Topics covered:

• Present-moment awareness and memory difficulties

• The “Above, Middle, Below” model of awakening

• Witness consciousness and emotional detachment

• Spiritual superiority/arrogance

• Therapy alongside spiritual practice

• Different people need different spiritual “medicine”

• Monastic vs lay ideals and role models

• Healthy expression of anger

• Spirituality as embodiment, not escape

Connect with us:

• Oholomo’s website

• Jack’s website

• My Rising Rose YouTube channel

Whatever psychedelic practices you are using, if you wish to enhance and deepen your experiences of the Below, my advice is to work on opening up as many of your sensory channels to it as you can. For whatever reason, different people seem to have natural aptitudes for engaging with certain kinds of sensory stimuli while others remain relatively underdeveloped. In my case, my sense of vision and body sensations were naturally my strongest channels. For me, that meant that the whole range of imaginal experiences, energy flows, spirit visitations, and other aspects of the Below manifested most clearly as visionary and tactile experiences.

My visions began spontaneously. As I lay in bed before sleep one night, I started to have what I can only describe as a dream-like experience while I was still awake. The imagery was extremely vivid: I saw my body surrounded by an energetic egg of white light, which in turn was lying in the coils of a black snake. I could see the eyes of the snake, and the details of the coils quite clearly with eyes closed, although it would disappear if I opened my eyelids. From this initial event, I went on to have a great number of vividly real and profoundly meaningful visions — several per day — throughout the rest of my sojourn in the Below.

Almost all of these visions were accompanied by body sensations. These could be subtle, such as a general feeling of warmth or safety, or quite strong, such as a rush of fear or sexual energy. Over time, I realized that certain configurations of body sensations were associated with certain spirits, guides, or other imaginal entities I was seeing in my visions. For example, there was the spirit of an old indigenous South American woman that appeared to me visually, always accompanied by a feeling of weight on my back like I was carrying a backpack. There was the black jaguar spirit that felt like a rush of fear up the left back side of my body that sprang out in front of me from my left shoulder. There was a blonde angelic feminine figure whose presence I could feel walking alongside my right side, and whose hair sometimes would glance my cheek.

What I didn’t experience with any clarity was auditory signals. Only twice did I hear a voice clearly saying something to me. But other people are different, reporting frequent auditory communications in words or celestial music or other sounds. Here is how Jack, for example, talks about his interactions with his guides:

In terms of connecting with guides or spiritual beings, it started when I was asking myself questions, and I noticed that my head was either nodding or shaking in response to those questions. And then I realized that my body was being used by higher beings to answer the questions of my mind. I asked, “Are these my guides?” And then my head starts nodding. My mind was blown.

And then I asked a question, “What is the purpose of my life?” And the answer came through. I would say it was the auditory sense, but I wouldn’t even describe it as words. It was a felt sense, which could be interpreted into words. And the words were “You are to be a teacher and leader of man. You’re here to save humanity.” And it came from this place of utter peace, and truth and sincerity. There was no hint of ego or anything; it was just pure.

As time went on, I developed these auditory connections with spiritual beings where I would hear their voice inside my mind. You know, people talk about their mind’s eye; it was like my mind’s ear. Sometimes they’ll send me images, or I’ll close my eyes. And it’s like I’m watching a movie; I’ll just be experiencing all this stuff. And they’ll just explain things to me through that.

And on rare occasions, maybe only two or three times, I’ve heard an actual auditory sound in the room. And every time it’s the Morrigan. And there’ll be her talking to me, you know, I’ll hear her saying my name in the room.

But it’s mostly a feeling sense that could be interpreted into words. And that’s a fascinating form of communication. It’s almost like it’s 10 times the speed of speaking. So it’s like these waves of energy moving back and forth. And so you can have these like massive resolutions and insights and all sorts of stuff, in a super short period of time.

The main advice I want to share here is to start with the sensory channels that naturally seem to be the most open, and take steps to enhance those. If you naturally start to see visions, then perhaps you should move your practice time into a darkened environment where you can more readily see them. (I moved my morning practice from the back deck to my dark basement for exactly this reason.) If you naturally are prone to bodily sensations, then perhaps do some kind of practice that will enhance your receptivity to them. (For me, I discovered that repetitive movement practice such as qigong or ecstatic dancing was most effective.) If you are receiving auditory messages, then maybe you need to work more with sound. (That may perhaps mean moving to a totally silent practice space, or chanting out loud, or singing bowls, or some other kind of sound-based practice.)

Once you have figured out how to maximize the channels that come to you naturally, you can then turn to developing the ones that don’t. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to how to enhance sensory channels. For me, I found that I could enhance my auditory channel by ringing a bell and listening to shamanic drumming as part of my daily practice. I also found that the smell of burning tobacco, perfume, and other aromatic offerings had an evocative sensory effect. I am not telling you what to do specifically, but rather suggesting that you consciously pay attention to how the practices you are engaged in affect the sensory channels, and see if you can find a combination of set, setting, and technique that enhances the clarity and quality of the messages you are receiving. Whatever the specific details, the goal is to create imaginal experiences that you tangibly see, feel, hear, smell, and taste. Immersive multi-sensory experiences that are manifesting across as many sensory dimensions as you can manage will have a notable effect on strengthening and deepening your experience of the Below.

Over time you’ll create strong associations between certain sensory cues and certain experiences of the Below. Here’s Misha talking about the benefits of a multisensory immersive practice:

My primary, low hanging fruit sense modes are tactile — which is the whole body, not just surface — and I tend to get a lot of visuals. And then there’s felt sense stuff, which I’m not sure if that’s exactly just body or energy or what. Into that, I have introduced scent. I have medicine objects like specific stones, little bear fetishes, a twig from my ash tree outside. Of course, there is music, instrumentals, songs, and chants. On the more tactile end, a teddy bear that’s soft, so my system is like, “Ohhh… soothing… soft…” and that’s combined with my image of Bear as protector. And then darkness and posture.

And, if I’m wanting to enrich things, I also pay attention to multi-modality: using thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, desires, and actions. The more immersive my experiences, the more richness. When processes show up spontaneously at a low level of intensity, it can be much easier for me to just disregard them and not actively engage. However, more active engagement enriches the experiences. And the more full and intense they are, and the more any particular element is repeatedly included, then there’s this wonderful byproduct or associated effect of cueing the nervous system to a pay attention to that kind of information in the future. Even if there’s not conscious attention being paid, the nervous system is paying attention to things in the environment.

The more you enrich it and the longer it lasts, the more it installs, the more deeply the system is sinking into the experience. The nervous system learns this, and then these specific sensory elements can later act as cues to prep the system to say, “I’m going into this state, or I’m doing this kind of work, or I’m going to engage in whatever.”

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Once again, this material can come forth either in the form of impersonal energies and forces, or as discrete entities. For example, ancestral material is often experienced as a thicket of intergenerational trauma, racial trauma, or issues related to culture and heritage that need to be untangled. Alternatively, it can be experienced as visitation from the spirits or ghosts of specific ancestors. In the case of past life material, the journeyer may experience feelings, memories, emotions, or other phenomena that seem to come from previous incarnations; or, they may be visited by a previous self, or experience becoming that previous self for a time, seeing through those eyes.

For me, a major part of my experience of the Below was what I would call ancestral trauma. My late grandfather had a difficult upbringing in Colombia, and we were never allowed to speak to him about his family or background. But, late in life he revealed to a family member that he was half indigenous. That’s about all I knew about that side of my family heritage, and to be honest, I hadn’t thought about it in much detail or looked into any information about indigenous Colombian people.

But, when I had that Kundalini event where the serpentine body deva revealed herself, one of the things I did to try to understand what was happening to me was to research serpent goddesses. Naturally, I started with Asian goddesses in order to see if I could find an image that matched the description of the one I was experiencing in my visions. I had a clear image in my mind’s eye of what I was looking for. I found a few images online of Kundalini, Nagkanyas, and other Asian serpent spirits, and Echidna from Greek mythology, but nothing was fitting perfectly.

Then, one day, I had a visionary experience where again I saw this goddess, but also some other imaginal symbols — a jaguar, an Indigenous person’s face, a waterfall in a jungle. This made me think to look for a serpent goddess associated with indigenous South American cultures. A fraction of a second after typing a few Spanish keywords into Google, I found myself breathlessly staring at the exact image I had been seeing in my mind, a statue called “Bachué, diosa generatriz de los chibchas” (i.e., “Bachué, Mother Goddess of the Chibchas”) sculpted by the Colombian artist Rómulo Rozo in 1925 (see Fig. 3).

FIG. 3. Bachué, diosa generatriz de los chibchas, Rómulo Rozo, 1925.
(Source: Wikimedia.)

This image of Bachué would become the single most powerful symbol in my journey through the Below, the organizing image of my entire imaginal world, and my principal spiritual teacher. I already mentioned that this goddess is none other than my body deva. What’s significant to emphasize here in this section about ancestors is that, although you might expect that such a tremendously impactful image would have arisen from one of the Asian religions I had spent such a huge amount of my life studying and practicing, it arose out of my ancestral heritage, even though I knew next to nothing about that culture.

Once I knew that this image was coming from my Indigenous roots, this part of my heritage opened up for me a great deal. In the succeeding months, I began to experience more and more imaginal phenomena related to South America. Over those same months, through a series of really astonishing synchronicities, I also came into possession of photos, ID cards, and other memorabilia from my Colombian grandfather’s parents and grandparents — people whose very existence was never allowed to be mentioned in my family. My heritage was coming alive, and was intervening as an autonomous force into my life!

However, as my indigenous ancestry came more into focus, the portion of my DNA that comes from European settlers in South America did as well. Catholic imagery became much more pronounced in my imaginal world, introduced both by my maternal and paternal side. Now, I found myself imaginally reckoning with what felt to be a conflict between two different sides of my own genetic code. I experienced visions of the genocide of one side of my ancestry perpetrated by the warfare and violence of the other. The details of how those visions played out and how they came into resolution are a story for another time. For now, I just want to reiterate yet again how important it is to engage with the imaginal symbols or images. The more interest you take in them, the more you allow them to unfold and reveal deeper and deeper resonances.

Another type of experience that I want to draw out here is how individual ancestors can allow you to see through their eyes or inhabit their bodies in a kind of time-bending experience. I’ll turn it over to Jack again for a story about this kind of interaction with one of his ancestors:

I was in Marseilles traveling with my partner at the time and we went on a small boat to go to one of the islands off the coast. It’s the first time since I’d started to awaken that I was on the Mediterranean Sea. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was in the British Navy, a commander of a destroyer during the Second World War, and his ship was sunk by German U boats in the Mediterranean, and he spent three years as a prisoner of war.

And, when I was on the sea, I suddenly started getting these images flashing into my mind from the bridge of a warship. It was like I was looking through my grandfather’s eyes, and feeling what he was feeling.

And through his eyes I saw this little speck on the horizon on the sea. And then I saw a flash and I realized he had just seen the guns go off on an enemy warship. And it was his first time that happened and he froze and was so afraid, because he realized this isn’t a simulation anymore; this is real. That’s actual artillery fire from a warship firing at my ship, and I’m responsible for the lives of all of these men. And I remember the fear, and the shock and disbelief.

But what it’s done is helped me understand him and what he went through and the way that his experiences, the fear that he had, have been a part of my own life. And through connecting with him I’ve been more able to release that fear. It’s good; it’s cathartic for me.

The kind of catharsis Jack is describing can also come through experiencing past lives. In Above-based spirituality, the emphasis is normally on releasing the trauma or karmic burdens of past lives so that the individual soul can become lighter or more spiritually evolved. In the Below version of past life recall, as always, the emphasis is not to transcend or release but to welcome and fully embody the past, so that it can become liberated to express itself in the here and now.

Here’s my friend Kini describing her encounters with one of her past lives, who emerged as a guide in her shamanic journeying and soul-retrieval practice:

The only way I can describe it is that it was like a spontaneous download. I got this full packet of information about this past life of mine as an African shaman who was very stocky, and strong, and kind of low to the ground, and powerful, very grounded. And I got his name, Umkumbe, his history, and even how he died.

This was just spontaneous. I didn’t reach out, I wasn’t looking, but it just came as a download. I knew he was a guide, but I also knew he was me in a past life. There was a sense of support and grounding, in part because he was so solid. He also had white ash on his body, which was like he was shielded or protected in some way.

Umkumbe has been with me ever since. He’s my shamanic guide, and when I go to do work in the underworld, for myself or for clients, he’s there and supports me and whatever work I need to do, and he’ll heal or guide. I’ll go down into the underworld through a hole in a tree at a specific place where I grew up, go down the tree trunk into the earth, and come out in the underworld. And he’s always there with his cloth laid out and implements, and I’ll sit down with him. And he’ll present me with objects or situations that I must navigate in order to learn a lesson.

Whatever way ancestral and past life materials manifest, what is wanted is a full accounting of all the ways that our being has been shaped by deep history. It turns out that the ego, which has always thought of itself as the master of its own destiny, has been wrong all along. As we learn to welcome, communicate with, and remonstrate with ancestors and past lives, we come to see how little of our present lives have ever been under our control. We come to realize how events long past continue to shape our present experiences in ways that have been invisible, unappreciated, or even denied by the ego. We find out that our genetic and karmic inheritances have given us both blessings and burdens, and realize the steps that need to be taken in order to receive the former and rectify the latter.

Working to unearth, appreciate, and fully embody all of these structural influences allows us to walk through life with a confidence and self-composure that is liberating. A sense of completeness that can only come from thoroughly knowing and understanding the makeup of our being. There are no hidden skeletons in the closets, no shameful secrets we hide from ourselves or the world, no historical wrongs or injustices that we aren’t fully owning and inhabiting.

We will also likely experience our work in the Below being deeply beneficial for the whole chain of ancestors and past lives stretching out into the past, as well as for living family members and children yet to be born. While I was working with my ancestral material, for example, I saw visions of an infinite web of relations, stretched out and interconnected with one another like a vast fishing net. And I saw me stitching and mending this net, retying its frayed ends and washing it clean to restore it to its original vibrant colors, revitalizing this network of ancestral support and connection for all my relations across time and space.

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Another place where a sense of autonomy and alienness emerges — sometimes to our great surprise and consternation — is in our relationship to the physical body. On any spiritual journey, our relationship with the body tends to undergo radical transformations. In the Above, for example, the body is one of those things that we Transcend beyond. In fact, de-identification with the material form through the realization that “I am not my body” is often one of the first things that propel people into this trajectory. As nondual realization dissolves the subject-object division, we see that what we thought of as “the body” is a mere collection of sensations floating around within awareness — or appearing within a void, depending on your flavor of nonduality. As a deeper level of nondual deconstruction takes hold, those body sensations also are seen through. The body dissolves into tiny particles of energy that barely can even be said to arise at all. As the quality of divinity comes to the foreground, this empty and insubstantial body can take on the qualities of pulsation, bliss, joy, and divinity. A “body of light” or a “rainbow body,” as they say in some traditions.

Moving into the Below is a totally different story. In the Below, the body is not transcended or dissolved. Rather, it comes alive as its own autonomous intelligent being. Again, there’s a difference between those who experience this intelligence as an energy or impersonal force and those for whom it is a personified entity. For the former, there is a knowingness, wisdom, or felt sense that the body somehow seems to possess, quite autonomously from our mental apprehension or perceptions of it. This autonomous intelligence asserts itself spontaneously, taking control of the awakening process, healing old wounds, and activating, energizing and balancing out the energetic system. Here is how a friend named Misha described her experience of this process:

I wake up most nights two hours after I went to bed. I feel a particular energetic quality, a kind of arousal or activation that’s been going on for years. I’ve joked with friends that this is “life having its way with me.”

I’m in a liminal state. I feel intuitively guided to engage in different ways. The body begins making spontaneous, organic, symmetrical movements that are dancelike. My hands move into very precise, mudra-like postures. I vocalize, though not usually in words. I might tremble or shake. I may find myself pressing hard on areas of blockage, such as the throat or liver. From the outside, these things might look like possession. From the inside, I’m opening, expanding, clearing, releasing, healing, awakening.

I find myself doing energy work with and on my body, encountering and resolving psychological issues. Waves of emotion may arise, need to be felt, expressed, released. I sob away old hurts. Chakras or other energy centers may activate, energies may move around in a multitude of ways. Many kinds of spiritual experiences and insights occur. At times it’s like the deep phase of a psychedelic journey. Sometimes sexual energies arise and I engage with those.

Generally, I just stay very receptively present and notice what happens or wants to express. Sometimes I use some of these periods to listen to recorded meditations or dharma talks, or feel guided to go outdoors and bask under the night sky. Nowadays, even if I’m not paying full attention, whatever process wants to happen just happens anyway.

An episode might last between 10 and 90 minutes, or sometimes even longer. When several occur in a night, which is more often than not, there is generally a progression in the processes that occur. The last round generally begins about an hour before dawn.

These experiences feel purposeful and directional. Even when I can’t recall precisely what shifted, progressed, or resolved, I can feel beneficial differences in my being.

I can totally relate to Misha’s experience, and had something quite similar happening with me. However, people who are more attuned to entities, as I am, will likely also experience the autonomous intelligence of the body as a distinct creature with its own agenda and will. The spiritual teacher and healer Mary Mueller Shutan calls this the “body deva” (deva means a spirit or a deity in Sanskrit), a term that I feel is quite apt in describing my own experiences.

I met my body deva during a Kundalini event that kicked off my initial Descent into the Below. When Kundalini arose, it felt like my whole body was taken over by a serpentine goddess. Over the course of the next year, I kept having visionary experiences of this entity: a feminine form that was half serpent, half human, with dark, black, scaly coils below and radiant sunshine pouring out from her head above. When she appeared, she would often enter my body and begin to move me around. She would teach me qigong-like sequences combining breathing and visualization. She would use light and energy to heal and empower my body.

This goddess became one of the primary entities in my imaginal lexicon, a powerful symbol that I felt was speaking to me at a visceral level. And, for all of that time, I took this entity to be a goddess that was wholly external to me. However, eventually, this goddess revealed herself in a powerful visionary experience to be none other than my own body’s inner consciousness. From that point onwards, she no longer felt alien or like she was “taking over.” Rather, this goddess became the symbol or icon for my own body in my imaginal world. Working with her in this way, she became so closely associated with my experience of my own body that it’s now entirely natural for me to think of my physical body as this goddess.

In whatever way it manifests, whether as a relationship with an intelligent energy or an entity, in a Descent, the quality of the interactions between you and your body are of the most intimate nature. In order to engage in this relationship, what the body needs is for you to hear and accept its deepest truths. It needs you to give it the space and time to tell you about its memories, traumas, and wisdom. The whole time that your ego-self has been deeply identified with the body, it has ignored, walled off, and repressed these uncomfortable truths. The ego has repeatedly told the body that it needs to be quiet, to shut down, to deny parts of itself, in order to be safe.

In an Awakening from Below, as the body begins asserting its independence and autonomy, the ego-self often has no choice but to place aside its preferences and allow this communication to take place. What the body reveals when it is listened to can be crushing to the ego, and this unburdening process can for many be one of the most difficult areas of the Below. Eventually, though, you learn to meet the body with loving patience and acceptance, without ego-identification or the impulse to recoil. You hold it in a loving embrace and allow it to speak its truths no matter how difficult. You learn to surrender to the process, and to allow the body to express itself, and through this, to heal itself.

Here is how Lisa experienced this kind of opening:

Right from the start I had to give my body over to this process. This body, as I once knew it, was no longer mine. A few days after my initial transcendent awakening experience, where I was shown I was pure light and was visited by both God and Jesus, my whole body exploded internally, releasing all the pain and trauma that was stored in each and every cell.

This pain contained traumas that I had known, traumas that I thought I had already worked through and resolved, and traumas that I had absolutely no memory of. I remember thinking, I cannot believe a human body could hold so much pain! How could such a thing actually be possible? I went from someone who was incredibly active, always moving, going to the gym, going on hikes, always engaged in active projects, cleaning and cooking and stretching and moving, to someone who couldn’t even walk down the street due to the insurmountable emotional pain I felt in my system.

I had to descend down into the depths of my shadows. Allowing myself to be taken over by a sense of pure ugliness and disgust. Memories of awful experiences from childhood and thoughts of any harm that I have ever experienced over the course of my life surfaced. I found myself wanting to hide any aspect of beauty or attraction from the world. I was cloaked and clouded in ugliness, in an aura of dullness. My life went from somewhat difficult but certainly enjoyable, to entering into the complete depths of this inner darkness.

I knew on a very deep level from that point forward my only job was to surrender to this pain, allowing it to consume me completely. My body was no longer mine, there was a much bigger process taking place now. Something far beyond what my own mind could understand or try to control.

While it can be excruciatingly painful at first, over time, a foundation of trust builds. The body goes from being a source of shame, disappointment, and disillusionment to being a deep well of groundedness and intimacy. It goes from feeling alien to feeling like an old friend and companion. There is a sweetness to the energy that is shared between you, like between two old lovers who have been enamored with each other for decades.

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What lies on the other side of the Abyss? What could you possibly find at the heart of a black hole of infinite darkness? Well, when you finally totally surrender and die to the thing you have feared the most, a most astonishing and profound transformation takes place. This is at once the deepest mystery of the Below and also the simplest thing imaginable. Spoiler alert: it turns out that the thing that your ego has always feared the most is exactly the elixir that, all along, your soul has been called to gather up.

It has always been so. This has been the central tension throughout your entire life: you have unconsciously been pouring an enormous amount of energy into denying, repressing, holding at bay, and otherwise ignoring this existential terror. But, when you finally accept the Abyss and allow it to fully consume you, you realize that behind this terror had always lain nothing less than the very destiny that your entire life has been preparing you for and that your entire being has been perfectly designed to fulfill.

To put it bluntly, you realize that what you have always been deeply, utterly terrified to accept is the fact that the elixir is actually you.

Of course, I don’t mean that the elixir is the ego-you, but I also don’t mean it’s just the part of you that is awareness, or your heart, or your higher self, or any other specific part of you. The elixir found in the Below is the whole of you, every level and layer of you, including all the virtues and kindness and open-heartedness, of course, but also all the traumas; all the wounds; all the unconscious aspects of your psyche; your physical body and its energies; all the decisions, successes, and disappointments in your life story; and all the hidden ancestral, karmic, natural, and material structures all way down to every last atom.

When you Transcend through the Above and into the Void, you experience ego death because you go beyond all reality and even consciousness itself ceases to exist. Ego death is totally different in the Abyss. When your ego dies in the Abyss, every other aspect of your whole being is completely present. The death of the ego allows these parts to autonomously heal themselves. It allows them to become relaxed, undefended, and liberated from all that controlling and micro-management. All of it can now be awake and alive and vibrant, for the first time free to actually be the elixirs that they all along have wanted to be.

What word can we use to capture all of that? Plotkin speaks of “soul initiation,” and I personally love that term. Yes, to me, the awakened being can indeed be called the soul, and the transit through the Descent and down into Abyss for sure is an initiation. But, because both of those words have a lot of other connotations and are used in various different ways that could be confusing or off-putting for some people, let’s just use a neutral term like “coherence” instead.

I call what lies beyond the Abyss coherence because, once you have been initiated into the totality of your awakened being, the entire journey through the Below, no matter how difficult, is seen to always have been perfectly orchestrated to arrive at this exact moment. All the pieces fit together, and everything turns out to have been both necessary and completely worth it. All of the imaginal phenomena, spirits and energies — even all the drama and terror around the Abyss — snaps into alignment. Or rather, they are all revealed to have been in perfect alignment with the soul’s plan all along.

I mentioned earlier that, during my own Descent, I had approached the Abyss many times over the course of two years, and that I had repeatedly recoiled from that precipice in fear. As the experiences came more and more frequently, I prayed to all of my guides for help and guidance. I also reached out to my good friend Jack. By this time, he and I had become quite close through sharing the details of our spiritual experiences and giving each other support and advice. When I asked him how he dealt with the Abyss of terror that lurked at the bottom of the Below, in typically Jack fashion, he responded with the advice to lean in and embrace the darkness. “Just reach down into that chasm,” he said, “pull up all the terror you find down there, and spread it to the four directions, surrounding yourself in a sphere of fear.”

It sounded to my ego-ears like exactly the worst advice imaginable, but early one morning not long after, as I did my predawn meditation, I resolved that the next time I found myself at the edge of the Abyss I would do exactly what Jack had said. After meditation, I felt sleepy, so I took a nap before continuing with the rest of my practices.

While I slept, I had a distinctly imaginal dream. For many years, I had different versions of a dream where I am pulling on a string that goes down my throat into my stomach. As I pull and pull on that thread, mucus and bugs and various other nasty things come out from inside. That morning, however, for the very first time, I came to the end of the string. With one final tug, something deep in my abdomen released and there was a sensation of deep visceral relaxation. I immediately awoke.

Feeling that this was a good omen, I continued with my morning practice of drum-assisted visualization. Practically as soon as I closed my eyes, the Abyss was there before me. Like many others also report, I experienced it as a deep black tunnel located at my perineum. The Abyss felt like a chasm of fear underneath me, a roiling ocean of terror upon which no stable ground could possibly be found. Specifically, it was fear of madness and annihilation — and, deeper at the core, fear of loss of control.

So many times in the past, I had arrived at this precipice and had recoiled, but this time I felt I was ready. With Jack’s advice still fresh in my mind, I decided I would reach down into the black hole and unleash the darkness. In my visionary mind’s eye, I placed my hands down into the depths. My physical heart was pounding and every cell in my body was telling me to run away. But, I simply accepted and surrendered to whatever was about to happen.

As my whole being screamed in terror, I grabbed a handful of the darkness and drew my hands up to “place it in the four directions” around me, as Jack had advised. But, as I opened my hands, I made the most astounding discovery of my life. I found I was holding a golden, liquid light with the quality of the most profound and divine love imaginable.

I must have done something wrong! I reached down again into the Abyss, looking for the darkness, trying to grab ahold of the terror that had been so menacing, but each time I pulled up my hands, there was nothing in them but radiant love, all the way down. I realized in that moment that the terror the ego had felt about going mad and being swallowed up by the Abyss was always just love in disguise. I realized that all the machinations of the ego had been due to the love my being had for itself, for my family, for life, and for the world. I realized that all of it — every last it of suffering and pain I had ever experienced — was always just another face of love. There never had been a problem in the first place! I burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all, as a wave of bliss shot through my body and lit up my scalp.

And just in that instant, I saw the form of the goddess Bachué. Like in every other vision I had ever had of her, she was wearing a mask of tranquil equanimity (see Fig. 3). But this time, she took it off and revealed her true face underneath, which I recognized as none other than my own brilliant soul.

Seeing that vision, everything snapped together at once. Up until that moment, I had been relating to all of the aspects of the Below that I have been describing here in this chapter as separate entities, spirits, deities, and forces. But, now, like a series of Russian dolls nested one within the next, they all clicked together. I knew in that moment that all of the guardians and protectors, the power animals, the angel of sexual energy, the body deva, and all of the higher imaginal beings and goddesses with whom I had been communicating throughout my sojourn in the Below — all, without exception — were part of one single, multifaceted being. It was also clear that all of the ancestors, past lives, natural forces, and structural elements, as well as my own personal biography, were all parts of this being as well.

All of the aspects of this multidimensional being cohered into Bachué’s body, with each piece of the overall puzzle assuming a different location within her form. This whole assemblage then merged with my body, and the brilliant golden light of my soul, Bachue’s true face, flooded the whole system. It exploded out the top of my head, creating a blazing mandorla of radiance and bliss around me.

Now that it’s been a few years since this coherence event, it’s not that the process of awakening was complete, leaving me fully enlightened (although it certainly did feel like it for a little while!). Make no mistake about it: my ego has come back on line a million times since that day. But that is perfectly okay, because now I know that, despite all its fumbling and bumbling, it too is made of love. Astonishingly, on the other side of the Abyss, it turns out that even the ego can be welcomed back as a coherent part of the awakened whole.

The way I am describing my experience here suggests a single, magnificent coherence event that reveals the alignment behind everything all at once, accompanied by a lot of imaginal fireworks and the peals of angel’s trumpets. As you’ve no doubt realized by now, I am prone to these kinds of dramatic mystical experiences, and this event was no exception. But, that’s just one way of experiencing it. For other people, coherence on the other side of the Abyss may be more of a gradual process, a whole chain of happenings taking place over many years or even decades, where different aspects are gradually brought into coherence. To illustrate, here’s a story from Jack, comparing his ongoing process of coherence to my sudden definitive moment:

I think we’ve gone through a similar process at a different speed. For you it was instant, and for me it’s been over several years. I have felt greater and greater coherence with all the different levels of life, like I am unifying with them. There are lots of stories not just one.

The overall theme is a deep trust in life, and a realization that I am life, and a letting go into all of that. It’s like a surrender. I don’t have to do anything to become more free, because the ego doesn’t have to control anything. So, I just allow myself as life to take my form, and I use my form as it needs to be used. You could say that this is my sole mission, but I don’t have to do anything to achieve it.

I used to be dragged kicking and screaming into things, but now my trust in life is so much higher. I’ll know when I’m supposed to do something, or where I’m supposed to go, and I just do it. There’s a lot less inner resistance and I don’t feel like I need to know as much as I used to. So I can trust in the flow of life.

Your own final coherence might come as a spectacular divine revelation or as a quiet whisper of relief after a long series of insights. Either way, there will come a moment when the perfection of the whole finally falls into place. When that happens, there will be no doubt in your mind that the work of Descent has been completed. It’s like a veil suddenly lifts, or like dawn suddenly breaks. For perhaps the first time in a long time, you suddenly feel human again. You realize that your work of being alchemized in the Below is finished. It is time to begin the Return.

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People talk a lot about paranormal abilities emerging spontaneously during an awakening process. Some people consciously try to acquire or develop such abilities. Some traditions hold that the emergence of these powers is an important marker of spiritual attainment, and some even say that not having them means you are not awakened. Conversely, the Buddha is famous for saying that all such powers are a distraction, or even a perversion of spirituality. Here, I’ll offer you my thoughts, which is a different take than any of those positions.

I agree that it seems to be the case that all sorts of paranormal effects can occur when you are navigating the Below. I think of these effects as falling onto a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, uncanny or weird events can be associated with certain states of consciousness. These may be paranormal, but they don’t have profound spiritual meanings. For example, in my own experience, I developed for a period of a few months extraordinarily strong powers of smell. In Misha’s case, she sometimes experiences weirdness with electrical appliances:

If my energy gets too intense, into a “screechy” kind of frequency, it interferes with electronics. I have this one particular CD player that, if the energy gets too screechy, will pause the CD until I calm the energy down enough, and then it starts playing again from exactly where it was paused. And it can happen with Zoom as well.

It also happens with this one friend. I don’t know why, but it’s something about her technology. So that when my energy starts getting screechy, then she starts having problems with hearing me through her device. This doesn’t happen with other people’s phones, but just with that one particular person’s phone.

So, yeah, I can interfere with electronic devices, although I don’t do it on purpose. That would be kind of a nice party trick if I could do it on purpose, right?

Beyond these meaningless kinds of effects, there are also those paranormal abilities that can be considered gifts or blessings. These are often called siddhis, using a Sanskrit word meaning “accomplishment.” Jack talked with me about some of the kinds of powers or abilities that he has discovered and developed through his process of Awakening from Below:

I guess one of the funny things with the whole awakening experience is that when things start to open up, they become very ordinary very quickly. So, something that someone else might think is a siddhi, I might not even have realized or conceptualized in that way.

Like, I can see divine light, this golden white light, shining out of every object, every human being, everything. And, what I learned after a few years of seeing that was that when human beings are baring their soul, this light shines more brightly. And if I focus on it with an open heart and a lot of presence, it will shine more brightly. It’s like I help people to heal by holding their spirit with my spirit, but through my eyes. Just by seeing them, they become unburdened and their soul shines more brightly. So you could call that a siddhi. I use it for the healing of others, and I benefit by being healed and opened at the same time.

There’s also the beings that I channel: some people might say that’s a siddhi to be able to communicate with deities and dragons. And to allow them to occupy my body and flow through my body, and to speak to people through me. To be a link between their world and the human world. And I deliver messages from them to support people who are listening to me, and to do healing work with other people. And I can feel them expanding my consciousness too. They’ll focus in on a trauma held inside of the body of the person I’m working with, and then expand the field of consciousness so that I can sense where that trauma links to past lifetimes or other points in time in space. So that the trauma isn’t just held in this body in this moment in time, it now links to all moments in time and space. That, you could say, is a siddhi that I’m using to help people heal.

And then, there’s manifesting prosperity, which some people also would call a siddhi. The dragons I channel also are deities of wealth. They would be like, “Jack, you do realize that in all of the stories, we sleep on piles of gold, right? There’s a reason for that!” It’s all about flows of energy. You are this whole cosmos and this whole Earth, and that’s where all abundance flows from. All abundance that anyone can ever have, it always flows from the cosmos and from the earth, and it flows through energy channels. So, if you are blocking the channels of abundance that exist inside your body with shame or trauma, you are blocking the flow of the earth and you are blocking the flow of the cosmos. So by unblocking it, by allowing the cosmos and the earth to provide for you, you are allowing the cosmos and the earth to flow, you are undamming a river. You are doing that as a gift for the cosmos for the earth and for yourself.

In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with courting synchronicity, premonition, or blessings in your life like the ones Jack is describing. There’s also nothing wrong with asking higher powers, ancestors, and other spirit guardians for guidance, help, or support — whether with spiritual matters or with mundane things like money or a job. But, I do believe it is a perversion of spirituality and an enormous karmic fault if you ever use siddhis you gained from your spiritual practice for greedy ends or to harm others.

That is why, in my opinion, if you start moving in the direction of cultivating paranormal powers — either intentionally or spontaneously — it is imperative to take responsibility to ensure that any powers you develop are used to benefit and never to harm others. Therefore, I think your first act of magic should be to place a permanently limiting spell on yourself that will prevent any siddhi you ever gain in the future from possibly ever bringing suffering to another being. At the same time, you should vow that any power you do gain, if you ever tried to use it for unenlightened purposes, would be immediately rendered ineffectual. With that limiting spell in place, then I think you can invite siddhis that will benefit all beings to emerge and to flow through you, as necessary, in order to help where needed. Set the intention and forget it. You need not cultivate any specific powers, but just see what arises naturally to meet the needs of the moment. And, whatever does arise, don’t ever cling to it as it moves through you. Remember that it’s never about you; it’s only ever about spreading love and alleviating suffering.

Another thing you don’t want to get hung up on is figuring out whether paranormal powers are real. As I’ve said now many times, you’ll do best to abandon that whole line of thinking, since any specific answer to the question will only serve to limit the possibilities of the mystery.

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I was lucky that, when my Descent began, I was almost immediately introduced to Bachué. Thus, my journey into the Below began with a positive and empowering encounter. The fact that I was having such a vivid vision of this goddess was bizarre, and her half-demonic appearance was disconcerting to be sure. But, I had no doubt that the content of the vision was beneficent and supportive, and that allowed me to more easily accept and embrace what was happening.

My friend Lisa also experienced a spontaneous encounter with the beneficent and helpful masculine presences of God and Jesus right at the beginning of her process:

I think that my whole life I felt very misunderstood. That’s been a big theme for me. Once, I felt like everyone was watching me and laughing at me, and I was feeling so horribly embarrassed. I lay in my bed and I was just feeling really small, and all of a sudden, it was just immediate that God and Jesus were here. It was a knowing with my whole experience, an emotional knowing where everything just clicked in. I knew it was them, and I knew that we were all merged. Everything couldn’t be more perfect, you know, just amazing.

I felt it physically that there was this masculine energy just coming behind me and holding me, supporting me, comforting me, and offering me this soothing newness when I felt so alone. It felt completely real. Actually, it kind of scared me a little bit because it literally felt like a physical person by me, like actual physical touch.

I was never raised religious or anything like that, but I feel that energy all the time now. And I feel them a lot when I walk, like somebody next to me. Towards the end, Jesus has been coming in and teaching me different things. And then, recently, he told me to see all men as him. And, he’s been giving me like hints and clues about how to open myself more or how to go deeper into the awakening. It’s been a communication for myself only, just the opening of energetic space. It’s passive, but it’s also active. It’s a total allowance, opening and just allowing. That’s how I kind of describe it.

Other people are not so fortunate as Lisa and I, and may spend time struggling alone in the Below without any helpful beings who can provide guidance. For this reason, I think that finding a beneficial higher power is a top priority. The Below is a dark and fearsome place, but a powerful and compassionate being can hold your hand and light the way as you traverse the underworld.

If you don’t currently have a guide, who can you call upon to be one? There is no one right answer, no single highest being that is a good fit for everyone’s unique imaginal configuration. The right answer is to reach out to whoever will work for you. If you’re unsure, one exercise I sometimes suggest people do is what I call the “crashing plane thought experiment.” Imagine or visualize that you are flying in a plane when suddenly both engines fail. You start plummeting to the ground, and there is no chance of survival. If this were to actually happen to you, in that minute or so that you have left to live before the plane meets its fiery end, who would your desperate heart spontaneously call out to for help? Who might possibly have the power to perform a miracle? Who would you wish to hold your hand as you die?

If there’s someone who comes to mind while doing this thought experiment, then try calling out to that being for help in the Below. If it’s not a particular entity, but an abstract quality such as Truth, Love, or Compassion, then go ahead and use that. However, if nothing in particular comes to mind, then you can also just make a general call. In one of your practice sessions, when you have built up some psychedelic momentum and your sensory channels feel particularly open, try asking for a higher power to make themselves available to you.

Who will hear your call and emerge as your helper(s) may not be possible to guess beforehand. Remember the story I told about how I automatically assumed that my guides would be Asian deities, and how I initially rejected outright the idea of working with María? Since that time, I have also developed a close relationship with the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Quan Yin. But I also am very intimate with the radiant Pagan sun goddess Sol, who I had never even heard of before she appeared to me. A whole panoply of other guides, including angelic feminine goddess figures as well as power animals, have all become a regular part of my imaginal world, but I would never have guessed that they would play such a central role. Remember also Jack’s story about initially misunderstanding Kali’s intentions to nourish him due to her frightful appearance. My point is simply that help may come in the form you least expect, so don’t reject whatever guidance comes to you just because it doesn’t fit with your expectations.

That being said, you don’t want to just jump into a relationship with a powerful being willy nilly. My suggestion is to make the call for a higher power and see who shows up. When they do, if they are a being of light that is universally recognized as beneficial — a Buddha or bodhisattva, Jesus, Virgin Mary, a Hindu deity, Ramana Maharshi, etc. — then you can trust them.

But, what if the being who answers your call is not one you recognize? In this case, I would advise that you spend some time asking them questions. Who are they? What kinds of energy do they embody? What kinds of values do they stand for? Is there another being standing behind them that is even more powerful? If so, what are their qualities? Also an important question to ask any being is will you be able to “break up” with them if things don’t work out? (The answer better be yes — no truly beneficial being will require vows of fidelity or other kinds of obligations.)

Take a few days and do some research, or return to ask them more questions and get an increasingly better feel for who this being is. Only when you’ve fully vetted them and feel very confident should you let them into your life and let them advise you on your journey. And, once you do, remember you are spiritually sovereign and don’t ever let anyone — no matter who they are — force you into something that isn’t right for you. Your relationship with a higher power guide or protector should always feel beneficial, supportive, and empowering. You should never feel like you have taken on the inferior role in an asymmetrical relationship, or like you have lost any of your autonomy. A true guide or protector strengthens and nourishes your boundaries and personal power, never depletes or diminishes them.

As you dwell in the Below, you will continue to meet more and more beneficial beings who can serve different types of functions in your journey. Some of these will be more powerful than others. In my case, María, Quan Yin, and Sol are at the apex. For me, they are all actually manifestations of different facets of the Mother, by which I mean the absolute highest, most sacred and holy goodness in the cosmos. In addition to them, various ancestral and animal spirits provide specific types of assistance. The jaguar helps with journeys into the underworld; the owl with death and ghosts; one ancestral guide with absorbing troubles and generating blessings; another with enhancing my perception of the imaginal; and many others. Each one of these beings has their own particular potencies, and are called forth to meet particular circumstances. Bachué, my body deva, is the overall container or embodiment for all of these beneficial powers, the vehicle by which their blessings come out into the world. Of course, your pantheon and how you see them fitting together will be totally different than mine. As it should be. Since no two of us are exactly the same, no two imaginal worlds will line up perfectly eye-to-eye!

Once you’ve worked with your guides for a while and have developed deeper trust in them, it may be symbolically and emotionally significant to make a commitment to them in some way. Here’s Jack’s story of how he got a tattoo as an act of commitment to his dragon guides:

This tattoo was kind of like a blessing and imbuing of the quality of the Dragon into me, into my skin. It was like a sign of my commitment to the dragons.

I’ll often channel them and they’ll say things to me like “Our greatest obstacle in supporting you is you. You know, it’s humans resisting us and preventing us from being able to support them because humans subconsciously believe that they have to do everything by themselves, and don’t realize that they’re part of this cosmos, which is a single living being. We can do a lot of the work for you, if you allow us to, and us doing it for you is the cosmos doing it for itself.”

And I’d share those ideas with others and the words would flow through me, and it would feel so right and so true. But then when it came down to it in my life, I wasn’t letting the dragons do that; I resisted them; I assumed I have to do everything by myself and that I couldn’t call on them to support me. So even I didn’t actually fully trust them and wasn’t fully committed to our relationship.

So I got this tattoo as a symbol of my commitment. And now I can feel the connection growing stronger. I can kind of feel it on my skin, almost like the dragon energy is moving through me. And the dragons have told me how they are like arteries that flow the Kundalini, the lifeblood of the cosmos, through your body. And the dragon looks like he’s made of ink that’s flowing up my arm in that way. So, getting the tattoo made us come closer, and it was meaningful on many different levels.

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The Below can be exquisite, mesmerizing, ecstatic, and thrilling. But, it invariably will include many moments of difficulty, confusion, and fear. The further into the Below you go, the more pronounced this will become, and at the deepest layers, you will find an all-pervasive terror. Typically, journeyers will approach these depths, experience intense fear, and back away into safer territory, repeating this pattern multiple times. The ego spasms in sheer horror each time you approach because it intuits what lies at the bottom of the Below: the Abyss.

Here, let me introduce another quick visual schematic (Fig. 4) to illustrate how I’m thinking about this. Like in my discussion of Fig. 2, I want to draw your attention once again to the parallel between the trajectories of Above and Below. Each one is a mirror image of the other. Both involve the death of the ego, here indicated by the zenith and nadir points I call the Void and the Abyss.

FIG. 4. Two Portals to Ego-Death

Contemporary Western spiritual seekers are quite familiar with this process the way it is explained in Above-based spiritual traditions. They know that Transcendence involves an ascent into realms where the ego-self becomes less and less central, until it is gone beyond altogether. This journey can involve a great deal of fear, as the separate self hangs on for dear life to its familiar identity. Eventually, though, the fear dissolves away as the journeyer passes into the Void, the portal at the loftiest height of the Above. Here, there is the complete falling away of both subject and object, the cessation of all phenomena, the crumbling of any notion of a stable ground upon which anything could stand. You can’t even say it is complete nothingness, because the distinction between nothingness and somethingness ceases to exist. This is the culmination of the Transcendent trajectory. The truly indeterminate nature of the universe manifesting on a moment-by-moment basis is finally revealed.

While ego-death from Above necessarily involves going beyond the self and everything it identifies with, the journey of Descent into the Below is moving in the opposite direction. Here, there will also be an ego death, but an upside-down one. Down into the self instead of up and out. Down into all the parts of the psyche that have until now lain unconscious.

As we Descend, we peel back successive veils to reveal all of the components that make up the whole of our being: the psychological wounding, the deep traumas, the protective and obstructive forces, the gifts and burdens, and all of the other aspects and influences that have sculpted our personalities and our bodies and our lives. In Awakening from Below, we are not focused on witnessing, or holding in awareness, or clearing, or integrating these aspects. Rather, we are learning to totally liberate these aspects from our control: to fully allow these parts of ourselves to reclaim their autonomy, so that they can come alive and wholly express themselves.

As the Descent proceeds, we come closer and closer to the ultimate test. In the Abyss, we will be challenged to endow with autonomy and freedom and to allow to come alive and fully express itself nothing short of our deepest, darkest, most secret, most core fear. We will be challenged to not only unleash, but to fully embrace, the very thing that we have ignored, pushed away, papered over, and denied our entire lives. Every cell in our being will reject this and recoil in horror. We will beg, plead, and pray for it not to be so. We will try to fool ourselves into thinking our journey is complete, declaring ourselves done and trying to begin the Return prematurely. Anything to avoid falling into this Abyss!

I was contacted by Misha at precisely this moment in her Descent. She described being on the precipice of the Abyss as follows:

There were episodes when it was as if I were sliding down the inside of a smooth-sided funnel. I was sliding inevitably toward some narrow aperture, with who knows what on the other side and nothing to break or slow my fall. It was like I was free-falling through open air. And I was frightened of when I would hit the bottom, which I viscerally imagined would break me.

As I approached the threshold, it felt terrifying. I kept grasping for anchor points, the old tried-and-true techniques I’d learned to do during years of meditation practice. In fear and anxiety, I would reach out for one of those trusty old friends, and after a brief contact it would dissolve and run out of my hand like sand. Sometimes as I was reaching for these previously reliable strategic practices, they even evaporated before I could touch them.

How could my hard-won helpers not be working!? As they disappeared one by one, I’d start feeling frantic. What was I to do? Where was help to be had?

Eventually during one of these episodes, I desperately called into the unknown: “Help!” And help did come. Now it was as if that funnel were completely lined with overlapping hands, each of which was clothed in a soft, silky white glove. I literally felt these on my body as I was going through this experience. None of these gloved hands stopped or even slowed my fall. But their presence did gently caress me (in a passive way) with kindness and care as I passed.

In some way, that touch was reassuring. It felt like even though there was no other kind of intervention forthcoming, a caring presence was somehow letting me know it was there with me. That wasn’t my last free-fall, but at least I had something that helped.

In Misha’s account, we can see some of the most common features of the Abyss. The notion of a dark tunnel or hole is frequently mentioned, as is the sense of loss of control, the sense of unknown, and the fear. Pretty much everyone employs all the strategies they know when approaching the Abyss, desperately looking for someone or something to hold their hand as they fall, or to catch them on the other side.

In my case, my first encounter with the Abyss happened early on, within the first few weeks of the Descent. I recoiled in horror, primarily because I feared that going through the Abyss would mean loss of my sanity. Over the next two years, as a whole range of imaginal, spirit, bodily, energetic, ancestral, and other changes took place, I kept periodically reencountering the Abyss and recoiling in fear. Toward the end of that period, these encounters were coming more and more frequently, and it became apparent to me that the time was coming where I would have to cross through or be swallowed up.

I knew from all my time in the Below that surrender was the key practice, and I knew intuitively that this would be the only way to navigate the Abyss. But, try as I might, I could not wrap my head around letting go of control. In increasing desperation, I prayed to Bachué, María, my other goddesses, my power animals, and my ancestors on a daily basis. Both to help me surrender and also to help protect and guide me into and through the chasm that lay before me.

But, alas, it could not be so! The pull of the Below is like a black hole whose gravity is inescapable as it devours everything. This is the ultimate dismemberment. The ego must utterly die, and there are no strategies it can use to propel you through this portal while remaining intact. All of the strategies and “helping hands” we have relied upon to feel safe as we approach the Abyss must eventually be let go of. The ego has learned to surrender as ever deeper layers of the Below have woken up and become liberated from its control, but now it’s time for even the most subtle of the ego’s habitual strategies and safety mechanisms to utterly fail. When the moment comes that we are finally sucked away into the Abyss, we have no choice but to make that transit naked and alone. In more ways than one, the Abyss is a birth canal.

And, rest assured that it will be a birth. But first comes a very real death. And, just like in the final death, the only thing our guides can do to help us when that the precipice comes is to encourage us to let go. This is how Jack’s guides helped with some tough love at that crucial moment:

I felt my spine rotating backwards to an impossible degree, and there was a snap. And there was just darkness. In the distance, there was a point of light, and it started getting brighter and larger. As it got larger, I felt this orgasm rising inside of me. And I also felt an existential terror that I was going to be destroyed on a fundamental level. This is it! This is the actual end!

It just got more and more intense to the point where I felt like I was screaming, like I was falling off a cliff and I was about to hit the rocks. There was like a threshold, and then some kind of being appeared and invited me to cross over the threshold. I said no, because I thought I would be annihilated if I crossed.

And then it lovingly gave me a little push!

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Topics Covered:

• When the underworld comes to you — ancestral emotions surfacing uninvited and what to do (or not do) with them

• Synchronicity as invitation: Netflix, a long-lost phone call, and the doors that are always opening to the below

• Why sitting with suffering without an agenda is radically different from trying to heal, filter, or transcend it

• The redemption that lives inside the wound itself — not beyond it

• Feeling the unresolved trauma stored in the earth and the body

• The savior fantasy: why thinking you’re the one who will heal the land or your lineage is just another ego project

• Time-bending moments where personal, ancestral, and historical timelines snap into alignment

• The identity game: why “I am awareness” or “I am God” are just versions of the same ego move

• Why spiritual perfection is a myth — and authenticity is the actual goal

• Honesty as the only prerequisite: being exactly what you are, rawness and all

• How the “above” and “below” both become escapism if they don’t flow back into the middle — ordinary, everyday human life

Connect with us:

• Oholomo’s website

• Jack’s website

• My Rising Rose YouTube channel

That autonomous or alien quality — how the imaginal feels like an external agent when it manifests to us — is going to be a common theme as we move forward. Because they are not part of the everyday ego’s understanding of the self, most of the aspects of the Below are perceived as external forces or entities, things that are appearing to us and having an effect on us, rather than being part of us. This perspective can be heightened for people who have already experienced a significant degree of attenuation of the ego-self due to nondual experiences or some of the other realizations that can be found in the Above. In other words, the less you identify with the ego-self, the more these experiences may seem to be coming from beyond you.

We can experience this sense of “beyond the self” in the form of abstract external forces or as independent entities such as spirits, ghosts, demonic beings, or past lives. In Jack’s story in the previous section, it was clear to him that he had experienced a visit from a goddess named the Morrigan. In Jeff’s story, the situation was more ambiguous. Was the blue circle created by a disembodied intelligence that Jeff is calling “the faeries,” or was it made by individual faeries who he understands as discrete beings? Or maybe, was the artwork itself the faerie, a living being with autonomous agency and a voice of its own? Jeff doesn’t get into any of this in depth in the blog, but how he, or Jack, or any other person experiences imaginal phenomena doesn’t matter for our purposes here. What’s important is how you experience them.

When encountering the more difficult aspects of the Below, people who experience them primarily as impersonal energies often talk about nebulous feelings of oppression, darkness, black clouds, malevolent forces, and so forth, while those who experience autonomous beings will talk about demons, ghosts, dragons, or other fearsome spirits. On the brighter side, “energies people” speak of lights, colors, auras, and energy fields, while “entities people” speak of angels, devas, dakinis, and other spirits of light and radiance. Whether seen as energies or entities, these phenomena can be every bit as imaginally charged as anything discussed in the previous section, with all of the emotion, meaningfulness, time-bending, and transformative qualities we have already been talking about.

What’s ultimately going on here? Are we discovering various autonomous aspects of the unconscious, as Jungians would argue? Are we uncovering a collection of protective and wounded “inner parts” as they might put it in Internal Family Systems? Are we engaging with independent beings that are wholly external to ourselves, as most traditional worldviews would say? These different systems might be interesting to research and may offer helpful tools and insights. However, ultimately, our opinions on the question of what’s actually going on don’t matter. Remember Jeff’s dictum that this is not a physics equation we must try to solve. What’s important is that these energies and entities are calling us to engage. Whatever they are, we are called to come into relationship with them, to communicate and translate their messages, and to deepen our receptivity to them.

To illustrate, let me share with you two stories about learning to engage with energies that were initially experienced as uncomfortable, but then opened up to become something special. The first one comes from my friend Lisa, who shared with me how she discovered that she needed to surrender to what felt like an immensely oppressive energy in order to find liberation from some limited ideas she was carrying about herself:

I feel this journey has been around the theme of surrendering to the feminine in myself. To allow it to be there. To nurture it and honor it. But in a completely different way than I have ever known or had been taught. I had to go into the depths of the ugliness, face the traumas that took place, and to be stripped of everything around what I thought it was to be a woman.

I am still only just coming out of this process, so I have no idea what it all means, but this feels incredibly important to my journey. And it was so scary and painful to go through at points because it felt like I was giving everything of myself up. Everything that gave me any joy or security about myself, it had to go in order for this process to take place. I can see how this could be seen as a “letting go” process that’s typical of awakening experiences, but it just feels different in that it was incredibly painful at points and certainly did not fit into the other awakening experiences I was hearing my peers talk about.

I felt stripped of absolutely everything I had. I continuously found that any attempt I would make at trying to make myself feel better about myself or my appearance was not able to be fulfilled. I couldn’t muster any energy towards putting on make-up or working out. All the things I used to do that would bring me some sense of self-confidence were just not possible in this condition.

It felt like I had no choice in the matter. I couldn’t will myself out of this process. I had to let it take over me. I had to give myself to it. I had to face the depths of this space, to be it, to become it, and to rise out of it in its own time, when it would allow me to do so.

In the second story, my friend Jack discovered that a destabilizing energy he sensed in one of his clients actually had a valuable lesson for him:

One time, I was working with a client and she had an intense energy. It was a traumatized energy that I didn’t feel I could handle. I’d have sessions with her and I would worry that I couldn’t hold that space. And then afterwards I’d have to lay down and I’d get this weird experience where I felt like the ground from underneath me was like being taken away. It felt very unstable, and it would make me anxious.

One evening, I lay down on my bed after one of these sessions with her and I just decided that I would accept what was happening. It felt weird, but the more I relaxed into it, the more comfortable it became until my body felt like it relaxed. And through that, there was a kind of rootedness. I felt rooted more into the earth and relaxed into a more expanded state of consciousness. It was like, through the intensity of her energy, she was initiating me into a deeper level of expansion within myself.

The common theme in both Lisa’s and Jack’s stories is learning to open up rather than seeking to explain or understand. Like them, I also had to overcome my own ideas and preconceptions in order to establish a working relationship with the seemingly autonomous forces of the Below. I am decidedly an ”entities person,” and initially, for me, accepting that fact was difficult. Very soon after my Descent began, I encountered a large number of spirits who emerged to me in rapid succession. Each one seemed to be calling for my attention, for me to speak with them and receive their messages. By this point in my life, I had adopted a more rational, skeptical viewpoint toward spirits, ghosts, and other paranormal phenomena. Accepting what was happening at face value seemed to go against the identity and self-image I had built for myself. (“I’m just not that kind of person,” I told myself.) The more numerous and more insistent on speaking with me these entities became, the more anxious and unsettled I felt about all of it.

All of that came to a head one day when I suddenly remembered that I voluntarily became possessed by spirits when I was a teenager. I had invited them to take over my body during a Lakota Sioux power animal dancing ceremony, and I remembered feeling exhilarated and empowered by the experience. I had been closely involved in sweat lodges and other aspects of Lakota ritual for several years when I was a teenager, which I remembered well, but I had for some reason completely blocked out the episode with the power animals.

Next, I remembered that as a child of about seven or eight I used to perceive inanimate objects as discrete spirits, and have conversations with them all day long. I had also blocked out that memory. Putting the pieces together, it suddenly hit me that I was imagining myself as a skeptic, but I really was holding spirits at arm’s length because I was afraid. Afraid of what it would mean if I admitted to myself that I believed in them. Specifically, I realized that I was afraid that opening myself up to the spirit world meant that I would be opening myself to black magic, attacks by demons, and other nefarious influences. In other words, I wasn’t a skeptic at all; I actually believed in spirits and, in fact, always had!

That realization was a turning point in my relationship with the spirit world. From that moment onwards, I began to invite the spirits I encountered into a more intimate relationship. I’ll talk more about some of the techniques I started to incorporate in order to establish communication and deepen the relationship in the next chapter. What’s important for the moment is to emphasize that — whether we see the imaginal world as energies or spirits — the more we engage with it, the more it will open up to us.

Even when we decide we are willing to work with energies or entities, sometimes our first reaction to them is colored by preconceptions or misapprehensions that we need to overcome in order to receive the messages that are being offered. For example, my friend Jack discovered that a deity he initially perceived as dark and scary was actually wanting to nurture him:

Kali was the first spirit or goddess of the underworld that I really connected with consciously. And it happened because I was going for dinner with a friend at an Indian restaurant, and my friend pointed out all of these images of Kali with decapitated heads that were everywhere. She was like, do you know who that is? That’s Kali, goddess of death.

And then maybe a week later I was walking through a park and I opened myself up to Kali just to see if she was there, and I felt her energy come in. Initially her energy was very intense, frightening almost, like she was screaming and shouting. But, then I felt her sending a message from her consciousness into my mind: “No… I’m Mother Kali. Mother Kali.”

What she explained to me was that my mind had taken these images that I’d seen and projected an idea that this deity was intense and frightening onto her. And she was coming in to correct that misinterpretation. I was filtering her message incorrectly because of my preconceptions, so she corrected me. And, my welcoming her in the form that she wanted to be with me created the start of a relationship that has evolved and lasts to this day and is one of the most significant relationships I have with any being.

When we begin to engage and understand spirits and energies on their own terms, instead of through our preconceived ideas about them, they begin to open up. As more imaginal phenomena come forth, our perception of them becomes clearer. A lexicon of symbols, images, events, energies, entities, and other imaginal elements begins to coalesce. A mandala or network or landscape begins to take shape in which all of these elements stand in relationship to one another. The more we explore this world, the more connections will emerge between these nodes, reinforcing and enriching each other and revealing further messages.

As we learn the topography and features of our own personal latticework of spirits and energies, we will find our own place in this imaginal web and begin to more confidently navigate its complexities. We will discover that certain aspects of the Below are here to offer protection, others to guide us, and still others to provide valuable insights about how to create boundaries or clear away negativity. As we develop fluency with this matrix of energies and beings, we find ourselves able to engage in two-way communication with the Below. We can ask questions and receive teachings and guidance. We’ll come back to discussing specifically how to do this in the next chapter. For now, let’s keep moving deeper on our journey of Descent.

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The chief way that we can court the Descent, invite the Below to become more manifest in our lives, deepen our experience of it, and eventually discover its elixirs, is to break down the protective wall built by the ego-self in an attempt to keep us safe. I imagine that most readers of this book have already entered into an awakening process of some kind or another, or at least have tasted enough to know that those walls the ego perpetually keeps us ensconced in can at times be lowered. Sometimes this happens spontaneously, sometimes intentionally; sometimes it’s over in a flash, sometimes it lasts for a long time.

However it happens, the lowering of the ego’s reality-walls opens up an infinite number of possibilities for how reality is experienced or how it manifests. You might already be quite familiar with practices that can reliably drop the wall and allow you to experience the Above — perhaps techniques that elicit awareness, spaciousness, emptiness, bliss, tranquility, or something similar. One of the most significant lessons in one’s Descent is discovering what kinds of tools or practices allow the Below to manifest.

I like to refer to such ego-wall-lowering techniques as psychedelic. Etymologically speaking, this word includes the Greek for “mind” or “soul” (psyche) and for “visible” or “manifest” (dêlos). So, a psychedelic could be anything that makes the deeper aspects of the psyche visible or manifest. Everyone will, of course, think of psychedelic drugs first. Personally, I have only done psychedelic drugs a few times — in college and for recreational purposes — and I quickly decided that it wasn’t for me. But, my studies of the use of hallucinogenics among shamanic cultures and conversations with some psychonaut friends has led me to have an appreciation for how powerfully these substances can knock down that reality-wall and evoke profoundly imaginal experiences.

However, while psychedelic drugs can reliably breach the ego’s defenses, I would strongly urge caution because these drugs are potentially unreliable in what kind of experience they plunge you into on the other side of that wall. As a beginner using such drugs, there’s often no telling what will happen. You might be thrust into an experience of the Above or the Below, you might experience extreme bliss or terror, you might experience sublime spiritual states or hellish nightmares. Drug-induced psychedelic states can potentially be therapeutic, but they can also cause irreparable psychological trauma to the journeyer.

Thankfully, with the clinical usage of these compounds in therapeutic environments, we have found that the nature and intensity of psychedelic experiences can be much better controlled with careful attention to “set and setting.” Even so, in speaking with friends who engage regularly with psilocybin, ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, MDMA, and related substances to periodically propel themselves beyond the reality-wall for purposes of spiritual growth, they invariably tell me that their psychedelic sessions are unpredictable and that they need to do a ton of other practices in between sessions in order to integrate their experiences.

If after careful considerations of the risks you decide to use psychedelic drugs to enhance your experience of the Below, then that’s your own choice. Remember the principle of spiritual sovereignty. Fortunately, however, there are plenty of psychedelic practices (to use the more expansive definition of the term) that don’t involve drugs of any kind. Many of these practices are long-established parts of certain religious, spiritual, and cultural traditions, and many of them are already well known in contemporary Western spiritual circles.

On the more intensive end of the spectrum are practices that normally take place within retreat settings, including fasting, vision quests, meditation retreats, long-term sensory deprivation (e.g., so-called “dark retreats”), and so forth. Such intensive experiences can produce visions, revelations, and mystical experiences that are every bit as powerful as any drug. These also have the same downsides of being potentially unpredictable and overwhelming. Again, if you decide to engage in intensive practice in retreat settings, do so with discretion, under skillful supervision, and paying close attention to grounding and integration.

However, there are also many highly psychoactive techniques that can be practiced more regularly as part of your daily routine, which means that, on the whole, they will be more easily integrated. I’m thinking here of all sorts of different meditations, breathwork, mantras, yoga, qigong, visualization, prayer, active imagination, automatic writing, dream journaling, lucid dreaming, shamanic journeying, drumming, dance, ecstatic movement, and other trance-inducing techniques. When practiced in high daily doses, these can be every bit as psychedelic as drugs or retreats, and your experiences can also be just as powerful. When practiced in more moderate “dosages,” these can be safer and easier to integrate than the more intensive options. If your daily dosage drops even lower, these practices may become inert, devoid of any kind of psychedelic power at all. In my view, this flexibility is a great advantage. Particularly when combined with grounding practices, this gives you some power to control the intensity of the experiences you are cultivating.

During my three-year Awakening from Below process (which, again, should not be thought of as normative), I figured out which practices worked for me personally and administered them at the maximum dose that I could handle in order to maintain a high psychedelic intensity. In general, I practiced about 4.5 to 5 hours per day of a blend of seated meditation, walking meditation, yoga, qigong, and drumming-assisted visualization. This schedule allowed me to immerse myself in the Below while also maintaining healthy integration with the everyday life of family, work, and other obligations. I continually tweaked the blend of practices as my experiences shifted, and occasionally backed off when I wanted to more carefully navigate difficult territory.

What works for you, no doubt, will be different than what worked for me. My main advice is to always prioritize integration and balance. If you’re ever feeling like things are unsafe or unsustainable, back off and increase your practice of grounding. In a pinch, it is always a good idea to take a break from all psychedelic practices altogether, and to prioritize grounding until you get your footing back.

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The Descent into the Below is a descent into the unconscious portions of the psyche. Or rather, it’s an explosion of the unconscious portions of the psyche out into consciousness. It’s as if Pandora’s Box were opened and all the hidden contents of the mind — the sublime, the beautiful, the shadows, and the nightmares — all came flooding out. Among these contents, be prepared for difficult memories and traumas of all kinds to emerge. Some of these traumas will be expected. If you are entirely honest with yourself, you knew they were hidden away in there all along. Others will take you completely by surprise — memories that were completely repressed, or that you thought you had already worked through. The point is that every last vestige of unconscious pain simply must be reckoned with.

When challenges arise in the process of Descent, there are two different approaches one may take, which I refer to as the masculine and the feminine. (I know that these binary gendered terms are going to be off-putting for some people. If they are bothersome to you, please just replace them as you read with yang and yin, or any other terms you like. In my case, as a cisgendered heterosexual male who is deeply in love with a whole retinue of goddesses and other feminine spirit guides, it feels natural and important to refer to my approach in feminine terms.)

What I call the masculine approach represents the typical advice given in Buddhist and Advaita circles (Above-based traditions not coincidentally dominated by male spiritual heroes and teachers). This is to hold difficult experiences in one’s awareness until they dissolve or resolve. In the Theravada Buddhist meditation retreats where I spent much of my 20s, the instructions were phrased more or less as follows: “These afflictions are simply unpleasant body sensations; they are impermanent. Observe them with equanimity and they will pass away.” Advaita teachers I have heard, on the other hand, have tended to give an inquiry question like “To whom are these unpleasant experiences arising anyway?” or an instruction like “Experience yourself as the awareness that contains all experiences.”

These kinds of approaches are paradigmatic of Above-style spirituality: by holding the mind steady in a state of higher consciousness, all Maras can be vanquished. One’s mind is purified of these “defilements,” as they put it in Buddhism, or purified of “sin” as the Christians say.

On the other hand, the feminine approach is for difficult memories, traumas, and other challenges to be seen, recognized, and eventually even welcomed into the wholeness of your being. In order to start to do this, you must surrender to them, sink down into them, and deeply feel them. On the surface, it may look like the practitioner is doing the same thing as in the masculine approach: sitting with the experience and waiting for it to resolve itself. However, the attitude is completely different. Rather than objectifying the negative experience, disidentifying from it, reframing it, staying aloof from it, or observing it dispassionately, the feminine approach is to fully invite it in without any resistance and allow it to totally eviscerate you.

Think back to the two versions of the Buddha myth with which I started this book. In the traditional story, the Buddha is the archetypal masculine spiritual hero. He is strong, resolute, equanimous, determined, unshakable, and in control. In my recasting of the story, however, I replaced these attributes with their feminine counterparts. I made the Buddha vulnerable, emotional, relational, and surrendering. I made that change for this book because, while masculine approaches to spirituality can be quite effective in the Above, I have learned that the best way to navigate an Awakening from Below is to totally and utterly embrace the feminine.

To illustrate how this principle applies in real life, let me tell you a story about something that happened to me when I was somewhat early in my own journey into the Below. One of my kids was having a surgery to correct a congenital condition. It was not a life-threatening situation, but it was a major procedure. Although up to that point in my awakening process I had been very comfortably ensconced in the Above, with a high degree of equanimity and very little emotion arising other than tranquility, I noticed that I was feeling some trepidation about her safety and wellbeing when undergoing such a procedure. As she was wheeled into the operating room to go under the knife, I closed my eyes and tuned into my body sensations. A tremendous amount of anxiety suddenly welled up in the form of sharp little waves of sensation fluttering about in my body. These sensations were surprising and uncomfortable, and I noticed an impulse to recoil away from them.

Now, my years of mindfulness training had prepared me for precisely this moment. I knew that the “proper” thing to do with this kind of conditioning (or, as we dismissively called it in my Buddhist circles, “attachment”) was to dispassionately and analytically dissect the sensations that were appearing. To observe where they began and where they finished, their temperature, the speed of their oscillation, how they changed over time, and other details. I knew the teaching was to neutrally note these qualities as they were arising, seeing that all of it was an impermanent cloud of impersonal, transitory phenomena. I had done that many times in the past, and that’s what I “should” have done now.

But, as I sat there, something led me to just surrender instead of trying to observe, and to let the sensations completely take over my being. Among the sharp and prickly feelings of anxiety and the impulse to recoil, I now also felt my displeasure at the whole experience, my frustration with having to feel these sensations, and a tension in my chest that felt like sadness or like I wanted to cry. All of this swelled and churned like waves in the ocean during a storm. I felt gutted, like I was completely falling apart.

This went on for a while — perhaps 20 or 30 minutes — and somehow I just sat there surrendering to what was happening and sinking down into all of it. After a time, though, I noticed the sensations changing. The sharpness and prickliness seemed to give way to something more gentle. Just then, in a surprisingly sudden shift, it was like the ocean of sensation that was so uncomfortable in my chest area suddenly dissolved into a warm glow. It was precisely the feeling that I remembered from when my daughter was a toddler years ago, and I used to pick her up and hold her to my chest to comfort her when she was crying. I could feel her little warm body pressed against mine, and at the same time, a kind of outward extension of bittersweet tenderness from my heart area.

Feeling like I was actually holding her in my arms right that moment, I sensed a deep connection with her, like I was somehow sharing the trauma her unconscious body was undergoing in the operating room. I understood then that the anxiety I had felt earlier — while it may have felt cold, sharp, and unpleasant — was really just a form of love in disguise. I also understood that my vulnerability to be able to suffer so deeply out of love was not a problem — it was actually one of the most beautiful and important parts of my humanness. Pain, suffering, and vulnerability can be welcomed as part of the whole.

Do you recognize the similarities between the story I just told and my revised version of the Buddha myth in the preface? That shift from masculine to feminine is precisely the way to access the elixirs of the Below, no matter which Mara we are facing. I could never have discovered these elixirs if I had approached my experience using the techniques my mindfulness training had taught me. If I had exercised a detached posture toward my experience of anxiety, I could certainly have strengthened my equanimity, my appreciation of impermanence, and my resolve in the face of suffering. However, by surrendering to the anxiety instead, I found the blessings of vulnerability, connection, love, and tenderness lying at the core of an unpleasant yet entirely human experience. Different approaches, different elixirs.

The realization I had on that day was highly impactful for me, and from that point onwards, I applied that same feminine response to all of my weird and difficult experiences as I Descended further and further into the Below. Rather than observing these experiences with Above-based techniques, I relaxed, let go, and let them into my being. Sooner or later (sometimes much later!), I always got similar results. Some of these experiences took longer than others to sit with and fully digest; a few I had to come back to again and again for months or even years. But if there ever were any challenges or difficulties in my process of Descent, it was always only because I hadn’t yet managed to fully surrender.

Now, the advice I would have been given by my Above-based teachers about all of those experiences would have been that they are just clusters of impermanent phenomena, which I should equanimously observe and allow to pass away. Such things are distractions or delusions, they would have said; don’t get involved. If you have a lot of training in the techniques of Above-based spirituality, your ego will probably try to establish a sense of normalcy by falling back on that kind of advice. However, if you are encountering difficulties in the process of Descent, retreating into the aloofness and equanimity of Above is simply not going to work for you in the long run.

That being said, you can’t retreat into the Middle either. Don’t cling to the tools of conventional psychology, biology, neuroscience, or other knowledge systems of the Middle to try to explain the Below in a linear way. Undoubtedly, again, your ego will attempt to do this in order to tell itself that everything is okay. But, don’t allow your mind to settle on straightforward explanations or fixed notions of reality. When the ego struggles to explain what’s happening, just drop the effort to understand and surrender to fully feeling the experience instead. Sink down into experiencing whatever is going on, up close and intimately, in all of its gory detail.

Suspending your attempts to explain or understand, as well as your familiar tools and techniques, will likely make you feel naked, alone, vulnerable, or terrified. Surrender to those feelings as well, feeling them fully as they arise. If you need help with surrendering, try a surrender prayer or mantra. I wrote this one spontaneously one day, and used it daily for many months as I circled around the Abyss:

Divine Mother,
I surrender to your grace.
Embrace me, keep me safe, teach me.
I am yours.

I found that these words helped ease my mind. One of the reasons that I think this mantra worked well for me is that it set up a situation that I call “surrender by proxy.” For me, the Descent was at many points so harrowing that it seemed impossible for me to surrender to it directly. Instead, I decided to place my trust and faith in the hands of the divine mother in all of her forms (María, Quan Yin, Sol, Bachué, and all the rest). Whereas I could not manage to surrender myself to the Abyss, I found that I could surrender totally to her, trusting that she would guide and protect me. Of course, as I mentioned in the Abyss section of the previous chapter, you eventually have to let go of all crutches and pass through the Abyss naked and alone. But, I found that surrender by proxy eased my approach and gave me more confidence as I came near.

While I will present a lot of other practices in this chapter, I would say that, ultimately, the only thing you need to do to successfully navigate the challenges of the Below is simply this attitude of surrender. If you’re encountering the effects of trauma lurking in your body or your energy system is ravaged and battered, surrender to whatever is happening. If you see visions of dark threatening entities or find yourself in the underworld being torn into pieces, surrender to the experience. Faced with existential terror, madness, or the fear of annihilation, surrender to all of it, without exception. If you fully surrender to the Below, it will eventually reveal its gifts.

(That being the case, remember what I said above about grounding, specifically how it can provide a counterbalance to surrender. Learning how to pendulate between the acceleration of surrender and the self-care of grounding is a crucial skill that will ensure your safety throughout the Descent.)

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Topics Covered:

• Why inner healing must come before unleashing the body’s energies

• How even enlightened teachers can have dangerous blind spots around the body and desire

• Above, middle, below: a three-directional map of spiritual awakening

• Why Western spirituality is obsessed with transcendence — and what it’s missing

• Tantra, shamanism, and other traditions that genuinely embrace the below

• Sexuality and sensation as the body’s languages for spiritual knowledge

• Meeting darkness on its own terms, not as something to transform into light

• Ego-death, surrender, and learning to trust the descent

• Why spiritual emergence is so often misread as psychiatric crisis

• How two fellow travelers of the below found each other — and why this conversation needed to happen

Connect with us:

• Oholomo’s website

• Jack’s website

• My Rising Rose YouTube channel

I like the concept of “spiritual sovereignty,” which I got from my friend Misha, who got it from the spiritual teacher Adyashanti. This means that no one else can decide what spiritual path is right for you, but also implies that you must accept the consequences of your own choices. The bottom line is that if you decide to engage the Below using practices such as the ones I identify in this chapter, you must accept that there are dangers and take full responsibility for what happens.

Navigating the Below is a high-risk activity, and there are no guarantees of safety. This process will demand that you fully surrender to your worst fears — to madness and even to death itself. You may feel like most of the time you’re walking blindfolded on a tightrope over a chasm without a net. During the Descent, you will be working out a huge load of your past karma, traumas, and complexes. This is messy work that will give rise to mental agitation, emotional turbulence, and general instability.

One important way to attend to your safety and wellbeing is to reach out for help and support when you need it. That support might take any number of forms. It might be a knowledgeable teacher or guide who you meet with on a regular basis. It might be connecting on an ad hoc basis with someone who seems like they might have something helpful to say about what you are going through right at the moment. It might be a group of like-minded spiritual travelers who are going through the Descent together.

Whatever form of support is most helpful and feels nurturing is probably right for you. If you ask me, though, you should seek out people who are deeply familiar with the kinds of experiences we’re talking about in this book. It makes no sense if you need help with your motorcycle to call a plumber. Likewise, it makes no sense if you need help with the Below to seek advice from an Above-based priest, monastic, or spiritual teacher. At best, their advice could be off-base, at worst, quite harmful. Another thing I would suggest is to seek out a range of different guides or supporters. Since experiences of the Below are so variable from person to person, it is often beneficial to hear from a wide range of opinions and perspectives.

Even while I am encouraging you to establish a network of support that works for you, it is crucial to guard against over-reliance on other people. Always remember that any kind of supporter who undermines your autonomy, integrity, or freedom as an individual agent — even if unintentionally — is counterproductive. Any kind of supporter who makes you feel unworthy or ashamed — even if unintentionally — is potentially damaging your process. It is equally harmful to place a supporter or guide on a pedestal, to see them as infallible, or to become infatuated with them. Don’t give away your power, energy, autonomy, or wholeness to others under any circumstances. Doing so may completely derail your process.

Another important safety concern is the need to ground yourself. Being familiar with grounding practices is a critical skill. It means that you have a tool at your disposal whereby you can soothe your system physically, mentally, and energetically. If yours is an authentic Descent into the Below, you will undoubtedly encounter moments in your journey where things get extremely difficult, out of control, or even completely terrifying. When those moments come, it will be too late to start learning to ground yourself then. You will find it far easier if you already have several grounding practices that you have been doing daily all along. That being said, if you’re already traversing the Below, your only choice may be to develop or strengthen your grounding practices as soon as possible.

Grounding means your mind relaxes, your energy level settles down, and your body sensations connect with gravity and the earth. Common grounding exercises include qigong, martial arts, yoga, breathwork, visualization, and many other traditional spiritual practices. Physical exercise — ranging from going for a gentle walk to heart-pounding interval training — is nearly always grounding. A Kundalini teacher I know advocates gardening, making pottery, and eating meat and heavier foods. Other people I know are into playing music, creating art, masturbation, salt baths, making physical contact with the earth, or lying down on it and visualizing themselves melting into the ground. Whatever works for you that down-regulates your system and gets you back into your body (particularly the lower portion of it) is grounding for you.

As you become adjusted to the Descent, you’ll find that you can “turn up and down the volume,” so to speak, on the intensity of your experiences. All the other practices I outline in this chapter help you to enhance your connection with the Below, but grounding is what smooths the ride. If things start moving too quickly, you can slow them down a bit by increasing the percentage of grounding you are doing. If it still feels like it’s too much, you can switch to doing 100% grounding for a while.

Here’s a story from Misha about how a grounding practice helped her to turn the volume down on an overwhelming spiritual experience that arose at an inopportune time:

A few months ago, I was coming back over the mountains after having done a retreat. There was inclement weather, and I was going up into elevation on a twisty road that had pretty steep drop-offs. It was probably not a good idea to drive with such low visibility and a slick highway!

As I drove, I had to stop a couple times because there was something going on inside of me. It looked like I was driving up into a cloud. Everything was so magical, so divinely beautiful. I don’t think it could have been more awesome. I felt this pressure building in my cardiac heart area, which turned out to be Christ energy expanding. Eventually, I pulled over and spent maybe 45 minutes there in my car, twitching and moaning, and like, you know, being Christ.

Eventually, it calmed down enough that I could get back on the road. And so I’m driving carefully and slowly and really glad there’s no one coming behind me tailgating or whatever. Then when I was maybe 20 or 30 minutes away from the first town, and I just had a cringing feeling like, “I just can’t go there.” It was almost like I can’t be in that energy of civilization.

Earlier I had passed this place where there were signs for a nature area or campground or something. And I was like, “Let me go back and pull off there.” As I’m on a narrow mountain pass, I’m literally driving in the middle of the road because the drop-off is too close to where my lane is. And the snow is coming down, sticking on the road. By this time, I’m not in the Christ experience anymore, I’m in the God experience. Everything is magnificent, you know, the snow, the air, the mountains, the drop-off, everything. When I reached a safe enough place, I parked my vehicle and just let that experience overtake me for another 45 minutes or so.

Finally, I’m like, “Okay, I only have so much gas in the vehicle. And I’m really not good to be alone in a car that I’m not sure I can keep warm when it’s snowing. And it’s going to get colder tonight, so there is an actual real danger of freezing.”

Fortunately, there was cell service. So I called my Tibetan Buddhist temple, the local place. And I get their office manager administrative person. Now, a qualification for that position is that they have to be devoted to the rinpoche’s teachings and be skilled with all kinds of states, because she’s the point of contact when there’s in-person retreats, and people are going to be going through all kinds of stuff.

So I told her, “I’m having some kind of awakening experience, very blissful, but still, I’m not able to be functional, to do what I need to do. I’m in the mountains, it’s snowing, I need to get myself home.” And so what she suggested I do was to breathe in and out of the hara. And she asked, “Do you have a chant?” I said, “White Tara always works for me.” And she’s like, “Great, do that.”

So that’s what I did, and I was able to get home in one shot. I practiced this intensive grounding continuously for like another 50-60 minutes while driving. And I didn’t get hijacked either by bliss or by cringing. It kept me present and focused and grounded in my body and in ordinary reality. I wasn’t overtaken either by the blissful God experience or being unable to navigate through the places that energetically felt yucky. It gave me some space from the awakening process that was happening, which I needed because I wasn’t in a setting where it was safe to just surrender to that completely.

To me, Misha’s drive home from the retreat is a good metaphor for the whole journey through the Below. You’re headed off into the unknown along a treacherous mountain road with steep drop-offs. There will be tremendous ups and downs, intensely blissful and unpleasant experiences at every turn. You’ll probably find yourself to be overwhelmed, and even incapacitated at times. There’s a real chance you won’t make it back home in one piece unless you can ground yourself when you need to.

In Misha’s case, she was lucky to have cell service and the presence of mind to call for help when she needed it. But what if her phone didn’t work? It would be much better to already have that grounding practice in your toolbox, part of your regular repertoire of practices, wouldn’t you agree?

Navigating the Below in a way that is both safe and responsible also requires a strong commitment to ethics. As we have been discussing throughout this book, surrendering yourself to an Awakening from Below process involves the ego totally giving over control to the autonomy of your body, ancestors, the natural world, and a host of other agents. What these facets of your being present to you can be quite surprising — shocking, even. It is therefore advisable to have strong ethical commitments in place in advance, which can act like guardrails on the Descent.

In my view, a firm line should be always drawn at the point where your new-found freedom may possibly bring harm to another being. Awakening from Below leads to the liberation of every facet of the cosmos, and there is no way that is compatible with you harming another being. If, in the course of Descent, there arises an impulse or a desire to harm another, there is no way that this is your soul speaking to you. It is surely a corrupted or twisted element of your ego.

To give a concrete example, let’s come back to the topic of sexuality. As part of the Awakening from Below process, you want to be able to completely give over control of your sexuality to your body deva (or your body’s intelligence, If you prefer that terminology), and allow it to show you how it wants to experience pleasure and intimacy. However, this under no circumstances gives you free license to engage in sexual activity that is harmful or hurtful to others. In other words, you need to figure out a way to totally surrender to the Below while also maintaining some firm lines that you refuse to cross no matter what. This may seem like an impossible paradoxical task, but it’s a balancing act that you simply must do.

That being said, if you do experience impulses to harm others, you shouldn’t bottle them up or push them away either. The surrendering process is about including, not denying. The proper response is to sit with the feeling and allow it to unpack itself, to express what it is trying to say, and thereby to untangle itself. But even as you welcome the potentially harmful impulses to move through you, you must have a strong resolve to never, ever act upon them. Experiencing passing feelings of rage, greed, lust, or of wanting to lash out at or control others is a normal part of the Descent because these impulses are normal parts of everyone’s unconscious. However, if you ever feel that such thoughts are becoming compulsive, or you question your ability to resist acting on them, that is red flag indicating that you need to talk with a therapist or spiritual counselor.

Uncontrollable compulsions to harm yourself or others are in many cultural traditions around the globe considered to be examples of possession by an evil spirit. This brings us to another kind of boundary that you need to have firmly in place. Entering into the Below, you will certainly encounter many energies and entities that seem autonomous and external to you. As we have discussed, nearly all of them will eventually turn out to be parts of your own awakened being. They only seem external to you because you have repressed or denied them. In the end, they are revealed to be previously unconscious parts of you that, once fully awakened, become integral parts of your majestic wholeness.

However, it is possible that during your time in the Below you may encounter energies or entities that you truly believe are not part of you. For example, you might run into a ghost, spirit, or other entity or energy that you feel does not have a positive intent toward you. One of the lessons you need to learn in order to navigate the Below safely is how to clear such negative entities/energies out of your space. There are many ways of doing this using ritual, incantations, prayers, invocations, visualizations, and other techniques. You can find many specific techniques if you look into the books in the further readings section.

In my view, however, it’s critical to balance setting boundaries or banishing rituals with a compassionate concern for the wellbeing of all. Wishing for the utter destruction of any being is an unhealthy and unenlightened form of violence. Also, it’s important to keep this door open because, in the end, you’ll probably come to recognize that this unwelcome presence is actually just another aspect of your unconscious you have yet to accept. Therefore, look for techniques like “compassionate depossession” and others that focus on helping malevolent spirits to transform rather than on destroying them.

Another type of boundary that is critical to uphold is what I call your “energetic bubble.” The idea here is to minimize collateral damage when working out your traumas and complexes in the Below. You must recognize that your feelings, reactions, and egoic dramas that arise in the course of doing this work are all projections of your own mind, and you must work hard to not involve other people in them. If you find yourself working out some past trauma or situation that involved another person, you do not need to contact that person and drag them into your process. If you find yourself feeling regret for past actions, you do not need to reopen someone else’s wounds in order to heal yours.

The same goes for positive feelings or even blessings. To give you a quick example, just a few weeks ago, my wife was approached at work by a total stranger who claimed she had a dream about her. The woman was emphatic that in her dream she had received a message from God and she simply had to share it with my wife, and she was quite insistent that my wife had to allow her to do a blessing for her. She made these pronouncements right in the middle of an office where my wife was surrounded by co-workers and was trying to do her job. The woman would not go away, waited until my wife was on break, and then accosted her with the insistence that they meet privately somewhere so that she could perform some kind of ceremony.

In this encounter with my wife, the woman clearly breached her own energetic bubble by pushing her spiritual agenda in a way that encroached on my wife’s freedom and comfort. Now, she may just have been delusional, but for argument’s sake, let’s say that she had an authentic imaginal experience in which she legitimately had received an important message from God. Even so, surely there would be a better way to share this, right? Could she have written my wife a quick note and left her phone number inviting her to speak about it? Could she have delivered the blessing silently and unobtrusively from across the room, without involving my wife at all? My intention here isn’t to dictate how the encounter should have gone; my point is to encourage you to reflect on how to maintain your own energetic integrity without heaping it onto others who might find your overtures unwelcome or uncomfortable.

I will mention one last boundary that’s important as you navigate the Below. As we’ve said many times, the Descent can be terrifying and dangerous. You therefore need to exert your spiritual sovereignty and discernment when it comes to determining how much is too much at any given moment. Here’s Misha talking about her experience exploring her limits:

In my case, it’s taken a lot of healing with skillful guidance for me to develop the capacities that make surrendering likely to result in becoming less, rather than more, broken. If trauma activation is too intense, it can result in exacerbation and retraumatization rather than healing. At the same time, part of the healing process has been about realizing that I can go through flashbacks and other kinds of dysregulatory experiences, and successfully come out of them. Part of the learning for me has been that these experiences can feel like “it will be like this always,” but I’ve learned that this is not objective reality/truth.

Since my most recent retreat, part of the shifting has been around allowing myself to experience trauma reactivation. It’s been difficult to let go of the resistance to the experiences that generate unpleasantness. Many times in my past I’ve been hijacked by PTSD activations, yet recently there have been times I’ve been able to surrender and let the dreaded experience happen. One time, after feeling pierced through as if by multiple small projectiles, what showed up was vulnerability and a lovely, pure innocence.

As time went on, however, I ended up in a PTSD flare-up, and for a couple of weeks I was floundering. I had to significantly shift how I was practicing. I had to stop diving in to any activation that was happening and instead intensively practice mindful witnessing, noticing sensations, staying out of the mind and thoughts, and doing lots of grounding. At first this was on and off for most of the hours of the day, particularly at night. Over a three week period, the activations gradually reduced to a much more manageable level. Interestingly, allowing what was showing up — even resistance — to be present was key during all the parts of the retreat and post-retreat experiences. It’s the other forms of skillful engagement that changed.

To continue reading, get the book!

To continue reading, get the book!

For most people, the first clear calling of the Below comes in the form of “imaginal” phenomena, a term popularized by the scholar Henry Corbin. Experientially, the term “imaginal world” is referring to a category of experience that is distinct from rational thoughts, emotional states, and even mystical experiences of the nondual or heart-opening variety. Despite the similarity between the words, the imaginal world is also quite distinct from the ordinary imagination you might use when daydreaming or playing make-believe.

Corbin offers a description of the imaginal in his article titled “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal,” which is freely available online. Other works that have greatly influenced my thinking on this subject include Cynthia Bourgeault’s 2020 book, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, and also Rob Burbea’s talks on Soulmaking Dharma, discussed in the previous chapter.

I’ll be using my own language here in this chapter, but I think all of these authors would agree with me that imaginal phenomena are images, archetypes, symbols, and events that are characterized by strong emotional charge, density of meaning, and transformative power. Imaginal phenomena appear to us as autonomous, independent entities or forces, but yet somehow at the same time are deeply familiar, like they are mirroring parts of our psyche back to us in external form. When unpacked and engaged with, they reveal surprising and subtle connections between different types of experiences and events across time and space. They have an uncanny way of connecting our thoughts, memories, dreams, and other inner experiences with manifestations in the material world. Crucially for our purposes in this book, they are also the most immediate and effective gateways to the Below.

Rather than laying on more abstract descriptions, let me relate to you an example of an imaginal phenomenon so you can get the flavor. My friend Jeff Richards is an artist in Denver, Colorado. His main artistic practice is working with paint and thread against wooden frames to create stunning three-dimensional imagery. He writes a periodic blog called Hexagon Art, in which he described a mysterious event that took place in his studio one night back in 2022. I’ve quoted this story below, combining material from two of his posts with only a few minor grammatical tweaks:

I had been working on a large circular panel, laying out with thread a grid of squares and then painting over that grid with layers of color. Other than the intentional nature of the grid as a starting point I had no firm idea of where the piece was going to go. As is often the case, I was simply content to let the process take me where it wanted. Unfortunately the [artwork] took a wrong turn…. A little discouraged, I decided it was necessary to retrace my steps and get onto firm footing. I spray-painted a rich blue color over the entire circular surface, laying the paint on heavy to assure that I would end up with a solid blue color field as my new starting point. It happened to be late in the afternoon and, realizing the thickness of the wet paint would take quite a while to dry, I lay the piece on a work table and packed it in for the day. As I headed out the door I caught a last glimpse of the shiny wet blue circle, hoping with a sigh that the freshness of a new day would indicate a different direction for me to pursue….

Then something I can’t account for happened overnight and I returned to discover a masterpiece; a totally unexpected, unimaginably sublime message from some source outside my experience, conscious or unconscious This was a real, full-on Faerie moment.

I was dumbfounded by the sheer beauty of it, by the absolute coherence that is so evident. A strange feeling of otherness came over me, the sensation that some alien presence had shaped the paint. Even today it looks to me like a symbolic language, an alphabet with a distinct yet mysterious message that speaks not to the rational mind, but to something deeper, something almost instinctual, something untranslatable, ineffable, yet profoundly moving.

Jeff’s description of the blue circle (check out some photos here) and his reactions to it make it clear that this was an imaginal event. In the presence of the imaginal, we feel dumbfounded, awe-struck, at a loss for words. We feel the presence of something deeply mysterious, even sacred, intruding into our lives from a different realm. Reading the blog, you can feel Jeff grasping for the right language with which to express the power this image held over him — he uses words such as strange, otherness, mysterious, instinctual, untranslatable, ineffable, moving, and sublime. He tries out “faerie” as a shorthand to capture the bundle of emotions, meaningfulness, and power evoked by the mysterious disc.

Another important aspect of the imaginal that emerges from his blog is Jeff’s assertion that the blue circle was presenting him with a “symbolic language.” This is a pivotal moment in his engagement with the imaginal. Someone else might have noted the event as a weird coincidence or mystery, and just shrugged and gone about their business. But, Jeff chose instead to accept and engage with the symbolic language of the mystery.

His first thought was to try to recreate the same effect again, and his blog describes his many efforts to reproduce the series of accidents that led to the creation of the masterpiece. However, after much trial and error in vain, Jeff writes:

It occurred to me that I was approaching this conundrum from a completely wrong perspective. It wasn’t a matter of identifying causal factors, like solving a chemistry problem. There would be no solution for me at the end of a physics equation. The real truth was that I needed to figure out how to communicate with the faeries; and to do that, I might have to translate the message in the artwork.

This last observation is key. In imaginal phenomena, often an alien or autonomous entity brings a message from beyond this world. Whether big or small, this message is felt to be a mystery — something that needs to be unpacked and explored. But, this exploration cannot be done in a methodical, scientific way. As Jeff suggests, the rational mind is the wrong tool for this job. The imaginal speaks to us on a wholly different level; it calls for a different part of us to come forth. What’s important is not explaining or understanding imaginal phenomena, but rather engaging with, coming into relationship with, and opening up to them. It’s not about figuring it out: it’s about deepening the connection.

Jeff’s experience of the imaginal came in the form of the spontaneous appearance of a mysterious object, which called him to enter into a conversation with entities or powers he calls faeries. However, imaginal phenomena need not always take such concrete material form. It may be a mysterious event, say a synchronicity or an especially meaningful interpersonal encounter. It may be a specific place, person, or memory. It may be a dream that leaves a particularly powerful impression. Images, symbols, figures, landscapes, animals, words, abstract geometric shapes, numbers, body sensations, smells, sounds, flavors — nearly anything can appear with the strong emotional charge, density of meaning, and transformative power that are the hallmarks of the imaginal.

I said above that imaginal phenomena can also reveal connections between different types of experiences and events across time. Jeff’s blog doesn’t get into that particular aspect of the blue circle. But, I know from talking with him that it appeared to him to have a certain futuristic quality, as if the faeries were broadcasting messages back in time. For me, on the other hand, my imaginal world often takes on a historical tinge. If the blue circle came into my imaginal world, for example, I might have been tempted to describe the different patterns in the painting as a message written in an ancient runic script.

Imaginal phenomena often bend time altogether, collapsing past, present, and future together. The same symbol may contain multiple resonances with ancient mythology, with something I remember from my childhood, and with events or people in the current day. As I engage with this symbol over time, more and more resonances emerge or are revealed. Deja vu and synchronicities will emerge that bring these facets further into focus. Bit by bit, as this mysterious presence is unpacked, its significance deepens. Eventually, what started out as a discrete event becomes what Jungians call a “personal myth,” a complex story containing deeply felt truths about my life and my place in the cosmos.

Do you notice how the imaginal is inviting us down further into the Below with all of this? The imaginal is not Transcendent. It’s not about moving up and out of the mind and psyche, or about leaving the individual human condition behind. On the contrary, it’s about moving down into the deeply felt and deeply personal. Although they seem to come from beyond and have an alien feel, imaginal phenomena connect with our own personal past, present, and future and with our own personal set of symbols and meanings. The imaginal thus is a bridge to the deeper, unconscious layers of our self, down into the Below.

The imaginal is not exclusively associated with the Below, as there are entire imaginal worlds associated with Above traditions. Actually, you might say that one of the most significant roles that myths and symbols play in Above-based religions is to envelop the practitioner in an imaginal world of sacredness, holiness, goodness, and light. Catholicism’s vocabulary of symbols, to take one example, includes a whole range of angels, saints, Jesus, Mary, and other figures that can be very alive for someone as teachers, guides, protectors, and messengers of the sacred.

However, while Catholicism accepts and embraces these particular figures, it simultaneously rejects, vilifies, and demonizes the darker side of its own imaginal vocabulary. While some parts of the imaginal world are sanctioned and thought of as good, others are to be avoided and thought of as sinful or evil. Figures such as Satan or images of Hell are treated as anathema to spirituality. This same move is made in other Above-focused traditions, such as we saw with Mara and his daughters in the myth that opened this book.

Contrary to these examples of Above-centric traditions, one of the most notable things that is happening with an Awakening from Below, in my opinion, is an awakening of the darker side of the imaginal world. Those aspects of the imaginal that have been walled off as dark, sinful, unwanted, or evil begin to stir and to emerge from the shadows. The imaginal phenomena associated with this kind of Awakening process can seem exceedingly dark, or a blend of both light and dark, depending on the individual.

While it may be disconcerting if you have internalized the taboos against the dark side of the imaginal, there’s nothing innately wrong with it. In fact, there are many religions worldwide that have long embraced it. From Asian traditions, think of the wrathful deities such as Mahakala and Palden Lhamo from Tibetan Buddhism, or the dark goddesses such as Kali and Durga from Hinduism. Think of Hades, Hecate, Circe, and Nyx from ancient Greek and modern Paganism. In Celtic tradition, there’s the Morrigan. None of these traditions eschew or reject these dark entities, and I personally have found that researching such traditional figures is one of the best ways to validate, unpack, stimulate, and engage with my own imaginal darkness.

Those who engage with the darkness often find it to be just as exquisite and impactful as symbols of light. By way of example, let me relate an imaginal experience had by my good friend, Jack Morrígan, a spiritual teacher, healer, and long-term explorer of the Below, who has taken the name of the Celtic goddess. (All of the stories I am quoting in this book without mentioning a particular source were provided to me by email or orally, and are presented here with some minor edits to condense them or make them fit with the book’s flow.) Jack recounts:

The Morrigan is my primary deity, and she’s a deity of death, sex, and magic. Once, I remember her coming to me in one of her forms, in which she has a raven’s head and long, claw-like hands covered in feathers, and blood all over her mouth. That might look horrendous to someone else, but to me, I know who she is. I love her. So what I feel looking at that form is love and sexual attraction.

And one time — almost like in a waking dream — she bites into my wrist with her beak and pulls out blood and muscle, and she connects it to her wrist, and she says, “Your blood is my blood is your blood.” And I feel this flowing energy, like my body being purified spiritually through my blood by this deity that I love.

If, like Jack’s, your own imaginal world is tinged more darkly than typically allowed by the Above-based traditions you’re familiar with, you might recoil from such a visionary experience. You may find yourself thinking that such dark imagery has no place in a spiritual process, that all visions should consist of divinity and light. The incongruity between your expectations and the realities of your visions may produce confusion, fear, or shame. But, in truth, you have no control over what your imaginal world looks like, and there’s no predicting it in advance either. So, you might as well open up to it and see what there is to discover in the darkness.

I already mentioned that when my own imaginal world opened up, it took me completely by surprise. Having been steeped in Buddhist and Asian religious imagery for my entire adult life, I was perplexed when a completely different range of symbols and entities suddenly started emerging. It turns out that my personal imaginal landscape includes a whole spectrum from light to dark. On the lighter side, figures like the Virgin Mary, a radiant Pagan sun goddess called Sol, and the Buddhist goddess of mercy Quan Yin all play major roles as protectors and guides in my visionary experiences. But there is also a whole pantheon of darker animal spirits who embody more primal sensations. A black jaguar who protects me when I journey into dangerous territory, a vulture who eats the parts of me that I am ready to let go of, an owl who facilitates encounters with ghosts and wandering spirits. In fact, the most significant figure of all, who I’ll introduce in more detail below is a goddess who is half angelic and divine, and half serpentine and demonic. I also experience a multilayered imaginal realm that has expansive upper regions with vast landscapes of mountain ranges and jungles, as well as a cavernous underworld with networks of catacombs and dark lairs. Different guides and protectors inhabit different parts of this realm, and I travel in visionary experiences to visit and converse with them in their different locations.

That’s the way the imaginal shows up for me, but as I’ve said a few times already, there’s no reason that you should think that any of my experiences — or Jeff’s, or Jack’s, or anyone else’s I’m mentioning here — are normative. The point is to discover, embrace, and enter into relationship with your ownimaginal world, whatever it might be like. Light, dark, nurturing, or scary, all imaginal phenomena have important messages for you if you engage with them and invite them into a relationship. Aside from surrender, this kind of active engagement is one of the most important core skills of navigating an Awakening from Below. For as we’ll see, the Below is saturated with the imaginal all the way down, and all of it is inviting you into relationship.

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Topics Covered:

• Oholomo’s kundalini reversal experience

• When the mainstream spiritual frameworks don’t fit

• The distinction between “Above” and “Below” spiritual paths

• Reimagining the Buddha’s enlightenment story from a Below perspective

• Awakening the Below vs. spiritual emergency

• Integrating ancestry and intergenerational trauma in awakening

• Ego dissolution through inclusion rather than transcendence

• Why normalizing diverse awakening experiences matters

• Liberating the body to be itself

Connect with us:

• Oholomo’s website

• Jack’s website

• My Rising Rose YouTube channel

Without any background knowledge to help contextualize these things, surprise openings to the below can be difficult to understand. They’re consequently often interpreted as spiritual emergencies or mental health crises rather than the blessings and opportunities that they truly can be. The goal of our conversations is to validate and normalize such experiences in order to encourage people to lean into and even embrace the precious dark wisdom that comes from below.

Listeners who like what they hear in these episodes may want to check out the book, Awakening the Below, which teaches readers to recognize the signs of the Below when they appear, to navigate the depths more confidently, and to fully integrate these experiences into their spiritual development in a healthy and meaningful way.

I look forward to this journey with you in this series. Let’s begin our descent.

Connect with us:

• Oholomo’s website

• Jack’s website

Let’s talk about navigating darkness! Everyone on a spiritual path encounters challenges, and in this chapter of TAP we meet author Oholomo, who talks about rather than transcending or letting go, we can welcome and fully embody them - so that its energy can be liberated and expressed in the present. When we awaken DOWN into life it begins with a Descent. The call to the Below can take many forms and we each have our own personal experience of it. Like Oholomo says in this book, “Awakening the below”:

“Once we turn toward the call, whether through our choice or not, a chasm will open up and we will be drawn down into its darkness. This process is never a perfectly step-by-step linear one, and everyone’s experience is unique. Some people find themselves having dramatic mystical experiences when moving through the Below, while others have more of a gradual unfolding. Some people experience high levels of absorption whereby their entire reality seems to be shaped by the Below to the exclusion of all else. Others are able to maintain a wider, more holistic perspective that allows them to do the work of integration as they go along. Awakening the Above and Below may happen sequentially or simultaneously, or perhaps all mixed together.”

People, you really don’t want to miss this one—especially if you’ve known darkness in your own life. My hope is that it inspires you to go deeper and experiment with a model that isn’t about disidentifying from the darkness, but about fully sinking into it.

Oholomo articulates this with such clarity, and his voice has a quality that seems to draw you directly into the Below, I feel inspired to move further myself.

Get the book

A guide to assist those in spiritual crisis or difficulty

This book is a companion for those who are traversing the underbelly of the awakening process: difficult emotions, trauma, strange bodily ailments, spirits, ghosts, ancestors, demons, the imaginal, the soul, energies of the earth, the elements, the dark feminine, and more. This is what the author calls ‘the Below’.

Without any background knowledge to help contextualise these things, surprise openings to ‘the Below’ can be difficult to understand. They are consequently often interpreted as spiritual emergencies or mental health crises rather than the blessings and opportunities that they truly can be. The goal of this book is to validate and normalise such experiences, in order to encourage people to lean into and even embrace the precious dark wisdom that comes from Below.

Awakening the Below will allow readers to recognise the signs of the Below when they appear, supporting them in navigating the territory more confidently and to fully integrate these experiences into their spiritual development in a healthy and meaningful way.

“Awakening the Below is an essential guide for any seeker looking to understand the darker aspects of spiritual awakening. Through experiential narratives and a conversational flow, Oholomo carves a path for the modern seeker who is ready to discover that ’the best way out is always through.” — Mary Mueller Shutan, author of The Spiritual Awakening Guide and Shadow Work for the Soul

Oholomo writes about spiritual awakening from a fresh perspective that combines forty years of experience with Buddhism, Advaita, yoga, shamanism, Western paganism, and Jungian perspectives.

• Warnings and Caveats

• The Buddha and the Goddess

• Acknowledgements

Warnings and Caveats

Before you read any further, please read and take to heart the following warnings and caveats:

(1) This book is intended a work of art, not science. Everything I am writing in this book is poetic, not an infallibly accurate prescription for you to follow. Please always listen to your own inner guidance when evaluating what is said here, and carefully determine if any of it is right for you. It’s okay if it’s not; just freely discard whatever doesn’t work for you and go about your business with confidence that you know yourself best.

(2) These pages are intended to elicit a strong effect for certain readers. If you are not the intended reader, then it will all likely seem like complete gibberish to you. However, if you are in an Below-style awakening process, this book may be intensely psychoactive. It may take you on a profoundly personal and spiritual journey. If you are deep in the throes of the Below at this very moment, please be aware that reading these pages may have unexpected effects on you, including energy surges, deep emotions, insomnia, and other psychophysical effects. If you are prone to experiencing a lot of fear in your awakening process, be aware that some of what I write here may well trigger that kind of response. Always take it in small doses, prioritizing your own wellbeing and safety.

(3) Don’t ever let anything I’ve said in this book talk you out of seeking assistance from a qualified therapist, counselor, or spiritual guide if you believe that kind of resource would be beneficial for you. Even though I am huge fan of DIY, I think that having someone, or a group of people, you check in with on a regular basis can be extremely helpful when you are navigating any awakening process. Just make sure you feel supported, cared for, and understood by them, and that your boundaries and autonomy are always respected. If you feel like something is off, you are most likely right.

(4) If you feel well resourced and mentally strong, then rest assured that the Descent into the Below is not a problem. Nothing is broken. There is nothing to change or fix. Always remember that this process is a blessing — a mysterious one that can be quite challenging at times, but a blessing all the same.

The Buddha and the Goddess

Let’s start with a story. It’s a famous episode in the legendary life of the Buddha that you probably already know. In the tale, the future Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama, had left behind his wife and child, his position as the crown prince of his kingdom, and his life of luxury and ease in order to take up the path of a forest recluse. For years as a samanera (i.e., a person who has renounced worldly life to become a spiritual seeker), he had given himself over to the practice of austere asceticism, intense meditation, and other yogic practices that the gurus of his day promised would lead to enlightenment. In the process, he had starved himself, deprived himself of sleep, performed all kinds of physically painful self-deprivations, and denied himself every biological and psychological comfort in single-minded pursuit of this lofty goal.

After many years of this kind of practice, having become adept at many states of consciousness but also having become exhausted and on the verge of starvation, he finally had determined that this path was too extreme. He therefore had acquiesced to his bodily needs and had eaten his first decent meal in a long time. Having arranged himself a seat under a bodhi tree, he had then set off on a different tack. Having remembered a certain experience of peaceful focus he had as a child, he had decided to recall that state and use it as a platform from which to achieve nirvana. He had taken a strong determination then and there that he would not arise from the foot of the tree until he became awakened. Give me enlightenment or give me death! The hero’s strength, resolve, and determination (they say “he was a lion among men”) are a large part of what has allowed this legend to speak to generations of followers over the past two and half millennia.

But now, as he approaches the point of victory in his quest, the samanera faces his ultimate challenge. In the climax of the myth’s story-arc, he is accosted by a horde of evil spirits led by Mara, the demon-king. Some retellings of this narrative take great up a great deal of text describing the fearsome attributes of these demons and their malicious threats toward Siddhartha. In certain versions, Mara’s three daughters (representing desire, aversion, and attachment) try to knock him off his seat by tempting him with their sensual wiles. Through it all, the samanera is invariably depicted as aloof and equanimous, completely unfazed by any attack or temptation.

For centuries, Buddhist commentators have interpreted an encounter with Mara — whether in this myth of the Buddha or in other Buddhist scriptures — both literally and figuratively. Literalists see demonic forces opposing serious meditators as external entities lying in wait to trip them up and derail their spiritual progress. Others have preferred to view these “demons” as internal psychological forces: the temptations, delusions, traumas, existential fears, and self-doubts that naturally arise as one progresses on the spiritual path. From this perspective, Mara himself represents the last thrashes of the separate ego-self grasping for any point of stability as it nears the point of being defeated once and for all. Although the encounter with Mara may be understood in these different ways, ultimately, everyone agrees that anyone on a quest to awaken sooner or later must encounter their own horde of demons.

In the version of the Buddha’s myth told by the eighteenth-century Tibetan Tenzin Chögyel (translated for Penguin Classics by Kurtis R. Schaeffer), Mara’s assault takes up all of Chapter 9. The demonic horde rains weapons down upon the resolute meditator, but the samanera’s compassion turns them all into flowers. Enraged by Siddhartha’s equipoise, the demon king challenges Siddhartha’s worthiness to become enlightened. On what basis does he take that seat under the bodhi tree? How dare Siddhartha think that he has earned that right?

Siddhartha calmly responds to these taunts by placing his hand upon the ground, and calling the earth to bear witness to the fact that he has made “endless sacrifices” in lifetime after lifetime of practicing virtue. Just then,

the ground trembled, and Sthavara, goddess of the earth, emerged halfway out of the soil. She folded her hands in reverence to the Bodhisattva. “Great One, it is so,” she said. “It is just as you have declared. The truth of this is evident to me. And yet, Lord, now you have become the witness for the world and the gods.”

With these words, Mara is defeated. After mounting a few last attempts to scare Siddhartha in vain, he finally retreats. Now in the clear, the samanera settles into a deep meditative state and concludes his quest to transcend the human condition. He realizes the so-called Four Noble Truths: that life is suffering; that the cause of suffering is desire, aversion, and ignorance; that these can be eliminated; and that the path to their elimination involves virtue, meditation, and insight into the true nature of consciousness. This discovery earns him the title “Buddha,” meaning “Awakened One.” Other names he would come to be known by include “the Victorious One,” “the Transcendent One,” “the Unsurpassed,” and other epithets that connote his victorious struggle rising above the forces of evil and ignorance.

This story I have just told has inspired countless generations of seekers, and continues to do so today. It is a perfectly tailored description of a model of spirituality that in this book I will call “Awakening the Above.” While there are other examples from world mythology, the Buddha is the paramount example of this transcendent trajectory. Awakening the Above means to wake up from the delusions and suffering of the ordinary world, to escape from the limitations of the human body and mind, and to be victorious over the ego, psychological turmoil, and other forces of Darkness. All of the details in the Buddha’s storyline are pointing toward the Above: he leaves his family and his society behind, transcends his biological body and his mind, controls his emotions, defeats the demons, and is the paragon of determination and virtue. He masters all methods of meditation and makes “endless sacrifices” to deserve his awakening. Such is the momentum behind his trajectory of transcendence that no one can stand in his way — even the earth goddess herself bows down and cedes her place of honor to him.

But what if the legend of the Buddha’s life were to be written from a different perspective? What if it were written as a myth about “Awakening the Below”? How would the story be told differently?

Well, for one, that climactic moment in the narrative where Siddhartha lays his hand upon the earth would need to be heavily revised. Imagine if, rather than rising up out of the earth to bear witness to his virtue, the goddess were instead to pull the demon-besiged Siddhartha down into the earth, and press his emaciated, battered body against her warm breast. Imagine if, while she held him, the demon horde fully engulfed him, like a dark cloud permeating his every cell. Imagine if all of his past traumas, his deepest fears, his memories, his longings, his tears, his rage, and his broken-heartedness were through this act of love alchemized into an infinite field of unspeakable tenderness. Imagine if instead of being the dispassionate witness of the world, he instead merged with the world’s soul in all of its sacredness, woundedness, and interconnection. Imagine if, instead of vanquishing the demons, he accepted and welcomed them as parts of himself.

What do you think? Can you visualize a world like this, where Awakened Ones don’t have to be brave heroes? Where there is as much space for vulnerability and helplessness as there is for virtue and resolve? Where tropes of masculine power and victory make way for the gentle, loving intimacy of the divine feminine? Where it is not by vanquishing suffering that Siddhartha becomes enlightened, but by surrendering to it? Where instead of transcending his humanity, he deeply inhabits and embodies it in all of its fragility, vulnerability, and tenderness? Where instead of defeating Mara, we may discover that the Dark is as welcome as the Light?

How does our version of the story end if there’s no need for the hero to become the “World-Honored One”? Perhaps the Buddha will open his eyes only to realize that it was all just a dream and he is back in bed in the palace. Maybe he puts his arm around his sleeping wife, the beautiful young Yasodhara, and lovingly kisses her naked shoulder as he falls back to sleep. Maybe he realizes he doesn’t need to be the victor after all, perhaps wishing for nothing more than to return to his ordinary life in service to his family and his people.

However the ending of this new myth might be written, the essence of the story will emphasize that awakening the Below is less about transcendence or perfection than it is about intimacy. It’s less about waking up from life than it is about waking down into it, gathering up all of the fractured dimensions of our being and weaving the broken pieces into a sacred and scarred wholeness.

Before you get the wrong idea about what I’m saying here, let me be clear: this book is not arguing that one of these two versions of the Buddha myth is better than the other. It is not about pitting Above against Below, producing a dualism to take sides over. Rather, my basic premise in these pages is simply to establish that descent into the Below is a viable, legitimate — but quite different — path of spiritual development than we get from stories about spiritual heroes and demon-vanquishers. This book is about making space for the Below alongside more Above-oriented approaches from Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and other popular spiritual approaches.

From what I have seen, it seems that some people are naturally oriented toward the Below, and that they will spontaneously discover themselves moving in that direction (or will be thrust into it kicking and screaming!) when they begin to undergo an awakening process. Without any background knowledge to help contextualize what is going on, surprise openings to the Below can be difficult to understand. They are consequently often interpreted as “spiritual emergencies” or mental health crises rather than the blessings and opportunities that they truly can be. My motivation in writing this book is to validate and normalize such experiences, in order to encourage people to embrace and even lean into the precious dark wisdom that comes from Below. Finally, this book is also an invitation for those who find themselves naturally drawn toward Above-based spirituality to become more aware of the Below, to become less fearful or dismissive of it, and potentially even to open up to exploring some of this territory. While our natural inclinations may draw us Above or Below, the other is always available for us to investigate, if we are so called. Ultimately, as we will discuss, these two paths converge, becoming inseparable or even indistinguishable. As far as this book is concerned, the true goal of spirituality is nothing short of this unity of Above and Below, the integration of both into a seamless whole.

Acknowledgements

I want to sincerely thank the “Bottom-Up Awakening” discussion group that met with me over the course of about 6 months to provide feedback on portions of this book as I was writing them. I also want to thank the many friends who let me repeat or reproduce their stories here, including Jack Morrígan, Misha BearWoman Metzler, Jeff Richards, Lisa, and Kini. Misha was particularly generous with her time, providing detailed feedback and copyediting on the entire book. Of course, all remaining shortcomings are due to my own oversights!