a glass ceiling keeping him from an even more spiritual experience, so he dabbled in the occult.
“I see these gurus, these monks and I’m like, Oh man it seems like they understand the place, they’re at peace,” Justin says on a Delafe video. “I was like that’s really cool and maybe I’ll be a monk one day.”
Today Justin Kaniaupio Crespo, a native Hawaiian, is back to Jesus. The church hurt has been forgotten and forgiven. The deep dive into drugs and the Eastern mysticism ended with a demonic encounter that freaked him out.
Justin walked away from church because of legalism. The church put sinners on blast. To a youth they knew was fornicating, they “prophetically” declared in open assembly: “If you don’t come forward we’re just going to expose you to everyone, to all of the volunteers,” Justin remembers.
When he followed his girlfriend to New York, he was blindsided by the secular feel of the city. It was easy to fall into drinking with the friends he was making.
“I had my first try of marijuana. I took an edible,” he says. “It completely shifted so much for me, like it opened my eyes to just asking questions that I never would have asked I I was operating under religion.”
After living in New York for three years, he was fired from his job at age 26 and returned to Hawaii. Whereas before he had scolded his brother for smoking weed, he now was himself a total pothead and smoked avidly with his brother.
A friend introduced him to shrooms. His first trip was amazing.
“I saw the lines that kept me in my body started to fade away and I was like everything is one thing and I saw this light,” he recalls. “As I started to come down there there was just a space of peace and I was like, How do I stay here? How do I stay in this place of peace?”
Psychedelics became his norm. As the novelty wore off, he noticed that there was “glass ceiling. I would always say there’s something on the other side of this glass ceiling that I can’t access,” he reports.
The way to penetrate the glass ceiling, he decided, was through sobriety and mediation. He sought gurus, Buddhism, Hinduism and meditation to break the glass ceiling. He learned about ridding himself of his ego and acquiring a “Christ consciousness.” These were concepts of New Age occult. He got tarot cards and did readings.
But on a trip to Mexico with his girlfriend, he terrifying encounter with demons. “In the hotel room in the middle of the night, I smelled rotting meat,” he says. “I’d seen enough movies, they talk about rotting flesh. I thought it was a hoax until I experienced it in that room. I knew it was demonic.”
Back in Hawaii, his girlfriend started going to church, and Justin met up with her mentor and spilled his guts. He was surprised that the mentor didn’t judge him because that is what he was used to from his childhood church. “He just loved on me,” he says.
He began attending church. Then the pandemic locked down everyone. He spent hours and hours listening to sermons online. He threw out the tarot cards, stopped taking shrooms and stopped smoking marijuana.
His girlfriend got tapped to lead in a youth camp for kids of incarcerated parents, and Justin decided they needed to get married (previously he had thought they didn’t need a “piece of paper” marriage certificate to consider themselves married “before God”).
As his now-wife was raised up in church leadership, Justin also began taking on service roles in the church.
“Jesus is freedom and hope, my Savior and King – everything,” Justin says.
