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.

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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.

To continue reading, get the book!

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!

• As Above, So Below

• An Example of Awakening from Below

• Completing the Circuits

• Useful Resources

In this book I am using “Above” and “Below” as metaphors referring to whole clusters of experiences, ideas, practices, symbols, and realizations that can arise in the course of an awakening process. These metaphors should not be taken as literal or precise descriptions. If there’s one thing that every single tradition has agreed upon, it’s that words cannot possibly be adequate to capture the ineffably mystical nature of spiritual experiences. Let’s agree to use these metaphorical phrases as pointers to a range of experiences, without confusing the finger with the moon.

My choice of using the specific metaphors Above and Below is deliberate. When I first began speaking about this topic, I initially was drawn to using the words Spirit and Soul. However, I soon found out that distinction had already been popularized among depth psychologists and in certain spiritual communities by the prominent Jungian theorist John Hillman. I therefore wanted to use terminology that had fewer preconceived notions packaged into them, and felt that Above and Below would be more neutral. I am aware that there is a similar usage of the terms “Awakening from Above” and “Awakening from Below” in some Jewish traditions, but this is not where I got the terms from and these are not common terms in mainstream Western spirituality, so I don’t mean to invoke any of those connotations.

Even before I found out about Hillman, it was already perfectly obvious to me that I was not the first to distinguish between these two types or orientations of spirituality. Friedrich Nietzsche influentially distinguished between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses he identified in Ancient Greek culture, based on differences between the mythologies and rituals associated with these two deities. In his model, the god Apollo was associated with the sun, rationality, heroism, and order, while Dionysius was associated with intoxication, ecstasy, emotion, and chaos. At first glance, these are not entirely dissimilar from what I am going for with Above and Below.

More recently, an analogous split has been identified in ancient India by the scholar of religion David Gordon White, who in books such as Kiss of the Yogini distinguishes between the Dharma-based current in Indian religion versus the various Tantric goddess traditions. The former (characterized mainly by male deities) tended to value order, morality, wisdom, and meditative practices focused on stillness, while the latter (centering the feminine) tended to involve ecstatic trances, intoxication, ritual sex, and sensual pleasure. Again, at first glance, a lot of that fits with my model of Above and Below.

Other models that overlap substantially with what I have written here include Mircea Eliade’s and Michael Harner’s notions of shamanism, which strongly distinguish between the overworld and the underworld, as well as Carl G. Jung’s notion of the ego’s descent into the wilds of the shadows of the psyche. While I learned about all of these models through reading scholarly books on them, this book you are holding in your hands is emphatically not an academic one. It is a personal one. So, when I use the terms Above and Below here in these pages, I am not intending to make historical or theoretical distinctions. What concerns us here is not the accuracy of these categories for describing particular cultural, religious, or spiritual traditions, but rather their emotional and poetic valence in describing the qualities of our own individual spiritual experiences. I am trying to paint an intuitive, subjective, and intimate picture, not a literal one.

As Above, So Below

I am going to spend a bit of time in this chapter trying to define more precisely what I am talking about when I say “the Below.” Let me start with Fig. 1, where I offer a map of the simplest version of the model I am proposing.

FIG. 1. The Three Realms and Two Trajectories.

In the center of this image lies the Middle, the realm where we humans ordinarily spend the majority of our lives. In this domain, I experience myself as an ego (what many people call the separate self or the narrative self) with a material body. It is from this perspective that non-awakened people typically experience pretty much all of their everyday activities, relationships, and identities related to work, family, hobbies, and so forth.

The quest for fulfillment in the Middle realm involves developing one’s personality, intellectual interests, creative outlets, and social connections. We use these skills to become adept at whatever challenges, missions, or tasks our society and culture set out for us. In the modern West, some milestone achievements of the Middle include becoming established in a career, achieving financial independence, finding a mate, raising a family, and finding a meaningful way to contribute to solving some of our most pressing social problems. Personal healing and growth in the Middle is often facilitated by interactions with therapists, coaches, teachers, parents, and other mentors, who help us to work on our physical, psychological, and social wellbeing. We don’t usually refer to these pursuits as spiritual, but I would argue that, ultimately, integrating spiritual realizations back into our Middle lives is precisely the point of spirituality. More on that later.

In any case, not all people are moved in this lifetime to explore the territory beyond the Middle. For that reason, mainstream spiritual and religious opportunities tend to stay within its boundaries. Religious institutions operating in this domain teach morality and kindness, and promise a comfortable afterlife. Spiritual teachers and communities operating at this level include mainstream yoga and mindfulness classes focused on wellbeing, and teachings about praying or manifesting your way into wealth and happiness. Shamanism and magick that ultimately are serving egoic, psychological, or material ends are also examples of Middle-based practices, although they might claim to be otherwise. These forms of spirituality frequently offer beneficial practices, but the benefits they hold out are limited to the ordinary, everyday human world.

When one’s quest for meaningful answers begins to look beyond the bounds of the ordinary and everyday, there are essentially two paths to choose from. Actually, people rarely make a conscious choice between them; more likely they are intuitively drawn in one direction or the other — or for some people, toward both simultaneously.

Those individuals drawn toward the Above are enticed by the promise of transcending the human condition, elevating oneself above suffering and “worldly” concerns and discovering the “ultimate truth” about the universe. Escaping the bondage of the ego and the physical form through a journey into the Above is what I call Transcendence. Traditions that emphasize this trajectory include Theravada Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Christian mysticism, all traditions that have had a huge impact on Western spirituality.

What does the final goal of liberation look like in Above-based traditions? From Theravada we get the ideal of the serene monk, living in perpetual meditative bliss. Advaita has a similar idealized view of the Hindu sage (Ramana Maharshi comes to mind). Christianity likewise has its monks and nuns who ideally live lives of chastity and faith while preaching love and virtue (think of St. Francis of Assisi, for example). Traditions that prioritize this Transcendent trajectory consider the ultimate goal of spiritual practice to be to see through and rise above the vicissitudes of samsara (the everyday life of the Middle) once and for all, and then to reside permanently in the tranquility and bliss of Transcendence.

As they begin to open up to the Above through various spiritual practices, practitioners may experience a range of phenomena that pertains to this realm. In the most general terms, the first-person experience of “awakening the Above” involves four main aspects. First, and most characteristically, there is a shift in identity that transcends the personal, separate ego-self of the Middle. In Advaita and other Hindu-influenced systems, this is normally talked about as a shift in identification from the ego-self to the True Self, Pure Consciousness, or Brahman. In Christian mystical systems, the shift is from identification with the ego-self to identification as God, Christ, Child of God, Bride of Christ, or other terms. Buddhist systems speak of the dropping away of identification altogether, which they normally refer to as Non-self or Emptiness. In all cases, the ego-self is seen as less and less relevant as the trajectory of Transcendence continues, ultimately disappearing altogether from the practitioner’s experience.

A second, equally important, aspect of the Above is the dissolution of perception. Generally, this involves the breaking down of the mental constructs that interpret the world as being composed of discrete physical objects, as well as seeing into the constructed nature of sensory perception. Again, there’s a difference between how traditions express this. Hindu systems will tend to speak of this as the realization that all phenomena are “made out of consciousness” or are “inseparable from Brahman” or “part of the Self.” Christianity will refer to this as the realization that all phenomena are “part of God” or “have a Divine nature.” Buddhists, as always preferring the language of negation, tend to emphasize the Emptiness, non-arising, non-existence, or mirage-like nature of all phenomena.

Both of these aspects of the Above, the shift in identity and the dissolution of perception, are referred to in contemporary Western spiritual circles as non-duality. Some systems of Above-based spirituality, such as the teachings normally referred to as “radical nonduality,” hold these realizations to be the only goal of spirituality. However, most traditional forms of Above-based spirituality teach one to discover and to interweave these strands of nonduality with other aspects or dimensions of the Above. One of the most common is a sense of sacredness — either experienced as gods, goddesses, or angelic beings, or else in shapeless, nebulous, or formless manifestations such as radiant light, bliss, joy, peace, and so forth. It is not unusual as part of awakening the Above to experience oneself fully merging with this sacredness or becoming divine. Experiences like this bring healing, wisdom, blessings, and other positive sensations. Eventually, it can settle down into a pervasive but gentle sweetness or tenderness that is a common background feature of all reality.

Another aspect that is often present in Above-based teachings is the opening of the heart. An open heart overflows with kindness and good will. Again, it is spoken about differently by different traditions, but think of the Buddhist practice of loving kindness meditation, the activities of Ama the Hindu hugging saint, or the symbol of Virgin Mary or the sacred heart of Jesus. The shared idea here is a universal love that is extended globally regardless of the specific details or circumstances. Another feature of an open heart is that it can be easily heartbroken, filled with empathy, or even feel like it is taking on the suffering of the world. These two varieties of love — kindness and sensitivity — are the two sides of the same open-hearted coin.

While these four aspects are core experiential features of the Above, there are many other experiences that are reported and prized by different traditions. These include things like communication with disembodied teachers, psychic phenomena of various kinds, energetic flows, bodily bliss, auras, lights, colors, synchronicities, psychokinesis, and much more. There are a lot of books out there on all of this, so I’m not going to go into any more detail about any of that here. Let’s just suffice it to say that all of this Above stuff differs markedly from the Below.

I am going to discuss the experiences of the Below in much more detail in coming chapters. For now, let’s simply give a list of terms that can convey a general sense of the territory: bodily intelligence, sexual energy, emotions, trauma, the earth, the elements, ancestors, spirits, ghosts, demons, the imaginal, the soul, the dark feminine. Rather than Transcending up and beyond our individual humanity, in the Below we Descend, sinking down into and inhabiting the deepest layers of our embodiment and our psyche. Parallels to this Descent are perhaps suggested in Greek mythology in the form of the katabasis, or the descent into the Underworld. A clear Below-oriented model is found in Jungian-influenced systems of Depth Psychology focused on the exploration of the darkness and liminality of the unconscious. Shamanism gives us another example, where the classic Descent trajectory involves a “Shamanic Crisis”: an illness or existential event that brings the journeyer to the brink of death, which occasions an encounter with the deepest dimension of the soul.

In my experience, the majority of spiritual seekers who talk about “awakening” in the contemporary West are exclusively thinking about the Above, and may be completely unaware of the Below, or even hold negative views about it. These biases are not their fault. The narrative about the Buddha defeating Mara, discussed in the preface, is an influential myth that strongly shapes people’s ideas of what “proper” spirituality looks like. Christianity’s millennia-long tradition of characterizing the Below as Satanic and sinful also plants seeds of fear, distrust, and disdain in Western spiritual seekers (even those who eschew Christianity). Buddhism, Christianity, and Advaita all denigrate sexuality and sensual pleasure, whether as a form of greed and self-gratification or as an immoral act that is offensive to God. This can often set up a guilt and shame dynamic between Above-oriented spiritual seekers and certain experiences in the Below.

As a consequence of prejudices such as these, many Western people who are experiencing an awakening process know nothing about the Below or even actively demonize it. However, in talking with people over the past years, I have noticed that a certain percentage of these people may nonetheless find themselves spontaneously thrust into the Below in the course of an awakening process. When this happens, it is common for spiritual journeyers to be thoroughly confused about why their awakenings don’t seem to match those of their colleagues or fit into the maps they have been given. They may realize that they’re on a different track than the norm, but have taken to understanding the Above as the “right” kind of awakening and the Below as a deviant or harmful cul-de-sac. Many people I have spoken to have come to believe that there’s something wrong with them personally; that they are deficient or broken in some way that is hindering or preventing their spiritual growth. I also know people who have had more extreme reactions to the Below, such as believing that they have gone mad, checking themselves into mental hospitals, and going on psychiatric medication to stop what they assume must be symptoms of psychosis or other mental illnesses.

The purpose of this book is to help people recognize the signs of the Below when they appear, to navigate this territory more confidently, and to fully integrate these experiences into their spiritual development in a healthy and meaningful way. Helping journeyers to better understand and benefit from the Below begins by doing away with the prejudices and hierarchies we have inherited from various traditional sources. While the founders and followers of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions may have expressed strong opinions about which kinds of experiences are better than others, we can and should do our own investigations and come to our own conclusions. In this book, I will share my own ideas based on my own personal explorations. My basic premise is that the Above and Below each hold out unique opportunities for growth, fulfillment, wisdom, and liberation. Those of us who find ourselves in the Below — whether by choice or by chance — can feel confident in the knowledge that it is a great blessing.

The idea that there are blessings in the Below may seem counterintuitive to you if you have been used to dismissing or denigrating this realm, or if you are experiencing a lot of fear about it. But I am far from the first person to have made this discovery. Many years ago, the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell popularized the phrase “Return with Elixir,” which I like quite a bit. He was referring to the final stage in what he called the “Hero’s Journey,” the narrative arc of many a mythological narrative, literary work, and even Hollywood movie. This is the point in the journey where the protagonist, having faced the darkness and threat of annihilation and having come out the other side, now returns back to the everyday world with a valuable boon (the elixir) for their community. For an example of this pattern, think of the shaman who travelled through the ghost world and is now back in the village serving as a healer and counselor to her people. Or the myth of Jesus being crucified, only to then rise from the dead to guide his followers to salvation.

In the last decade or so, I have noticed that Western spirituality is increasingly placing importance on a particular Above-based variation of Return with Elixir, which these days is commonly referred to as Embodiment. If Transcendence is “waking up” (notice the Above-oriented language), then Embodiment is often called “waking down,” bringing one’s awakening down into the physical body and into the material world. Instead of the recluse who leaves society in order to live in a state of permanent bliss, the ideal here is the bodhisattva, an awakened being who lives in the world compassionately integrating their enlightenment back into everyday life. In Zen Buddhism this is commonly referred to as “returning to the marketplace with gift-bestowing hands,” after a famous series of paintings and poems called the Ten Oxherding Pictures. Tantric Buddhism (aka Vajrayana), Kashmiri Shaivism, and Daoist traditions each teach a whole suite of physical, breath, energy, visualization, deity, and meditative practices designed to integrate awakening into the body. Christianity, of course, has its own take on Embodiment, whereby God himself descends in the human form of Jesus in order to spread his love in the world of suffering and sin. What these traditions all share is the notion that residing eternally in the Above is not enough; one has to bring the elixir back down to the Middle.

The traditional myth of the Buddha’s enlightenment I told in the preface also has a Return with Elixir. In the original telling, the Buddha defeats Mara by exercising a detached posture of equanimity, an appreciation of impermanence, and resolve in the face of suffering. This allows him to bring back the elixirs of Dharma — i.e., teachings on how to transcend the human condition — from the Above. However, in my modified retelling, the Buddha brings back altogether different elixirs from the Below. What are those gifts and how do we access them? That’s what this book is about.

An Example of Awakening from Below

When I say “awakening theBelow,” I am not just referring to brief glimpses of the Below, but an awakening process that involves extended journeys into the Below or that, at least for a time, feels like the center of gravity is located in the Below. Here, I am going to give you just a taste of what awakening the Below can look like by briefly outlining my own story. (Keep in mind that this is just a preliminary example and that details can vary significantly.)

My spiritual explorations began when I was in elementary school. By the time I graduated from college, I had learned two forms of East Asian martial arts, served for several years as assistant to a sweat lodge ceremonialist, taken courses on shamanism and Asian religion, danced publicly with my power animals, experimented with ceremonial earth magick, and taken psychedelics a few times. I had also read classical Buddhist, Hindu, and Daoist scriptures, and had become curious about yoga and meditation. I did not know enough at that time to differentiate between Above and Below, but in retrospect I clearly felt drawn in both directions.

After graduation, I lived in Asia for several years, continuing to vacillate between Above and Below. I spent many months at Buddhist meditation centers, monastic retreats, and long-term retreats at yoga ashrams. I became an energy healing practitioner. And I learned how to ritually honor nature spirits and other unseen beings from various kinds of “spirit doctors.” During this time, I began to viscerally feel the difference between Above and Below, and I felt acutely torn between these two seemingly incompatible directions of growth and development.

It was during this time, when I was staying at a Buddhist monastery, that I had my first major spiritual breakthrough, a heart-opening experience that blew me open with universal compassion. After that heart opening, things were relatively stable for nearly 20 years while I established myself in my career and raised two children. However, in my mid-40s, I had another dramatic spiritual opening, this time a classic nondual awakening experience. This experience came on as I was listening to a 10- or 15-minute description of a technique called Headless Way. I find it highly ironic that I had listened to countless in-depth descriptions of Buddhist and Hindu contemplative techniques for decades without any dramatic results, but a quirky British guy gushing about how he can’t find his head somehow broke through!

Anyway, you can read more about the details of my whole awakening process under the “About the Author” section of this website. Here, I just want to give the basic outline. As it happened, this initial glimpse of “headlessness” set off a series of dramatic mystical experiences over the next four years. Initially, these had to do with deepening into nonduality. My identity shifted from the ego-self to awareness, and six months later from awareness to non-self. I experienced rushes of Kundalini energy up my spine and out the top of my crown. My sensory perception started to dissolve as I began to experience the emptiness of all phenomena, and I had a few “cessation events” where consciousness turned off.

If you’re following along, you’ll have noticed that, so far, while I had a certain earlier proclivity for the Below, the truly impactful spiritual openings I had in my life were all oriented toward the Above. I could easily find analogues for everything I was experiencing in the Buddhist and Hindu teachings I knew well, and I could easily share them with others within my spiritual circles and be readily understood. Things felt amazing and I was certain I was on a trajectory to becoming enlightened.

All of that remained true for the first year or so after the awakening process began. However, after that point, my trajectory took a downward turn, into the Below, and things started getting much weirder. Over the following two years, I continued to have Above-style experiences that made sense to me based on my background in Asian traditions, but I simultaneously began to experience a whole range of Below-style phenomena. These began when the flow of Kundalini energy in my spine reversed direction, strongly gushing downward from my crown into the depths of my pelvis. I felt like something had been deposited in my hara, a dark gem that now seemed to take over and became the “engine” behind my awakening process. After that, I started to feel that my body was an autonomous intelligence with its own kind of embodied consciousness and sensitivity, and that it was teaching me how to sink more deeply into its depths.

My whole subtle body system lit up with each chakra being clearly defined and vibrantly alive with an energy that was at once blissful, sensual, and unspeakably tender. During this time, I was visited frequently by nature spirits, elementals, ancestors, goddesses, angels, and other ethereal beings that taught me valuable lessons and played a hand in orchestrating my spiritual journey. I navigated encounters with a few intensely dark denizens of the spirit world, and had a near brush with death. Two years into the process, deep in the depths of the Below, I encountered a bottomless abyss of fear, and on the other side of it, the radiant divine light of my soul.

One thing worth mentioning about this period is that, although I had been steeped in Asian spiritual ideas and practices, the experiences I had in the Below felt much more closely aligned with my family heritage, which is predominantly Latin American, with both European and Indigenous roots. For example, the spirits that were the most significant guides on my journey all turned out to be Catholic figures, Pagan deities, or animals and plants native to South America rather than Buddhas or bodhisattvas. Another notable facet of my own process (as a cisgendered heterosexual male) was the predominance of feminine forms. Most of my most important spirit guides were female. My energy body felt like it had transformed into a feminine form. When I saw my soul, the form it took was that of a goddess.

These qualities of my experiences perplexed me. They seemed to be so far off the map of the familiar Asian traditions that, for a little while, I was not sure if I was having an awakening experience or if I was going insane. Fortunately, I was well-resourced enough to be able to keep my wits about me while I gradually made some sense of what was happening. My earlier exposure to indigenous traditions, shamanism, spirit healing, and energy work, along with nearly 25 years of daily yoga practice and deep study of religion, had all prepared me for exactly this kind of work.

After several months struggling to understand and trust the process, I decided to surrender to it. The message was coming loud and clear from my guides that I needed to integrate Above and Below into a coherent whole, and I took this to heart. I consulted books by authors who were adept at navigating these kinds of experiences, and created my own synthesis of practices that resonated with my unique experiences. Over the course of the next three years, I created an amalgamation of energetic, ancestral, shamanic, magickal, sexual, yogic, heart-opening, devotional, visualization, and meditation practices. I will describe the ingredients in that synthesis in Chapter 4. (Of course, the whole idea here is to encourage you to create your own DIY tools, so I am just giving you some starting points for your consideration.)

There will be a lot more to say in the coming pages about how certain practices can help you to to open up to the Below and to unlock the blessings and gifts that it offers. However, if you would permit me to share the single most significant insight I learned from my own journey with you right now, I would say that it was the importance of surrender. This is going to be the major overarching theme in this book. To sum up my whole message in the most pithy form, it is simply to fully surrender to the Below and it will reveal its blessings.

Completing the Circuits

This book is for those who find themselves on a similar path to mine. We have been to the Above; we have seen clearly the nondual, empty, divine nature of reality. Yet now, for who knows what reasons, we find that the techniques we mastered in the Above don’t seem to be working for us anymore. We are intuitively feeling that we are being called to something deeper, more feminine, more intimate, more human, more alive.

If you have already begun to awaken the Below, you may have been feeling lost, or even trapped, down here. Perhaps you have felt scared and lonely, thinking that things have gone wrong or that you’ve gone crazy. If that’s true, I am here to tell you that awakening the Below is a great blessing. You may not be able to see this yet, but your journey into the Below and the elixirs you will learn to bring back are absolutely critical to the evolution of your community and to humanity as a whole. We need you to be doing the work you are doing — in fact, the entire cosmos is depending on it. Thank you, most deeply, for every step you’re taking on this journey!

Perhaps, for some readers, despite the difficulties you might be facing, you may already have begun to suspect that great blessings lie in the Below. Have you perhaps felt like purely Above-based awakenings are missing something? I mean, thank goodness that we have people who have gone far, far out into the Above and brought back those teachings. They are like beacons of light for the rest of us, and I am super grateful to them for doing that! But, aren’t you a bit bored with enlightenment that lacks an equal amount of soulfulness? Awakened people who can’t deeply inhabit their bodies, cook food with friends, or love their children madly? Awakened people who can’t feel deep in their bones their own woundedness, the intergenerational trauma of racism, or the brutalization of the planet? Awakened people who can’t light a candle for their ancestors, cry over the evening news, get lost in a piece of music, or have wild sex in the back seat of their car? I know I have.

Fig. 2 adds to our simple model the culmination of both trajectories I’ve been talking about. What this book is calling for is the completion of both circuits: fully awakened beings who are also fully human. Awakenings that both Transcend to the farthest reaches of the Above and Descend to the farthest reaches of the Below, and then Embody and Return to integrate all of the gifts, wisdom, perspectives, and other elixirs gathered along the way back into the everyday for the benefit of all of life.

FIG. 2. Completing the Journeys

What does completion look like? Eventually, once you have traversed both of the loops shown in Fig. 2, you will discover that you are able to shift your consciousness back and forth at will between the Above, the Below, and the Middle. (Of course, the Middle will have transformed for you; it will still be the domain of the personality and the everyday, but now it is no longer dominated by the ego or the idea that the body is merely physical.) Different people may experience this flexibility in different ways. For me, I could draw my energy into different regions of my body, which caused my consciousness to sink or rise into these three realms. But, again, that’s me; your experience will likely vary.

However it happens for you, once you can freely shift your consciousness in that way, the elixirs of the three realms will start flowing together. You will then gradually experience the Above, Below, and Middle begin to cohere. From the Above, you will have learned definitively and permanently the nondual nature of reality. You will find yourself expressing an open heart that is unambiguously compassionate toward all beings. You will recognize and fully embody your own radiant divine nature. From the Below, you will have gathered a deep intimacy with the living intelligence of your human body as well as with the natural environment. You will have reconciled ancestral, intergenerational, and past life traumas. You will have received the blessing and protection of spirit guides, angels, and deities. You will have worked through your deepest fears to discover and become totally aligned with your soul’s mandate.

Bringing everything I’ve just said back into the Middle, you will achieve wellbeing and balance as an individual operating in the ordinary world, whatever that looks like for you. You will have inhabited (not erased!) your old wounds so thoroughly that you will overflow with presence and empathy in all of your relationships. You will become an effective channel to deliver your deepest gifts to your society and culture. And you will manifest your unique blend of elixirs in everything you do in your daily activities of work, family, and community. Your work of living out your awakening in the world will not be finished — in fact, it never will be — but the three realms will forevermore be integrated, whole, and inseparable parts of one seamless awakened singularity.

This kind of awakening is something that unfolds over the long term — years or even decades. So, if you feel trapped in the Below right now, try not to worry too much. It’s just a sign that you haven’t gotten to the bottom quite yet. Eventually, though, when you have passed through the final trial (which I call the Abyss; see Chapter 3), your Return will naturally and effortlessly begin without your needing to do anything. Likewise, if you haven’t yet completed the Transcendence portion of your journey, don’t worry about that either. That can be completed before, during, or after your transit through the Below, and it will happen just as effortlessly. (In my case, which isn’t to be thought of as normative, I started the Transcendence first, then did the Embodiment and Descent roughly simultaneously, and then completed the Return.) Wherever you are in your own trajectory, just surrender to being right there. You will discover that there are elixirs to be found absolutely everywhere.

Useful Resources

Before we jump into the remainder of the book, I wanted to briefly mention a few other presentations of the Below that I have personally found interesting and inspirational. I also will make explicit how these models are different than mine.

First and foremost of these, in my opinion, is the model forwarded by Bill Plotkin in his book The Journey of Soul Initiation (2021). I will admit that the impact this book had on me was like no other I can remember in a very long time. I found it after I had completed my own journey into the depths of the Below, and after I had already formulated in my own language a lot of the ideas that are now being given expression in this book. However, in reading Plotkin’s work, I immediately recognized a fellow explorer of the same territory. (Actually, in the book, he traces the trajectories of a half dozen or so people as they traversed the Below, so I recognized multiple fellow explorers.) It’s a brilliant book, which I highly recommend.

There are many similarities between Plotkin’s book and the one you are holding in your hands right now. Some are due to the influence that Plotkin has had on me, such as the fact that I was inspired by Plotkin’s use of stories, and have emulated that approach here. A substantial amount of the similarity is because we are both tremendously inspired by Carl Jung. However, most of the similarities between the books are due to the fact that we are describing the same territory that we experienced in similar ways. I also think The Journey of Soul Initiation could be quite complementary to this book because Plotkin talks a lot about vision quests, fasts, and wilderness expeditions as his primary modes of accessing the Below. These have never been part of my own modus operandi and are therefore not prioritized here. However, aside from different terminology and practices, I would say that the major difference between Plotkin’s book and this one is that his is exclusively concerned with navigating the Below and bringing back elixirs into the Middle. There is virtually no mention of the Above. Therefore, to me, it is a very on-point and extremely helpful description of only half of the story.

Another thing I found electrifying when I first encountered it is Rob Burbea’s work on “Soulmaking Dharma.” Burbea was a Buddhist teacher and a senior teacher at Gaia House in England, who was primarily known for writing Seeing That Frees, an extensive book on emptiness that became a classic among serious Dharma practitioners. Burbea passed away in 2020 from pancreatic cancer. In the last few years before his death, along with his collaborator Catherine McGee, he had started to articulate a new vision that combined Buddhist teachings on emptiness with a Jungian-inspired model of “the imaginal.” Unfortunately, he died before he was able to complete much writing on this topic; however, there are a number of recordings of his lectures and retreat instructions available online in the Gaia House archives. This material was extremely helpful to me, both validating my experiences and accelerating my Descent.

To me, Burbea’s articulation of Soulmaking Dharma is perfectly calibrated for practitioners who are highly experienced with Buddhist teachings who wish to start to orient toward the Below. His recordings point listeners who already have some mastery of the Above toward the Descent using Buddhist concepts in a way that I think is quite skillful and inspirational. On the other hand, if you are not that kind of reader, then it will probably not speak to you at all. Another limitation of Burbea’s materials, as far as I can tell from the online recordings, is that he walks people right up to the door to the Descent but does not lead them down into the depths. Therefore, it again is an on-point and helpful, although limited, view of the territory. (McGee continues to give retreats and develop this work, and perhaps her retreats are more comprehensive; I don’t know.)

A third model that is both relevant and also quite popular in spiritual circles is Adyashanti’s teaching on awakening the Head, Heart, and Hara. Personally, I like this model a lot and I think that it has a ton of overlap with this book. I haven’t followed Adya closely, but if I’m understanding him correctly, it seems to me that his Head and Heart awakenings correspond to my Above, and his Hara captures some of what I mean by the Below. While his three forms of awakening cover a lot of ground and I have no objection to them, I still feel like there’s more to the Below than is articulated in his teaching. To my ears, Adya’s descriptions of the Hara don’t seem to evoke the darkness, difficulty, terror, and sheer weirdness of my own journey through the Below. Perhaps we could imagine adding an extension onto his Head-Heart-Hara model, a fourth realm located under the Hara, deeper down into the Abyss. (Maybe I’d suggest something like Head-Heart-Hara-Hades, but I don’t know if that would pass muster with Adya’s marketing team!)

Finally, I wanted to mention one last model that I think is relevant to our discussion here: the one forwarded by tantric Buddhist and Hindu systems of practice. While there are many others, the most well known of these in the contemporary West are Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmiri Shaivism. While I have not engaged in formal training in either, from what I can tell from my reading about them, these two traditions recognize and teach practitioners to work with many of the categories of experiences I outline in this book. (While I have critiqued Buddhism in this chapter as an Above-focused tradition, Tantric Buddhism is an exception.)

Both Vajrayana and Kashmiri Shaivism involve formal instructions for working with the divine feminine, Kundalini and other energies, light, imaginal symbols, dreams, deities, ghosts, and spirits — most of the areas we’ll explore in the chapters to come. They each also have a general outline of how spiritual progress typically is meant to unfold. Buddhist Tantric frameworks, for example, typically begin with practices that prioritize opening the heart and engaging with beneficial deities, then proceed to developing higher states of concentration and nondual consciousness, and then lastly move from there down into the body and the energy system through physical and breathing exercises. In contrast, Kashmiri Shaivism, like other forms of Hindu tantra, tends to incorporate the body from the very beginning.

While the more systematic nature of these Tantric traditions is truly one of the great advantages they hold for many practitioners, this is also, in my view, their principal limitation. Both systems require initiation or empowerment in order to get started, rigorous preliminary practices that go on for years in many cases, and personalized instruction from an accomplished guru. Their teachings are structured, understood, and expressed in a certain traditional way, and deviations from the standard model are typically discouraged or devalued. Moreover, since these Tantric spiritual systems are the products of Indian and Tibetan cultures, teachers in these traditions are not necessarily open to symbolism or practices from other cultures.

These more rigid structures can limit people’s ability to participate in these systems if they suddenly find themselves thrust into the Below and need more immediate and more customizable tools. For example, during my own process of Awakening from Below, when I suddenly started being visited by Catholic, Pagan, and Indigenous South American deities and spirits, I wondered if a Tantric teacher steeped in Asian symbolic and spiritual lore might be able to help me interact skillfully with the beings I was encountering in their own symbolic and ritual languages. I reached out to a few people with this question, and they laughed at the very idea.

In a way, you could say that what I wound up doing in creating my own synthesis of practices was inventing a DIY version of tantra, so to speak, that resonated with my own unique journey. This wound up being much more efficient for me than if I had started formal training in tantra at that point in time. It also allowed my awakening process to have a totally unique symbolic vocabulary that reflected my own individual cultural, psychological, and spiritual makeup. (Of course, you might feel differently and prefer the security and structure that established systems can provide over the DIY ethos I am presenting here. If that’s the case, then by all means, follow your own intuition!)

One last thing that I wanted to mention about tantra is that I do really like Kashmiri Shaivism’s appreciation for the divine feminine. This is pretty much completely absent in all the other sources I discussed above. The gendering of consciousness as masculine (Shiva) and the manifestation of phenomena as feminine (Shakti) is something that makes intuitive sense to me, and the exuberant celebration of Shakti that you find in the tradition matches my own felt sense of things very well. For me, the whole Below has a strongly tangible feminine quality to it. In fact, I almost wrote this whole book referring to the Below as “her” instead of “it.” Even though I chose not to for stylistic reasons, for me, I very much see these pages as my own honoring and celebration of the goddess. Someday, I’ll figure out how to express what I really want to say about her, and I’ll write a whole other book. Meanwhile, although we have other priorities to attend to here, and I may not draw attention to the fact as often as I’d like, please know that the divine feminine is always here, behind every word.

Since I’ve already mentioned a few books above, let me include a list of a few more resources that may be helpful for people sojourning in the Below. While I learned most of my “DIY tantra” techniques from the Below itself, each of the books listed below provides more detail and tools about various aspects that we will be exploring here. Note that I am not recommending them because I agree with any claims they might make about what’s ultimately true. I am recommending them because I appreciate the practice advice that they give. Some of these were published more recently, after my journey was completed, but overall I have a lot of gratitude to these authors and I acknowledge a great debt to them for influencing my journey and my thinking on this topic.

• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996)

• Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (2017)

• Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm (2020)

• Barbara Carrellas, Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century(2007)

• Robert Falconer, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (2023)

• Daniel Foor, Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing(2017)

• Bonnie Greenwell, Energies of Transformation: A Guide to the Kundalini Process (1995)

• Julie Henderson, The Lover Within: Opening to Energy in Sexual Practice(1999)

• Langston Khan, Deep Liberation: Shamanic Tools for Reclaiming Wholeness in a Culture of Trauma (2021)

• Chöying Khandro, Dakini Journey in the Contemporary World (2023)

• Matt Licata, The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You (2017)

• Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche(2003)

• Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries (2021)

• Martín Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman’s Journey to the Heart of the Indigenous Soul (1998)

• John J. Prendergast, In Touch: How to Tune In to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself (2015)

• John J. Prendergast, The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence (2019)

• Reginald Ray, Somatic Descent: How to Unlock the Deepest Wisdom of the Body (2020)

• Reginald Ray, The Awakening Body: Somatic Meditation for Discovering Our Deepest Life (2016)

• Lorin Roche, The Radiance Sutras: 112 Gateways to the Yoga of Wonder and Delight (2014)

• Evelyn Rysdyk, The Nepalese Shamanic Path: Practices for Negotiating the Spirit World (2019)

• Sarangerel, Chosen By the Spirits: Following Your Shamanic Calling(2001)

• Mary Mueller Shutan, The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Kundalini, Psychic Abilities, and the Conditioned Layers of Reality (2015)

• Mary Mueller Shutan, The Body Deva: Working with the Spiritual Consciousness of the Body (2018)

• Tara Springett, Healing Kundalini Symptoms: Proven Techniques That Really Work (2020)

(Full disclosure: When you purchase a book on Amazon.com after clicking one of the links on this website, we receive a very small affiliate fee — a couple of cents, at no extra cost to you — that helps to pay our hosting fees. Thanks!)

• When to Get Help

• Case Study 1: Oholomo’s Descending Kundalini

• Case Study 2: Misha’s Identity Fractures Apart

• Case Study 3: After the Meditation Retreat

• Case Study 4: Jack’s Dark Night of the Soul

Over the past few decades, the phrase “spiritual emergency” has become widespread among many spiritual communities in the West. Inspired by the transpersonal psychologists Christina and Stan Groff, the term typically refers to a crisis of a spiritual nature, or one brought on by spiritual practice, presenting a severe mental or physical challenge to the experiencer. But exactly what constitutes a spiritual emergency versus the expected or normal kinds of challenges associated with the awakening process has always remained an open question.

Recent studies have shown that whether or not spiritual phenomena are experienced as emergencies is in large part due to the experiencer’s ability to interpret their experiences in positive ways. Extreme spiritual phenomena that happen without adequate context tend to provoke terror, confusion, and dysregulation. However, when one is able to make sense of these phenomena and fit them into a larger framework that is meaningful, they can come to be accepted as challenging — though not necessarily destabilizing — parts of the awakening process.

One of the main purposes of this book has been to identify some of the weirder, darker, more unusual kinds of phenomena that can arise in the course of a spiritual awakening, and to provide a helpful reframing of these. The hypothetical reader I have in mind, the one who I surmise will be most interested in what I have to say in these pages, is someone who has had at least a substantial taste of the Above (i.e., awakening to nonduality, emptiness, universal love, or divinity), but then has unexpectedly found themselves in the midst of a Descent. How this descent happened will be unique from person to person, but I am imagining that such a reader is at present thoroughly confused as to why their experience doesn’t match the Above-based descriptions of awakening shared in their spiritual traditions or communities. Perhaps certain aspects of the Below are completely unknown within their circles, or perhaps they are known and actively demonized. I imagine that they are frightened, and perhaps are even experiencing this all as an existential threat.

What I have attempted to provide here in these pages is a framework for such a reader to reframe their experiences by placing them into a healthy, meaningful narrative that will both provide comfort and deepen their awakening process. Once someone has accepted the Below as a normal part of spirituality, one can transition from interpreting the Descent as a spiritual emergency to appreciating it as a great, mysterious gift.

In this chapter, I will attempt to show this kind of reframing in action through some case studies. Each one takes a series of events that were at the time interpreted as some kind of crisis, and demonstrates how they might be reinterpreted in light of the materials and models presented in this book.

When to Get Help

Before we get into the case studies that represent the heart of this chapter, let’s take a moment to acknowledge the limitations of our approach. It’s simply not the case that reframing one’s experiences can solve all of one’s problems all of the time. The Below sometimes does have real, innate dangers.

In the first place, because of how closely the body is linked with the unconscious mind (Jung argued that the body is actually part of the unconscious), the psychic turmoil you experience in an Awakening from Below almost always manifests physically. It is therefore highly likely that you will experience a range of uncomfortable bodily sensations, symptoms, or actual illnesses as you go through the alchemical and energetic transformations of the Descent and Return.

In my own case, these physical discomforts included insomnia, heart palpitations, and chronic acid reflux. Other people I know have experienced chronic pain, migraines, and other ailments. To be safe, it is always advisable to consult a medical doctor to rule out any serious conditions when such things arise. There also may be particular value in being treated by a practitioner of energy medicine (acupuncture, Reiki, etc.).

Aside from the high likelihood of physical danger, it is a near certainty that you will experience mental and emotional upheaval. It may even be difficult to distinguish between the experience of the Below and serious mental health issues. Confusing overlaps between the two occur because certain types of psychosis can often have spiritual themes or content, and certain types of spiritual experiences can mimic the symptoms of mental illness. It’s not for nothing that Joseph Campbell was once quoted as saying “the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

Because certain mystical experiences share a lot of common ground with madness, there are some red flags that are prudent to keep in mind. First and foremost is the inability to distinguish spiritual experiences from the everyday world. Believing in strange things is not a mental illness. Nor is seeing deities, spirits, ghosts, fairies, aliens, or other visions in your mind’s eye, in dreams, during spiritual practice, in a twilit room when you first wake up from sleep, or in other liminal spaces. On the other hand, if you are seeing these in your visual field, in broad daylight, mixed in with your eyesight in a way that you can’t tell the difference between the ordinary world and the imaginal world, that is something to get checked out by a mental health professional.

Likewise, if you’ve become confused about what’s happening within your own psyche versus consensus reality, or if spiritual phenomena are completely incapacitating you, or if you find yourself uncontrollably talking about imaginal events in inappropriate social settings, or if you become suicidal, or if you have strong or persistent thoughts or impulses to harm other people, these are all also clear signs that you need to seek help right away.

It also may just be that one day you realize you can’t handle the intensity of the phenomena you are experiencing without some support. If that happens, don’t hesitate to reach out for help. While it may feel like you are alone, there are many knowledgeable guides and counselors who can help you to navigate this territory. I’ve listed below some organizations I like to point people to, who specialize in supporting people who find themselves in an acute spiritual emergency:

• American Center for the Integration of Spiritually Transformative Experiences

• Cheetah House

• Spiritual Emergence Network

• Spiritual Crisis Network

• Spiritual Emergence Anonymous

Case Study 1: Oholomo’s Descending Kundalini

So far in this book, I have tended to suggest that the Descent is a gradual step-by-step process of sinking into the Below, with a slow and steady peeling back of its layers. However, for some people, the Descent into the Below can happen quite precipitously. For me, it happened extremely rapidly as a result of a certain type of Kundalini opening.

Kundalini is a generic term that is used in contemporary Western spiritual communities for many kinds of energetic phenomena that arise in the course of spiritual practice. The most common form of Kundalini is primarily a pranic or energetic opening. This kind of Kundalini generally feels like the body comes alive with tingling, electric, bioenergetic, or subtle vibrations. Typically, these sensations begin at the base of the spine and move in an upwards trajectory up the midline of the body to culminate in the head. The experience of this kind of Kundalini is normally associated with Above-oriented spirituality. The ideal is that this moving energy opens up the entire chakra system, culminating in the opening of the spiritual centers in the third eye and crown, which lead to mystical experiences of the Above.

In East Asian traditions, there is a similar notion of the awakening of the body’s qi. Here, the sensations trace a pattern up the backside of the body and down the front in a continuous loop, leading to both spiritual development and physical vitality — in other words, energetically connecting the Above and the Middle.

Both of these kinds of energetic openings are highly valued and much spoken about. However, there’s another type of Kundalini opening that is more rarely mentioned, which is the kind that is more associated with the Below. This also can involve flows of prana, but the primary characteristic is that it feels like the body-mind is fundamentally torn open. The energy system goes completely haywire, the body goes into shock, the unconscious portion of the psyche is suddenly ripped from its slumber and spills out into awareness. This kind of Kundalini feels like something utterly other has taken over the body and mind, something that is at once both completely alien and also unspeakably magnificent. It simultaneously feels sublimely divine and incredibly dark, total ecstasy and also sheer terror.

The result of an opening like this is often that the journeyer is flung down through the Below at lightning speed. There is an explosion of imaginal phenomena of all kinds, spirits, energies, bodily autonomy, sexuality, ancestral and past life materials, nature spirits and elementals, and likely even the Abyss in very short order. What normally might take years of slow discovery somehow all bursts forth in a few weeks or days.

As I have already intimated, my own Descent was sparked by just such a Kundalini event during which I experienced the serpentine goddess I now call Bachué taking over my body. When I say it was a “descending” Kundalini, the downward direction was, for me, a visceral experience. As I was on a meditation walk in my neighborhood, I felt a surge of blissful energy shoot up my back and out the top of my head into the sky. But soon enough, an intense torrent rushed back down through the core of my body. The sensation was like a firehose had been inserted into my mouth. It was so strong that I staggered and nearly was knocked to my knees as I gagged and dry-heaved into my neighbor’s bushes. The accompanying imaginal vision was of a massive black snake rushing down my gullet, and depositing some kind of milk-like liquid into my dantian. From that point onwards, I felt like there was a glimmering, buzzing portal to the Below located in my abdomen. (First, I experienced this as a vibrant black gemstone, later as a dark tunnel down through my perineum into the Abyss.)

Other people I have spoken to describe other kinds of downward-directed sensations. Something that seems to be quite common is strong sensations in the soles of the feet. (In my case, they felt hot for a few months, like I was walking on coals.) However, the main reason I am calling this descending Kundalini is not because of the directionality of the energy flows, but rather to specify a Kundalini event that bursts open the Descent. In my case, after having spent a year in the Above in a blissful state of nondual perception and thinking I was enlightened, I was suddenly hurled into the Below. In the space of about two weeks, I had energetic upheaval, visionary experiences, and spirit visitations of all kinds.

Here’s how I described the Kundalini event and its aftermath in the journal I was keeping at the time, the full text of which I have made public elsewhere on this website. The following is excerpted, condensed and slightly edited as usual:

I’m walking outdoors when I have a vision that all the trees around me suddenly transform into multi-headed snakes spurting up out of the ground. I feel my whole body begin vibrate, and a current of tingling sensations emerges from deep inside my pelvis and flows up my spine. When it reaches the top of my head, snakes spray out my skull, a canopy of cobra heads looming above me. I feel energized and immensely strong.

The feeling expands until my whole body is filled with squirming snakes. They spiral around my limbs, my torso, and my spine, squeezing me tenderly in their coils while gliding across my skin. Their slick, liquid slithering is intensely pleasurable. As they glide beneath my skin, the ecstasy becomes unbearable. I can’t contain the energy. I involuntarily start making grimacing faces, and hissing sounds come out of my mouth.

The feelings of pleasure intensify even further, building and building until my body explodes in waves after waves of shuddering full-body orgasms wrapping around themselves. The snakes and I penetrate each other sexually — in, out, and through every orifice, in every conceivable way.

Then, a black serpentine demon-like goddess fills my body. Her lower body rises out of a dark ocean of serpents. Her scaly legs coil and intertwine. At her waist, a shift from the reptilian to the feminine. A youthful body with voluptuous breasts and skin black as midnight. Her face is the sun. Her arms are raised overhead. She’s holding a golden orb, with rays of blinding light extending in all directions. She is the full spectrum from terrifying darkness to angelic radiance, connecting underworld with the heavens.

We are not one but not two. I am the Snake Mother’s son and also her lover, and she is also my body itself. There’s something about her breasts and nipples. I have an instinctual urge to suck on them. Yes, there’s an obvious feeling of sexual arousal behind this impulse, but also something much, much deeper. A distant muscle memory that is only dimly coming back into consciousness, connecting suckling a breast with warmth, safety, and satiety. With life itself.

I suck, and the breastmilk begins to flow. Warm, nourishing, white ambrosia. But then: a gush, a geyser, an ocean of milk going down my throat. A rushing stream too powerful to contain. Mother, I am drowning.

Her black breast transforms into a gigantic serpent that suddenly descends from the sky and enters my mouth, filling my throat, my stomach, my intestines in a downwards torrent. The snake disgorges a load of the Goddess’s breastmilk deep in my belly. It is overwhelming, and I find myself in a stupor, gagging and retching.

The white milk coalesces to form a fist-sized black diamond in the center of my pelvis. Her seed has been planted. I have been impregnated with her mysterious essence. Some kind of treasure will eventually be born.

Is this a gateway to enlightenment or a portal to insanity? I am filled with panic. She is telling me that I am safe, but all I can do is tremble in fear and beg her for mercy. Ecstasy gives way to a deep well of terror.

For days I hardly sleep at all. I am anxious. No appetite. I feel like I have come down with the flu. I feel exhausted and lack the ability to focus on anything. I question my sanity, my health, and my strength to walk this path. But I do not have a choice. The only way forward is straight into the serpent’s gaping mouth. This is not an invitation; it is a mandate. There is no turning back now.

The intense Kundalini opening seems to have unleashed a ton of fluttering, stinging, and itching across the sternum as well as heart palpitations. My chest feels quite locked up at the moment. I checked with doctor and everything is normal, so I assume that this is all just the growing pains of the energies opening. I am now sitting with the unpleasant sensations and allowing them to pass through.

With the initial awakening, it sometimes felt like I was taller than usual. Like I was seeing things from a location a few inches above the top of my head. These days, it sometimes feels like I’m half as tall as I am. Like I’m looking out at the world through eyes located in my abdomen.

Other strange energetic phenomena have been taking place as well. I feel like my sense of smell is supercharged. I can smell a flower or a person 100 feet away. Is this a siddhi of superhuman smell? I’ve frequently felt like I was not in a body at all, just suspended in empty space. A couple of times when I had this perception, it felt like some other entity might be trying to enter my body. A pang of fear, and I have to stomp my feet around while walking briskly in order to force myself to return back into my body. I’m awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night, every night. A constant burning feeling like fire in my lower abdomen. And, I’ve also developed a serious case of chronic acid reflux.

As I was completely unprepared for this kind of cataclysmic event, I was completely confounded when it happened. I think it’s inevitable that any journeyer who is suddenly ejected from the peaceful serenity of the Above and thrown into this kind of turmoil would find themselves radically destabilized. Someone who didn’t have any context and wasn’t familiar with any of the phenomena we’ve been discussing in this book could understandably assume that they have gone mad — a psychotic break or sudden onset of schizophrenia, perhaps. That certainly was the case for me, and it took a long time for me to eventually come to terms with what had happened.

Of course everyone’s experience is unique, but I’ve provided my story here to give you a general idea of some of the phenomena that might occur in a downward Kundalini, precisely so that you don’t panic and assume something is wrong with you. If you are having a descending Kundalini, I know from personal experience it’s a lot to cope with. You will likely feel like you’re right at the limit of what you can handle, on the razor’s edge of madness.

Being afraid and confused like this is unavoidable. But, if you can somehow manage to surrender to the process, you will eventually gain confidence that you can actually handle it. You can gradually relax into the Descent and start to receive its blessings. Believe it or not, in the end, you will find this hair-raising roller-coaster journey to have been a tremendous gift. One day, you will be grateful for, and remember fondly, every step of this process — even this one.

Case Study 2: Misha’s Identity Fractures Apart

Misha, who we heard from numerous times in the preceding pages, shared with me the following account of the fracturing of her personality into “parts.” Let’s let her tell her story first, and then we can reinterpret and reframe it along the lines we’ve been exploring in this book:

About nine years ago, I was intensively plumbing the depths of the meaning, function, and value of the Twelve Steps, as well as using a homegrown framework for exploring the issues of life, death, and my relationship with those. In addition to engaging in regular meditation, breathwork, and prayer, I was doing a lot of inquiry and contemplation. Increasingly, I withdrew from reality and was experiencing life through the filter of past trauma. I began referring to myself as a collective organism with adult selves, plus child and teenaged parts.

I frequently regressed into a childlike state. At times I could vividly see in my mind’s eye, and energetically feel, how my bedroom window opened onto a castle and a magical land in the yard beyond. It felt to me like this fantasy land was overlaid on the physical world. In its own way it was as real as the ordinary world, and I was the Princess. Other times I would connect with the spirit of Eagle and let Eagle dance with and through me, “flying” around the house.

When I showed up at anonymous support group telephone meetings, increasingly I was speaking in a child’s tone of voice. I began using a child’s nickname, and started insisting that name be used. I’d feel irritated if I showed up in that child state and people called me by the adult name by which they had known me.

In the deepest part of the crisis, when I got triggered, it would take as long as a day and a half to calm down enough to get myself to bed. Due to extreme levels of anxiety, I slept with the room lights on and the bedroom door locked. I slept fully clothed, including shoes, with a kitchen knife under my pillow. My bed was a “scary zone.” I’d visualize Dog curled up under my bed to alert me in case of approaching danger, and Bear curled up behind me for protection and comfort.

Eventually, a person in the group whom I trusted suggested I talk with a counselor. They persisted with increasing insistence until I acted on the suggestion. By then, I was significantly homebound, disabled and incapacitated, so trying to get to in-person appointments on a regular basis was impossible. My once a month grocery runs took the rest of the month to recover from, and I spent most of my time in bed on high doses of prescription pain medication. Eventually, I discovered that a counselor I’d worked with decades before was still in practice on the other side of the continent. I reached out by phone and left a message, hoping to connect.

I received a message in a gentle voice from my old counselor, saying we could “pick up the stitch.” I felt relieved I’d be getting help from this trusted person. Because I lived so far away, I was the first client he began working with over a video platform (this was more than four years before the COVID-19 outbreak). Over several calls, he gradually and gently drew me in, soliciting information about my state along the way.

I don’t recall spiritual emergence being addressed overtly in counseling. So I wasn’t getting any direct spiritual guidance around that part of the crisis. Instead, our weekly sessions seemed to be focused around trauma recovery. However, my counselor was spiritually awakened (though I didn’t recognize that at the time) and was part of the Spiritual Emergence Network. In addition, he had a great deal of clinical expertise working with adult women survivors of chronic, developmental childhood sexual abuse. So I was in good hands in both those regards.

Practices that kept me highly focused on being in the present moment and out of dissociative states helped a lot. Also practices that helped soothe my jangled nervous system and helped me feel safe. Executing mandala art of the symbolic images that appeared in my visions was part of the therapeutic process. Sometimes I’d spend 20-40 hours on a given image, which kept me grounded in the ordinary world while still in touch with the imaginal.

Besides psychotherapy, I continued participating in Twelve Step programs during this time. I also received lots of help and support from my closest friends. I found comfort in spiritual books and recordings that resonated with me. Tara Brach was particularly soothing. Things finally began calming down a lot, and the next round of major awakening shifts began about two and a half years after this one.

Going through the above account in detail, we can recognize a lot of the hallmarks of an awakening from Below. The practices that Misha was working with at the time of the onset of the crisis seem to have provoked the collapse of her centralized, unified sense of self. That, of course, is one of the principal purposes of inquiry and meditation. But, instead of experiencing this collapse of the self as a blissful emptiness or a divine oneness as one typically does in an awakening from Above, for whatever reason, Misha’s system was wired in such a way that she was thrust into the Below.

In the absence of a unifying self to provide coherence for her identity, Misha began experiencing various previously unconscious aspects of her being as autonomous entities (“parts,” in her language). She doesn’t explicitly mention this in the narrative above, but no doubt some of those child-like parts had important messages that needed to be expressed regarding childhood memories, traumas, and wounds (at one point, she mentions having been abused while young). Those repressed parts demanded to be recognized and accepted, for example, by insisting on being called by their proper names.

At the same time that this was happening, Misha’s imaginal world also began to open up with visions of a fantasy landscape with herself as a princess. She also experienced some kind of light trance state or semi-possession by Eagle spirits.

Like most people going through an Awakening from Below, Misha’s system was overwhelmed by the experience and she became energetically dysregulated. She fell into a morass of anxiety, with increased fatigue and pain. She also suffered from insomnia, which is one of the most common energetic side effects of awakening. In the depths of the night, she was accompanied both by fearsome dark energies as well as by imaginal animal companions who protected her.

All of these phenomena we have discussed in detail in previous chapters. But it sounds like Misha didn’t have any context for what she was experiencing at the time. Her therapist wasn’t familiar with the Below, and she had no specific practices in her repertoire that would encourage her to dive head-on into the underworld aspects that were emerging.

Nevertheless, on balance it sounds like working with the therapist on the underlying trauma was enormously helpful for her. I do think that everyone who finds themselves in this kind of situation could benefit from connecting with an experienced counselor. In addition, she mentions finding artistic expression of her imaginal visions to be beneficial. Also grounding practices that helped keep her out of dissociative states and soothed the nervous system. Of course, the specific things that worked for her wouldn’t necessarily work for everyone, but the general notions of support, engagement, and grounding are, in my opinion, universally advisable.

Fortunately for Misha, with the help of her trusted counselor, she was able to navigate her opening to the Below successfully, and it opened doors for her growth along her spiritual path. Others are not always so lucky, as we’ll see in the next case study.

Case Study 3: After the Meditation Retreat

This narrative was publicly posted by a user called HouseOnFire in a forum dedicated to meditation phenomena on Oct. 29, 2020. I’ve made a few edits, just to clean up spelling, fix typos, and add some punctuation for clarity. I also omitted parts of the post at the beginning and end where the author is referencing other materials and posts in the forum.

When I showed up at the Goenka retreat last January I was very much there to try to save myself from the mess I was making of my life. The first few days of Goenka are straight Anapana — just observing the sensations of the breath at and below the nostrils. I had been drinking, smoking weed, and drinking a lot of coffee, so these days were a detox for me and I slept whenever I wasn’t meditating.

Then on day four we were taught the Goenka body scan method and things changed. I picked up each new element of the body scan instruction quite easily and I attribute this to the months of concentration meditation I’d been doing…. I quickly became aware of subtle vibrations all through my body and could “play” with them at will.

The rest of the course was extremely trippy. Each night I slept less but awoke with full energy, immediately aware of the subtle energies. In my non-meditative time I started playing a game I called “what drug does it feel like I’m on.” Sometimes it was acid, sometimes MDMA or mushrooms.

In Goenka language, “I passed many sankaras.” During mediation I would find a dark or painful area in the awareness of my body, hang out with it, and watch it dissolve. Moments or hours later I’d feel some intense emotion, usually sadness, and then cry for a while. Then later still I’d have a memory come up — the time my parents installed a lock on the outside of my bedroom door and how I’d screamed and kicked the door down when they tried to use it, or whatever.

Where in my drinking and depression I’d felt mentally dull, now I seemed to be able to think in complete paragraphs, and at one point I decided to try to make sense of my life. This is where I got into trouble by remembering every important thing that ever happened to me. I had a single thought process go on for 6 hours uninterrupted until the thoughts started to go in slow motion and I found I couldn’t verbally cognate anymore. I could speak and know what I was doing but I couldn’t say words in my head. It was very strange.

So the course ends, I get to finally meet the other meditators, and then go home. It was a long drive home and I didn’t get there until about 3 am. Having woken up about this time the day before, I’ve now been awake for 24 hours. As I look at myself in the mirror before bed, I notice that my eyes and facial expression look a lot like pictures I’ve seen of Ram Dass where he looks totally blasted on bliss. Also — strangely, as I am a dude and don’t normally think about myself this way — I think that I look incredibly beautiful and lean in and give my mirror-self a little kiss. Finally in bed, I make a little bath of love for myself out of subtle vibrations and lay back saying “anything, anything.” It is the most contented moment of my adult life.

This is when shit gets weird. Suddenly my body starts rolling around on the bed all on its own. I kinda feel like I’m being pushed around but I can tell the energy is coming from the inside. I get the sense that I could stop it if I really wanted to, but it definitely doesn’t feel volitional. As I’ve just completed a ten day course where the main focus was letting things rise up as they will without reacting, I decide to go with it.

Pretty soon I’m up off the bed and dancing. “Ok,” I think, “I’ve got the dancing mania, cool.” Then I’m spinning my arms all around and my finger brushes across my chest and in a way that feels… seductive. The sensation at this point is hard to describe but I can only say that I became a sexy woman. I felt that I was a woman and I felt sexy as fuck. I strutted around the room feeling just so hot.

Then I felt strong hands push me onto the bed and begin to ravish me sexually. I went through all the positions of sex as a woman and felt all the emotion if not all the sensation. But I’m talking raucous sex and I moaned and screamed as would be appropriate. When this ended maybe 20 minutes later, I decided I’d better go tell my roommate what was going on as she’d obviously heard me. As I talked to her I kept feeling hands trying to pull me back into the bedroom and I could feel my gender changing from male to female and back again. When I allowed the female version to take over I moved and spoke in a feminine way and was super affectionate towards my roommate.

The problem was it didn’t stop. All night long, I had these bizarre sexual experiences with my ghost lover even though I was exhausted. By the time morning came I was panicking a little. What the hell was going on? Was I a trans woman and this was my subconscious way of letting me know? Was I possessed by a fucking spirit? Was all of this shit random?

I called a friend and he gave me the shitty advice to go see a medium. I did so and thank god she just said that I should call the meditation teacher. His explanation was that my subconscious mind had become too intertwined with my conscious mind and that sleep would fix me. But that night sleep was again impossible, and on the third day I had my friends take me to the hospital.

I’ll spare you the story of the hospital other than to tell you that when they gave me Ativan and Seroquel it felt like I was being blasted through a DMT tunnel and I only slept for an hour or so. A week later, I was discharged with a prescription for a powerful antipsychotic in hand. After a month or so I could sleep without the drugs but I became severely depressed. It’s only in the last few weeks I’ve felt like I’ve come out of the depression and started meditating again….

Did my experience mean something? What the hell was that?

This account really moves me because of the obvious confusion the journeyer underwent. It also is a clear example to me of the potentially dire consequences of misunderstanding an awakening from Below. As before, let’s go through it bit by bit, comparing the experiences described by HouseOnFire against those detailed in this book.

In the first place, let’s note the context in which these events occurred. The meditation retreat described here (which the poster simply calls “Goenka”) is a common Above-oriented variety of Theravada Buddhist vipassana meditation. In these courses, participants are encouraged to focus entirely on Above-based perspectives and there is no teaching related to, or even mention of, the Below. We can also notice that HouseOnFire went to this retreat with the idea of escaping or fixing “the mess” of his life — that is to say, he was seeking to transcend rather than embody his humanity.

As HouseOnFire began to participate in the retreat, he noticed the psychedelic effects of high-dosage meditation starting to kick in. As the defenses of his ego-wall started to become more porous, he began to experience various repressed emotions and traumas arising to be seen and witnessed.

What happens next is evident of a severe lack of grounding. HouseOnFire participates with full intensity in the retreat (which, by the way, requires 10 or more hours of seated meditation per day with exercise or other grounding practices explicitly prohibited). Then, he makes a long drive and deprives himself of sleep even further. Because of the sensitivity of his condition (whether due to the retreat or other factors it is impossible to say), he rapidly plunges further and further into the Below.

The homoerotic moment in front of the mirror, the gender changes, the spontaneous sexual energies, the feeling that this was happening because of an autonomous external entity such as a ghost or spirit, and the loss of control or feeling of being possessed are all things we’ve discussed in detail throughout this book. HouseOnFire reaches out to a friend, a medium, and the meditation teacher, but no one seems to be able to help him make sense of his experience. Like many others who perceive themselves to be in a spiritual emergency, HouseOnFire winds up in the hospital, where doctors treat him for psychosis. He seems to have eventually stabilized with medication, but has lingering depression as well as lack of meaning or context for the experiences he has gone through.

Could HouseOnFire’s experiences have gone differently? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps he has a propensity toward manic or psychotic symptoms that would eventually have been triggered by any kind of spiritual practice. Perhaps his best resort in that moment really was hospitalization and pharmaceutical interventions. But, what if instead of a complete lack of context and support, he was handed this very book and was able to reframe his experiences in a positive and supportive way? What if he had known how to ground himself and engage with the Below, rather than getting sucked away into an extreme experience? We can only speculate, but I would wager that his engagement with the Below would very likely have been much more manageable and meaningful than it was.

Case Study 4: Jack’s Dark Night of the Soul

One last case study I’d like to introduce is that of my friend Jack. We’ve heard a lot from Jack in the preceeding pages, in particular about his experiences of the dark imaginal and his close relationship with deities, ancestors, and other spirits. But these relationships deepened and developed over the course of many years, and, at least at first, his process of Descent was anything but smooth.

The following account is excerpted (also edited and some pieces moved around a bit) from a YouTube talk titled “Heartfelt Support as You Move through the Dark Night” he recorded for his My Rising Rose channel in 2024. Here is Jack’s story about his own Dark Night, including his thoughts on the ultimate meaning of these kinds of experiences:

I went through a quite sudden spiritual transformation that happened when I was 26 — that’s 11 years ago. It started out very spontaneous and easy. It felt like everything was flowing very well, and it felt really clear and open and peaceful. I would go in and out of states of presence and experience deep peace of mind. And I was so uplifted because I’d finally found something that was breaking me free from all of the pain that I’d been suffering through for most of my life before that point.

This continued on for about a year, I would say, until I had a Kundalini Awakening that was similar to a near-death experience. After that Kundalini awakening, my consciousness was radically changed. It was like the volume had just been turned up, or a dimmer switch had just been turned up. I began to see and feel energy, and I had out body experiences where I was meeting all these different beings, angels, and deities and having telepathic communication with them.

That was obviously amazing on one level, and on another it was pretty intense and it sent my nervous system into shock. For quite a while after that Kundalini awakening, I was very ungrounded. In the first week afterwards, my sense of myself was so shaken that I was not coherently inside of my body. That was confusing and disorienting, and I didn’t really have anyone to talk to about it. I had quite a long period out of work, about six months off for sick leave. Just walking out of the house felt incredibly difficult. Just the basics of going to the shop and getting food felt like it was the hardest thing in the world because my energy field was so confused. It was overwhelming to try to do anything.

I went back to live with my mom in the countryside in England. I thought I would be there for maybe a month or two, but what happened was that I really went into the Dark Night of the Soul, and I ended up being there for two and a half years. And what I found was that the more time that I was at my mom’s, the deeper I was descending into some kind of really dark and challenging place. I was meeting all these different parts of myself that I had been running from.

My childhood was really traumatizing. Even the way that I entered this world was traumatizing. I nearly died when I was born, and if you know much about the way that trauma is held inside of the body, then you’ll know that a traumatic birth that is left untreated can predispose one to lots of anxieties and suffering later in life. Especially if they’re in a family that is abusive physically and emotionally, and neglectful, which mine was. And then, when I was in my teenage years, I was using alcohol and drugs to cope with that, to push all that down. But I had stopped drinking and stopped taking drugs, and had gone through this spiritual transformation where my awareness had become much brighter. And what was happening was that my bright awareness that wasn’t being suppressed through drugs and alcohol anymore was now casting a light on everything that was inside my body and my mind: all of those things that I was afraid of, and all the things that I’d been running from for so long.

All of that had a really profound effect on my body. I was absolutely exhausted all the time and could barely get out of bed. But I couldn’t really sleep either. I would have intense nightmares pretty much every night. For a full year, I’d wake up around 3 a.m. and would just be sweating from the nightmares that I was having. I would only get a few hours sleep at night, and then I’d be exhausted during the day.

Also, I was feeling real despair and feeling like I’m a loser because I’m in my late 20s and am living with my mom in this tiny single bed. Seeing other people and comparing myself to the way they’re living their life, I was an absolute failure. I was studying medicine when I was 18. I was going to be a doctor, and I was going to be looked up to by the people around me. By this point in my life, I expected to be married with kids, having my own home and living really well by all the social standards. And I had failed. I’m at my mom’s house, I’m single, I’m in intense emotional pain every day, I’m unemployed. The people around me didn’t understand what I was going through, either. Even family members treated me like I was just nothing.

At the same time, I was having these new openings in my mind where I could communicate with these deities who were telling me that everything was going the way it was meant to be going. They gave me this analogy. They showed me a vision in my mind of this old office building from the 1970s, and they were like, “Look, the carpet’s outdated. The computer is really old and barely works. This office isn’t fit for the modern world. It’s not fit for purpose; it doesn’t function well. We need to upgrade it.” And, of course, the office here in this analogy was me: my mind, my state of consciousness, and all of the outdated things were all those old patterns that were running through me.

And what they were saying was, “Okay, we’re going to update this office. We’re going to get workers to come in with jackhammers, and they’re going to tear up the floors, and we’re going to redo it all. We’re going to rip the walls down because they’re all moldy. We’re going to build new ones, we’re going to get you new computers, and everything’s going to be running fantastically. It’s all going to be running great in a few years, but not now. And the funny thing is, you’re not allowed to leave the office. You have to stay here, which means that you are going to have to endure the disruption of all the noise that we’re making. But just know that this isn’t going to last forever. There is going to be a time when this all ends, and you will be where you want to be.”

Did you know that when a caterpillar goes into a crysalis, it doesn’t just transform into a butterfly? The caterpillar actually dissolves. It becomes a liquid, and it’s from that liquid that the butterfly is formed. So if you’re going through this kind of Dark Night right now, just know that this is what is happening to you. You’re withdrawing into your chrysalis. And as you feel into that and explore it for yourself, you may find you can relax and accept what’s happening. To go with this process rather than resisting it.

Waking up can be a quite sudden thing that can feel like it’s going to solve all our problems. And as it starts to deepen, usually what happens is we realize that it’s not going to. We realize that we’re going to need to get our hands dirty, that we’re going to have to scrub the dishes ourselves. And that can take time, and it can be messy and painful.

For me, this spiritual life, this unification with our divinity and with the world and with life: it’s not about escaping suffering. It’s about learning how to suffer well. It’s about realizing that suffering is our cross, the heavy weight that we carry that is also the vehicle for our spiritual evolution and our maturation as human beings. Suffering makes us wise and compassionate. It teaches us how to let go. It inspires us to greater depths of love and joy and peace. It’s the reality check that keeps us grounded, and it’s the calling that pulls our spirit down from the heavens to embrace the Earth.

Jack’s story has many of the signs of an Awakening from Below. It is clear that he too had some kind of descending Kundalini event: an energetic opening that cracked open his unconscious and led him into a Descent. This opening resulted in his being able to communicate with deities, spirits, and other entities, but it also left him energetically destabilized and hypersensitive. As Jack describes it, the overwhelming Dark Night experience that ensued for several years involved the emergence of many “different parts” of himself that he “had been running from for so long.” These included his birth trauma, childhood traumas, and many of the “old patterns” that he had been employing to cope with these old wounds. He also confronted feelings of failure and self-loathing, nightmares, and other difficulties as the unconscious parts of his psyche were released into consciousness.

What’s different about Jack’s experiences than those of Misha or HouseOnFire is that he had some explicitly supportive messages from his spirit guides that helped him to accept what was happening. His guides explained to him that he may experience discomfort for a while, but that he ultimately had nothing to fear. This message allowed him to surrender to the process for as long as it took to complete the transformation (in his case, about two and half years).

In the story he tells, you can see how Jack is able to reframe his own difficult experiences in order to place them into a meaningful and healing narrative that highlights the importance of suffering in the spiritual life. (In the original video, he also invokes the image of Jesus weeping in the Garden of Gethsemane over the prospect of being tortured to death, a powerful imaginal symbol of the sanctity of suffering if there ever was one.) This reframing is both a product of the darkness Jack encountered in the depths of his Dark Night, and also a support that helped carry him through and out the other side. Now, as a spiritual teacher, he is able to share this understanding with others who are going through a similarly difficult awakening process. In other words, this reframing is one of the elixirs Jack pulled out of the Below and is now sharing with his community.

As the book closes and we say goodbye, let’s take a moment to recap the core points. First, the principal point is to establish that there is an alternative form of awakening that is different than what you may hear about in Buddhist, Advaita, and similar circles — one that is far darker and weirder than you may be expecting. Whether or not this type of awakening happens to you apparently lies completely beyond your ability to control or predict. If this happens to you, you will likely need specialized advice and support that will differ markedly from the teachings that are most predominant in mainstream spirituality. That being said, there is nothing wrong with the Below, and there is nothing wrong with you.

I’ve repeated this many times, but I can’t stress it enough: the critical thing for you to do is to surrender to the Descent. If you stop fighting against it, this journey will take you to the darkest, most terrifying places in the depths of your being. But there, you will undergo the most astonishing transformation and discover the most precious gifts. The more you fight against this process, the more difficult this dissolution and rebirth will be.

Remember that the whole point of the journey through the Below is for you to find, accept, and honor every last bit of the totality of the cosmos, welcoming it all into the unimaginably sacred wholeness that you are. That process cannot be selective: you must welcome not only all of your Above parts of lightness and love, but also all of the dark and terrifying parts that are forgotten and repressed. The wholeness must equally include everything you think of as “yourself” and all of the parts of the cosmos that you have denied within yourself.

Once you have liberated the whole universe in this way, you will not be perfect. You will not be an all-knowing, all-powerful Buddha who transcends the human condition and dwells in eternal bliss. But you will find that your gifts, your elixirs, will be able to freely flow out into the world in just the way that you were always perfectly designed to deliver them. Eventually, with time, this whole array of parts will become so well integrated into your system that you will not even need to pay attention to them anymore. They will spontaneously, perfectly, and automatically arise as and when needed, without any conscious effort, thought, or even noticing necessary on your part.

To experience this freedom and ease is your birthright and your destiny. Nevertheless, in order to arrive at such a place, it is required that you must go through the difficult, torturous, and dangerous process of the Descent and Return. Like a caterpillar, you must be completely liquidated before you can take flight. Like Christ, you must be tortured to death before you can take your seat in Heaven. Like a phoenix, you must be totally unmade down to your very core before you can rise again from the ashes.

If you knew how difficult this journey would be and how much you would need to sacrifice, you would never have willingly embarked upon it. However, the fact that you’ve read this far tells me that you’re likely already in it and have no choice over the matter. There’s something whispering to your soul, pulling you inexorably toward the metamorphosis. You’ve already passed the point of no return. You are already swept up in the undertow.

As you are drawn by these dark currents down into the Abyss, hold out your hand so that I can pass along a parting gift. It’s this book, which contains a map of the territory you may pass through in the months and years to come. This is my own elixir, which I brought up from the depths of the Below precisely so it could be shared with travelers just like you.

May this elixir be good medicine for you, my dear friend! May this book be a force for good, a gift for the needy, a balm for your pain. May it never cause harm or suffering in any way to any being. And, may it carry all the blessings and invitations of the Below to whosoever is ready to hear the call and take the plunge. Goodbye for now, but we shall meet again upon your Return.

A record of spontaneous outpourings written from 2023-24. In the wake of the revelations previously described, this collection primarily focuses on the integration of emptiness and divinity, or of spirit and soul, or the Above and Below, back into the Middle. This, to me, is the deepest non-dual lesson of all: the realization that, simultaneously, nothing is real and everything in the world is deeply sacred.

I.

I am not here to become a Buddha, to achieve some kind of enlightenment that will transcend the world. I want to be awake here in daily life, not to wake up from it. If you can see that all dharmas are empty, then why not fully participate in and enjoy their passionate dance?

II.

The senses open up, revealing expansive spaciousness. The world arises and passes away, buzzing energies blending into emptiness.

The heart yearns to connect and engage. Waves of compassion, joy, and grief reverberating with a poignancy and intimacy never before imagined.

The gripping in your gut lets go, and down you fall into the surging, out-of-control river of life. To your surprise you learn you have a soul, and are astonished at its fathomless depths.

Awakening of head, heart, and hara. Opening, connecting, and deepening….
the never-ending dance of the Goddess.

III.

Awakening of the head is realizing you are the space in which all phenomena arises.

Awakening of the heart is realizing that you cherish and have gratitude for all phenomena.

Awakening of the hara is realizing that all phenomena are divine, and are inseparable from the divinity that you are.

Metaphorically and energetically, my head is immersed in the emptiness and transiency of all phenomena. From here, I see and hear the emptiness of all phenomena through the senses. My chest area, on the other hand, is all about connection. That’s the location from which I am intimate with all phenomena — which I collectively call “the Goddess” so that I can engage in a passionate love affair with all of it. Then below that, in the belly area, there’s a portal to the dark depths, an underworld teeming with power animals, spirits, ancestors, and other ghostly figures. Here, the earthiness of my fleshly body merges with the stirrings of something deeply powerful, resonant, mysterious, beautiful, and poignant.

Truth and Love and Soul.

IV.

Long after the final revelation, everything is exquisitely simple. No angels or demons. No waves of transcendent bliss. Just spontaneous perfection.

Just the sound of my shoes as I walk in the night. A bird fluttering. A thought. A feeling. A drop of rain on my forearm.

Just as it is and nothing more.

Yet, this is enough. This sacred world, just as it is, is always enough.

V.

There’s no subject or perceiver behind perception. And there is no inside/outside or here/there either.

When I listen to a sound, there’s no “I” doing any listening; just sound appearing. There’s no “I” that is experiencing; just nature happening. Birds flying, dogs barking, feelings of feet on the ground, thoughts. These all arise together, everywhere but nowhere in specific. I don’t try to adjust the flow of phenomena in any way. Things just flow, beautifully perfect, of their own accord. It’s all divinely glorious and entirely ordinary. No need to attach to, change, or identify with any of it.

If I invite any of those particular phenomena to become more predominant, they’re unfindable. All perceptions or objects are unpindownable. What I used to think of as “paying attention to a sound” is more like “inviting the sound phenomenon to become more predominant.” When I do that, the sound is there, but also completely unlocatable. Each instant of sound appears to be made out fizzy champagne bubbles. They are ethereal and sparkling, and they pop before I can actually hear them. If I sit still with that experience for a little bit, the fizz merges with the fizz of “vision” and “body sensation.” They merge into a whole synesthetic field of buzzing sensations that’s neither here nor there but also everywhere. Entirely present but entirely unapprehendable.

This flow of experience is also completely intertwined with the way of seeing it, so that the latter influences the former and vice versa. I turn the whole universe into a starry galaxy or a heavenly realm just by perceiving it that way. I invite the Goddess to shine, and her radiance is like sun rays everywhere. Everything is lit from within with an aura of beauty and poignancy. Everything is seen to be her divine dance. Saying “divine dance” is a way of talking about and engaging with the impermanent, empty, nonsubstantial world of phenomena in a way that honors, loves, and takes joy in it but it does not reify or essentialize it. Ultimately, the Goddess in all of her splendor is also empty and nonarising.

At first this was so stunningly beautiful that I was literally overwhelmed by it. However, seeing things this way has become quite “normal.” After years of mystical experiences, big openings, and disorienting perceptual and energetic shifts, it’s now just all become super ordinary. It’s kind of like pre-awakening, minus all the identification and resistance and trouble, and minus that gripping feeling in my core that kept everything I used to do based in fear. Everything is ordinary, but beautiful and flowing and perfectly ok just as it is.

VI.

I have no path, no teacher, no system, no maps, no doctrine. My practice cannot be a model for anyone else, and if I describe it it won’t make sense to anyone but me. I really don’t have any idea how or why it unfolded the way it did, and it hasn’t been a coherent particular method.

I have had a series of mystical experiences that happened for unknown reasons. It would be completely destabilizing at first, and I would have no idea what’s going on. But the mystical experience itself would show me what to practice. When the self dropped out, I investigated the lack of self. When the body dissolved into energy, I investigated the flows of energy. When the Goddess appeared, I investigated how to interact with her. So forth and so on, following, investigating, and engaging with whatever was happening.

Along the way, I would research spiritual stuff and practices that sounded kind of like what was happening to me, maybe take a few practice tips from that. At one point, I thought Headless Way was really useful, then Joan Tollifson, Peter Brown, Awakening to Reality, Rob Burbea’s “Soulmaking Dharma,” John Prendergast, Mary Shutan on shamanism, Reggie Ray, the Radiance Sutras. Each one was helpful for a time but not a system I fully accepted. Some helped me to clear the subject, others to clear the object, others to see that both are empty. Some helped me with re-engagement and re-enchantment, others to tap further into love and bliss and joy and a sense of divinity.

These have all been stepping stones, and I have jumped from one to the next without committing to any. My main commitment was always following closely what was being revealed in the present moment, and never settling for anything being a final resting point. I’m not considering the current situation to be a final resting point, either. The unfolding is never-ending.

VII.

Awareness, consciousness, and mind are all reifications of what’s going on. I might use these terms or others like “field of perception,” “energy,” and “flow of phenomena” for convenience, but I know that these are not substantial essences. There’s just what is happening right now, but these aren’t even really there since everything is like a bubble that pops before you can apprehend it.

The cosmos blips in, and everything is completely fresh and brand new in that moment. The notion that I was there the moment before, or that awareness was there, or that anything was there a nanosecond before, or that there’s continuity across time is all just thoughts.

The blips move at lightning speed, and reality is pulverized into minute particles or little fizzy bubbles that arise and pass so quickly that they are never stable and have no substantiality. There’s no time for thought—or rather, any thought that arises is its own blip, just as unpindownable as the rest.

If I spoke about it from the perspective of a reified subject, I’d say “I’m aware of the flow of these bubbles,” or “consciousness consists of a series of mind-moments,” or what have you. But, to speak directly from the perspective of the current blip that just arose exactly this moment, all these words like awareness or consciousness or mind or witnessing are reifications. There aren’t two things — awareness and what’s being perceived — there’s just an unstable, out-of-focus perception that flashed too fast to even say it ever arose in the first place.

In fact, from this perspective, there’s nothing I can really say about reality whatsoever, because those bubbles are all too much of a blur to be pinned down to any specific thing. Reality itself is a dream-like mirage that never actually arises. From here, whatever comes and goes is all ok because none of it is really real or substantial.

I see reality blipping in and out most clearly when walking quietly by myself as well. In daily life, I forget to pay attention to them for hours at a time, while I’m at work or with the kids or on zoom with friends. However, I conceptually know it’s how reality is working even when I’m not noticing the details, because it’s always how things are working whenever I choose to stop and check.

Once I really knew solidly that reality was just insubstantial emptiness like this, the blipiness of reality isn’t my most pressing concern.

VIII.

I’ve heard people say that you should stabilize so that you’re permanently walking around in a state of total presence. To me, that seemed like a desirable goal for a while, but then I saw that “presence” is just another form of selfing. I realized that “awareness of the present moment” is just another arising phenomenon I’d been clinging to.

Thoughts come and goes as much as any other perceptual phenomena. Thoughts are no more or less of a worry than sounds. Some are loud, some are subtle, they’re always seemingly flowing, but they’re never really there. They are nothing to hold on to, but nothing to run away from either. Even if they dance around in the mind for a little while, and we pay attention to thoughts instead of other phenomena, that doesn’t hurt us or harm us in any way.

The dance of thoughts is part of the Goddess’s mysterious and unpindownable dance — an outpouring of energy and love bubbling up, to be celebrated and enjoyed and let go of. None of it is a problem, just part of the ever-changing miraculous display.

IX.

After objects have been completely seen through, becoming thoroughly empty and non-arising; after the subject is seen through, becoming completely devoid of any observing awareness, presence, or I; after the background has dissolved and then been seen through so that there’s no ground of being or field or permanence anywhere; after all of one’s karma produced in this life and all others has been fully resolved and one’s relationship to all beings has been fully rectified; after one has been the creator of the universe and has acquired a body of light… after all of that has stabilized and integrated, it seems that all the realizations then fall away and life becomes completely and utterly “normal” again.

In hindsight, the whole awakening process seems like a dream or a story that is barely remembered anymore. None of it matters anymore in the slightest. None of the insights can be found anymore. None of the philosophies or phenomenological descriptions that were previously so important are the least bit interesting. Life seems to happen somehow, but who could say how or why, and who cares anyway? The only active impulse seems to be compassionately trying to help others, without attachment to outcomes, but even that just happens automatically. Life living itself without need for or possibility of any piece splitting off to monitor, tinker with, or even observe the rest. Perfectly, utterly ordinary.

After years and years of the most profound insights, realizations, and spiritual experiences imaginable, there’s a return to utter and complete normalcy, with no interest in spirituality or any possibility of calling up states or experiences that previously were so important. There’s barely even a memory of what it all was like.

Mountains really are just mountains again. Just a simple, humble, compassionate, normal human life with no specialness or other spiritual bells and whistles.

A record from Jan. 2021 to Apr. 2023. This cycle begins with a series of spontaneous visionary experiences and a massive kundalini opening (I–VIII). It talks about both ecstatic divine revelations as well as some of the difficulties encountered (IX–XVII). About halfway through, a shamanic opening brings ancestors, power animals, nature spirits, and other guardians into the picture (XVIII–XXXI). Unity becomes an increasingly more important theme throughout this cycle, culminating in an experience where Oholomo is given the ultimate trial and is then revealed to be the Goddess (XXXII–XXXIV). The writing throughout this cycle is more poetic than previously, which is fitting given the mythic and archetypal nature of the experiences being described. It is important to know that none of these events were precipitated by psychedelic drugs or other medicines; these were all natural and spontaneous occurrences that may arise through spiritual practice.

I.

As I walk near my home, I notice the vultures. Dozens of dark, foreboding bodies studding the copse of trees. More than I have ever seen before, an overwhelming number. They look down at me from above.

“We are here to eat your death,” they declare. I hear them loud and clear, like a voice from a dream. It is not a dream, but it’s not not a dream either. It’s like two planes of reality that normally are separate have been bridged, and a passageway has opened across the divide.

II.

A few weeks later, she makes herself known for the first time. An image in the form of a young girl, blonde, maybe age 6 or 7, appears in the imaginal space behind my closed eyes. I feel a strong affinity toward her. I turn my attention toward her and ask her what she is here to tell me.

She then transforms, becoming older. I can’t get a stable or detailed picture, but glimpses flash in and out — her hair, her lips, her eyes, her body. She is beautiful, mesmerizing. I feel a strong attraction, longing to reach out and touch her.

When I go to do so, just at that moment, I realize that I already am touching her. I am her. Or, she is me. She and I are the same being. I have the distinct sensation of physically and energetically being a woman. Mildly erotic, very sweet, and quite pleasant.

After some time, I have visions of all of the women that I’ve been with in my life one after another (girlfriends, wife, daughters, sister, mother, female friends, etc.). I see a vision of me eating them one by one, swallowing them whole. Taking them all inside myself. I realize all my life I have been trying to pull women in to plug a hole that could only be filled by Her, this inner feminine entity within my psyche.

A flow of gratitude and understanding for all these women comes over me, and an understanding of why I have loved them all so much.

III.

Again she comes in a liminal state between waking and dreaming. In this vision, she is again beautiful and mesmerizing. Again, I focus in and invite her to speak to me.

This time is different. Instead of being inside of me, she is external. She embraces me, and I am transformed into a baby in her arms. I cry and snuggle into her neck, longing to be soothed by her. The sensation of my skin on hers is as if I am melting into her.

For some reason, it feels important to know her name, but I can’t quite grasp it. I try to think of what it might be, but nothing feels right. Just then, I realize I need to use my body to know her, not my mind. I let the tension in my mouth and jaw relax, my lips spontaneously forming the sound “sh.”

I say this sound out loud, and instantly tears well up. The floodgates open, and endless pain begins to pour out of my body. She holds me tight in her warm embrace, using my own mouth to soothe me “shhhhh….. shhhh….. shhhh…..” over and over again.

She is the Mother, the source of all love. She takes my pain unconditionally, holding and healing me.

IV.

Another vision: I’m nuzzling into her neck trying to get closer and closer, but I feel like I can’t possibly get close enough.

Suddenly, I’m crawling through her vagina and up into her body. Now, I am inside her womb. I can hear her heartbeat. I am warm and safe here.

Just then, in a flash, her face turns blank white. A terrifying demonic glare, a Kali-like tongue. I’m confused, but there’s nothing to fear. She is protecting me from a danger I can’t see.

Now she transforms into a huge serpent of the deepest black. Fearsome images of snakes flood my mind, but I am safe. I am inside a white egg, wrapped in my Snake Mother’s coils. She is ferociously protecting me against everything that could possibly do me harm.

V.

I’m walking outdoors, when I see all the trees around me suddenly transform into multi-headed snakes spurting up out of the ground. I feel my whole body begin vibrate, and a current of tingling sensations emerges from deep inside my pelvis and flows up my spine. When it reaches the top of my head, snakes spray out my skull, a canopy of cobra heads looming above me. I feel energized and immensely strong.

The feeling expands until my whole body is filled with squirming snakes. They spiral around my limbs, my torso, and my spine, squeezing me tenderly in their coils while gliding across my skin. Their slick, liquid slithering is intensely pleasurable.

As they start gliding beneath my skin, the ecstasy becomes unbearable. I can’t contain the energy. I involuntarily start making grimacing faces, and hissing sounds come out of my mouth. The Mother’s “shhhh” has shifted into the “hssss” of the Snake Goddess.

The feelings of pleasure intensify even further, building and building until my body explodes. Waves after waves of shuddering full-body orgasms wrap around and around themselves. The snakes and I penetrate each other sexually — in, out, and through every orifice, in every conceivable way.

My emotions are roiling. It’s the warmth and comfort of the Mother with a sexual power and intensity I’ve never felt before, but it’s all also inseparable from my own body. We are not one but not two. I am the Snake Mother’s son and also her lover, and she is also my body itself.

VI.

How can I describe her, this indigenous demoness lover of mine?

Her lower body rises out of a dark ocean of serpents. Her scaly legs coil and intertwine. At her waist, a shift from the reptilian to the feminine. A youthful body with voluptuous breasts and skin black as midnight. Her face is a mask: eyes a blank stare, mouth completely expressionless. Her arms are raised overhead. She’s holding a golden orb, with rays of blinding light extending in all directions.

She is the full spectrum from terrifying darkness to angelic radiance, connecting underworld with the heavens.

VII.

There’s something about her breasts and nipples. I have an instinctual urge to suck on them. Yes, there’s an obvious feeling of sexual arousal behind this impulse, but also something much, much deeper. A distant muscle memory that is only dimly coming back into consciousness, connecting suckling a breast with warmth, safety, and satiety. With life itself.

I suck, and the breastmilk begins to flow. Warm, nourishing, white ambrosia. But then: a gush, a geyser, a torrent of milk going down my throat. A rushing stream too powerful to contain. I am drowning.

Her black breast transforms into a gigantic serpent that suddenly descends from the sky and enters my mouth, filling my throat, my stomach, my intestines in a downwards torrent. The snake disgorges a load of the Goddess’s breastmilk deep in my belly. It is overwhelming, and I find myself in a stupor, gagging and retching.

The white milk coalesces to form a fist-sized black diamond in the center of my pelvis. Her seed has been planted. I have been impregnated with her mysterious essence. Some kind of treasure will eventually be born.

VIII.

Is this a gateway to enlightenment or a portal to insanity? As I approach the threshold, my whole scalp crackles and lights up. Fire-like energy courses through my body, which is revving like a jet engine. I am a spaceship about to to blast off into outer space.

I am filled with panic at what is about to happen. She is telling me that I am safe and that all is good. But all I can do is tremble in fear and beg her for mercy.

“You are Oholomo,” she whispers in my ear while I writhe in terror. Years later, I would learn that it means “Bringer of Light” in the secret tongue of the goddesses. I did not know it then, but in order to become Oholomo, I will first have to surrender to having her turn my mind and body inside out.

Little by little, layer by layer, she must teach me how to fulfill my destiny. I can’t explain exactly how it happened, but it would involve being completely dismembered and then being put back together in the form of a goddess made of earth and sex and sunlight.

IX.

Ecstasy gives way to a deep well of terror. A Dark Night of the Soul. I have hardly slept at all. I am anxious, no appetite. I feel like I have come down with the flu. I feel exhausted and lack the ability to focus on anything.

I question my sanity, my health, and my strength to walk her path. But I do not have a choice. My mind has split wide open and all its unconscious contents have spilled out into the light. I’m now being called to fulfill a destiny that I have been circling around my whole life, but have always been terrified of actually accepting.

The only way forward is straight into the serpent’s gaping mouth. This is not an invitation; it is a mandate. There is no turning back now.

X.

The intense kundalini opening seems to have unleashed a ton of fluttering, stinging, and itching across the sternum as well as heart palpitations. My chest feels quite locked up at the moment. Checked with doctor and everything is normal, so I am assuming that this is all just the growing pains of the energies opening. I am now sitting with the unpleasant sensations and allowing them to pass through.

Other strange energetic phenomena that have been taking place…

With the initial awakening, it sometimes felt like I was taller than usual. Like I was seeing things from a location a few inches above the top of my head. These days, it sometimes feels like I’m half as tall as I am. Like I’m looking out at the world through eyes located in my abdomen.

I feel like my sense of smell is supercharged. I can smell a flower or a person 100 feet away. Is this a siddhi of superhuman smell?

I’ve frequently felt like I was not in a body at all, just suspended in empty space. A couple of times when I had this perception, it felt like some other entity might be trying to enter my body. A pang of fear, and I have to stomp my feet around while walking briskly in order to force myself to return back into my body.

I’m awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night, every night. I’ve also developed a serious case of chronic acid reflux.

[Note: I continued to experience issues like these for the next two or more years. It is not uncommon for a kundalini opening to cause energetic weirdness, health conditions, and food sensitivities to emerge. The symptoms finally abated when I had the unity experience that is described at the very end of Book 2.]

XI.

I am overcome by a desperate need to see her again, to touch her again, to feel her embrace again. I am filled with longing to have her, to know her, to consume her, to possess her. When finally she does reappear, I desperately gawk and grasp at her, futilely trying to get my fill of her.

Sometimes, she appears in the form of light. I’m overwhelmed by the glint of the sun on the rooftops, on the cars, on the grass. The rays filtering through the trees are dancing rapturously. Her radiance is blinding, poignant, heart-breaking.

I can’t take it; my soul bursts open. Tears stream down my face as I stagger, unable to even stand upright in the fullness of her presence. She is glorious. She is everything. She is the grace of the cosmos. She is resplendent, radiant, awe-inspiring illumination. There are no words.

Eventually, I will learn that if I can hold the tension of my desire ever so gently, it will convert from desperation into an unspeakable erotic tenderness. If I stop clutching at her, I will feel her constantly walking at my side, holding my hand, embracing me. I will be filled with a gentle joy and bliss.

XII.

I realize that my whole life has been led in the opposite direction from her. All of my intellectual pursuits, my ideas and goals, have always been leading me away from these emotions, from this chaos, from my destiny. Why have I constantly rejected her so-called samsara? Is it because I’ve been lured by the promise of some transcendent Nirvana? Or is it because I’ve been afraid to really be alive? Afraid of the rawness, of losing control?

There is no control now. I cannot contain her power and glory. I am awed by her mysterious dreams and visions, by her writhing universe of aliveness, by her raw drama of death and rebirth, by her fearsome cruelty and her sublime beauty. I crumble before her power, her helpless lover and child. All I can do is to witness her creativity, her glory, with gratitude and love.

XIII.

Visions filled with goddesses of light and feminine angels appear, giving me the resources and support I need to go through this transformation. They transmute confusion, grief, and fear into guidance, healing, and joy.

When I trust in them, I am filled with awe and wonder at the vibrancy and creativity of life itself. I feel deeply grateful to be here, alive in this body. I see how everything is divine and interconnected. The world lights up in a golden sparkle right where my awareness meets the things of the world.

While initially I thought I might be having a psychotic episode, I now know I am not losing my mind because I can see the benefits of my connection with the goddess playing out in my relationships and interactions in the world.

I see that my life is filled with love. I have been supported and guided throughout my life by a web of strong motherly web of care and protection. Feeling into this, I am much more present as a whole person, consciously and compassionately here in a way that I have not ever been.

XIV.

I can often see or feel her radiance shining on me. I open and surrender to these visitations, inviting her into my presence. Sometimes these encounters have a motherly vibe to them, sometimes she brings me specific words or images, and sometimes my awareness is filled with a healing divine light.

Just as often, she appears as sexual energies, which arise from the black gemstone in my abdomen and circulate through my body like a force of nature. They start swirling and collecting in the area below my navel, and if I allow them to, will eventually build up along the midline of the body in a sumptuously orgasmic bliss.

I have noticed recently that the familiar masculine drive to possess and maximize these sensations has been replaced by a more receptive orientation toward them. My body and mind don’t grasp greedily at the experience, but rather rest in an erotic reverence for this feminine energy. Channeled in that direction, even the strongest sexual surges transform into a delicious and joyful full-body bliss.

These waves of pleasure are both emotionally and spiritually healing. Opening to these flows seems to untangle and dissolve traumas and unpleasant memories that are stored in the body. I also believe that transmuting these sexual energies into warmth and openness has somehow transformed my relationships with the women in my life. A deeper appreciation and understanding of my own body, emotions, and mind is also steadily unfolding.

The goddess is not just a visualized fantasy. She is the living, breathing, feeling animal aliveness of this human body. She is my body making love to itself. She is the pulsating energy of the whole of life coursing through my individual being. The body’s tender, erotic, and intimate knowing of the Whole, the All. It is the blissful pleasure of the One loving itself.

XV.

The whole cosmos emerges from the union of phenomena and awareness, the dance between the Goddess and me. Our union is inherently sacred. I am her Lover, present to whatever is, witnessing and surrendering to her dance, in awe of the creative flow of the vibrancy and dynamism of all life.

Present to this flow, I am grateful for being able to experience the world. Whatever may be showing up at any given moment is a precious and impermanent gift. This integration of awareness and embodiment opens my heart. There are deep wells of love, support, and healing available here, and all dualities and separations are resolved and reconciled.

XVI.

This body is a deep, sacred mystery. It is not “me” or “mine,” is it? What I take to be “my” body is nothing other than the Goddess herself.

Take the physical body. Looking closer, there’s the gross sensations. Closer still, there’s a layer of subtler energies, buzzing like electricity all over. Deeper than that, there are cavernous spaces within the heart and belly where powerful waves and currents flow. Deeper still beyond that lies a mystery, a dark and pregnant possibility.

I am the Lover, experiencing and enjoying this body in all its multidimensional richness. And, I am the Son, recognizing my dependence upon her and feeling gratitude for the very fact of my embodiment.

XVII.

I am the Goddess awakening to herself. This is not about me. She is awakening for the angels. For the trees. For the flowers. For the birds, dogs, people, and cars, and pieces of trash on the ground. For the benefit of the whole world and everything in it.

She is everywhere. I look around at the springtime flowers, and can see that they are her garlands. The sunshine is her hair. The breeze on my cheek is her kiss. My body sensations are enveloping me in her embrace.

Suddenly, the entire landscape in front of me is filled with dancing child-like angels. Like fairies, her manifestations fly among the trees and spin around on the lawns before me. The whole of nature vibrates and sings with her beauty and love.

I tell her how grateful I am for this vision, and how much I want to partake in all of her love. Just at that moment, I look down and see a heart-shaped seedpod on the ground, an obvious confirmation and concrete sign of her assent. There will be many more signs like this one.

XVIII.

The next phase of my education has begun, and I must plunge back down into the dark depths of the underworld. The black diamond deep in my belly opens up into chasm, a portal to an underworld teeming with power animals, nature spirits, ancestors, and other ghostly figures.

Two blonde angels, the 6 or 7 year-old from before and her 13 or 14 year-old manifestation, come to me. They take me by the hand and lead me into the hidden corners of the night. Dark, foreboding images of death and violence; bright and shimmering images of promise and rebirth.

Past lives? Premonitions? Ghosts? I do not know. They show me everything, all at once. Deeply-held pain from the personal and collective levels rushes forth, releasing its life-long (lives-long?) hold over me. Long festering wounds abruptly are healed not through a prolonged process, but through an instant letting-go.

They want to heal not only my personal psychology, but also ancestral traumas latent inside in my DNA. I witness countless wars, deaths, massacres, murders, and tragedies of my people. I walk through boneyards and step over carcasses. My indigenous blood awakens to claim its own blessings and burdens, to seek its way home again.

This death and rebirth process will take two full years.

XIX.

More guides reveal themselves. They are born out of my deepest fears, which materialize into animal shapes.

Our journeys together always begin in a small dark house where the blonde angels reside. Taking the skyward path, we climb out the window and up a series of ladders into the night sky. The full moon is a portal to another dimension. On the other side, a giant macaw flies me to La Tierra, a multi-layered world filled with ancestors and spirit guides who teach me to unfold further and further transformations.

Taking the underworld path, we descend down through the floorboards of the house and into a labyrinth of tunnels. The spirits here are darker and more foreboding, from the ghostly to the demonic. At the lowest level, an endless row of pods where my previous lives sleep awaiting release. The guides teach me to free these souls of mine, which sprout wings and fly into the sun.

When I need to recharge, there is a field just outside the house. Here, the goddess’s radiant face shines down on a bed of flowers where I can safely rest and recuperate. She is everywhere, the loving and beneficent force behind it all.

XX.

I cannot relate to you all of the gifts, I can only suggest a small part of the whole. Every day, by her grace, a new teaching will be given to me….

I will have journeys where I dance the dark powers of the animals.
I will have journeys where I eat fiery gemstones to heal my body.
I will have journeys to the ancient grandmother who teaches me about my ancestors and their rites.
I will have journeys where my body is consumed by fire or by sun, burnt into ash only to be born again and again, each time a little bit stronger.

I will have dreams where I am taught by goddesses, shamans, and monks.
I will have dreams where I become lucid and make love with my spirit guides.
I will have dreams where I die, and ones where I am nothing at all.
I will have dreams where I am born again, the first inkling of consciousness emerging from oblivion.
I will have dreams where I see the face of my next rebirth.

There will be times when I am possessed by animals, ancestors, and other entities.
There will be times when the gifts of the spirits will materialize in the physical world, objects appearing where they hadn’t been a moment before.
There will be times when ghosts will teach me new powers.
There will be times when my ancestors will lead me to their tombs and show me their bones.
There will be times when the earth, water, fire, and wind will share their secrets, whispering to me in the languages of the elements.

I will shapeshift into a thousand different forms.
I will become the Christ dying and resurrected.
I will become the beholden one, the betrothed, and the human sacrifice.
I will become the hunter, the hunted, the piercing arrow, and the wound itself.
I will become a lone saguaro rising from the sacred desert sand.
I will become a torrential waterfall heaving and a gentle flower stretching to the sun.
I will become a billion sparkling shards of sunlight stress across the universe.

The four guardians will teach me to absorb and bless the pain of the world.
They will teach me to dance in spontaneous perfection.
They will teach me to don the ghost eyes that see through the dark.
They will teach me to hold the orb of the sun in my hands.
Gradually, they will transform me into who I have always been.
Taking all of her forms, I will become the goddess incarnate.
Oholomo is slowly being born.

XXI.

Resonance and intimacy lead to unity.

For example, I go to visit a lake to learn from the water spirits. Stripping down, I enter up to my waist. I see the lake nymphs, their radiance dancing across the ripples in the distance. May you be well, my ladies.

Standing in the water, I gather the energy together. I draw it up from my feet like the taproot of a water lily, and radiate out through my arms like a flower blossoming into the sky. I pour the lake waters over my head and body, asking the lake to cleanse any impurities and to give me her blessings.

I open my eyes, and notice that I am generating ripples that travel out to the nymphs, while their ripples are now extending back toward me. My ripples mix with theirs, a dance of radiant sunlight glistening and sparkling.

The water spirits and I intertwine our energies across the surface of the lake. But what’s more, I suddenly realize that my body itself is mostly made of water. I realize that the water spirits and I were never actually separate in the first place.

I express this oneness with an offering, the most obvious gift in the moment. I close my eyes and urinate, a libation of my waters for the spirits of the lake. I dunk my head nine times. May I bless you and you bless me.

As I open my eyes, I see that my movements have stirred up some water grasses from the muddy floor of the lake. All around me, small underwater flower buds are now floating upon the surface of the lake. Blessings upon blessings.

XXII.

Another story about resonance, intimacy, and unity:

At one point, I came across a tree that had been cut down and was being chain-sawed into pieces. It had been the tallest tree in the area, a great king looking out over the land. Impulsively, I placed my hand on its bark and blessed it. May you be well, ancient grandfather.

A few days later, I was walking in the night and came across a circle of eleven pine trees around a great, old oak. I could see the starry night and the sliver of the moon through the branches, and a sense of peace came over me. All at once, I realized that I was standing over the stump of a pine that had once been part of the circle. It had been cut and removed.

Just then, the spirit of the oak spoke to me: “Take your place as the thirteenth member of our coven. We will teach you our ways of listening.” I stand on the stump, joining this circle of teachers.

A deep silence opens up, a falling away of the typical rush of thought and a settling into simply sensing. There’s the background buzz of sounds, body sensations, and visuals, all melded together in a seamless multisensory flux-flow. Within, part of, and inseparable from this, a sparkling arises. In a nano-second, it seems to form into a particular sound or a specific body sensation. Following behind nearly instantaneously, the mind pops up, wanting to explain, narrate, and make sense of this new “arrival.” But, the thought is let go, allowing the fluttering to arise and be sensed.

Is it this fluttering really arriving anywhere… or is it momentarily congealing out of the background that’s always present and already right here? Does it actually even arrive… or is it better to say that no sooner does it appear to be taking shape than it’s already dissolving away? Without the mind jumping in to make it into a thing, do any of these objects or sensations actually succeed in taking shape… or do the trees see that everything is simultaneously happening and also completely empty?

XXIII.

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

Sublime Lover, touch my body with your warm energies,
And open my heart to the whole of your manifestation.

Dark Lady, rest me in your secret womb,
The silent birthplace and deathplace of all creation.

Divine Radiance, bathe me in your golden light,
That I may be healthy, strong, and awake enough to embody your glory.

Great Mystery of the Cosmos, I stand before you in loving presence,
Yet I know that we are one.

XXIV.

Of all the forms she takes, the most frequent in my visions recently is a pale white-skinned, golden-haired sun goddess. She descends upon me, embracing me in sexual union. She is separate, but she also somehow is a mirror reflection of me at the same time. It’s like my male physical body has a female energetic counterpart, which engage in an intimate embrace.

Over time, I perceive our bodies becoming more and more fused. When I look in the mirror I am male, but when I close my eyes and feel, I am her. I can feel my golden hair streaking across my cheek and neck. I can feel my breasts emerging from my chest. I can feel a pregnancy growing within my belly, where the black gemstone has taken root.

When we make love, it’s unclear who is penetrating who. Our union is sheer bliss, ecstasy, so much more than any physical pleasure.

XXV.

My physical body dissolves, and in its place is a nebulous sphere. Vision, hearing, and sensations are blended all together in a pulsating orb. Thoughts flow through, part of the synesthesia like a melody rising from a symphony.

The whole being fluctuates like the fluid body of an octopus, constantly shifting its color and transforming its texture in response to the fluxing environment. I feel tendrils extending from my heart area, feeling into the darkness to reach, grasp, and explore.

Each of my cells tastes, smells, and caresses with its own intelligence. There’s nothing I need to do; it all happens if its own accord at every moment. The Goddess, this body, lives and breathes.

XXVI.

My experience of life is nearly always positive. I have rarely had a negative emotion. I feel a constant blend of joy, happiness, and gratitude.

But occasionally, anxiety washes over my body. I sit with the sensation, not pushing it away and not turning away from it. Wave after wave of jittery buzzing flows through my system. I am simply being with the sensations, allowing them to be and paying attention to them.

Then, the waves of anxiety start to transform, becoming something different: a yearning, a heartache. Fear dissolves and reveals the love underneath.

If I sit with it and feel it all the way to the other side, all negative emotions turn out to be nothing but love. Step by step, my openness alchemizes all darkness into golden light.

XXVII.

After my initial awakening experience, vision, hearing, and body sensations were three separate channels that I had to switch between, and thoughts came through via a fourth channel. Then, after my first kunalini opening, these channels became more integrated, swirling into a kind of synesthesia. More recently, all the discrete streams of perception have pixelated into smaller and smaller particles. When I intentionally tune into the body, I find a cloud of amorphous sensations or buzzing energies moving here or there. When I’m more concentrated, this flurry becomes more and more atomized or pixelated, like stardust strewn across the galaxy. When I relax and concentrate, I sink down into that TV snow and lose all sense of thought or sensation or separation.

The last few weeks, I sit in my chair, fold up my legs, take a breath, and without intending to do anything, I “drop in” to that snow immediately. All the particles of perception start flitting around indistinctly, occasionally punctuated by a clear perception of a sound, sight, or sensation (like I might hear a snippet of a bird’s song distinctly amidst the snow). At a certain point, dream-like images and random incongruous thoughts start flitting though the snow as well. As I sit, all of this becomes increasingly indistinct — even any notion of awareness or consciousness or presence is all mixed up into that static. It’s no longer clear if I’m conscious or asleep or halfway between.

A less absorptive but similar experience is also persistent throughout the day, whenever I choose to stop what I’m doing and tune in.

I’ve continued practicing a bit of qigong in the morning, just a simple routine of 20 min or so. But a few months ago, I started to let go more during those sessions, allowing my body to move spontaneously instead of “holding form.” Gradually over time, the whole thing has become a spontaneous dance where I let my body respond however it wants to the energies that pass through.

During these sessions, my body is like a starry night sky, mostly empty space but with sparkling clouds of sensation. A bursting comet or a falling star fizzles here and there. And I keep moving, bringing embodiment and expression to this emptiness.

XXVIII.

What used to seem like a stream of consciousness is now seen as an endless series of pulses where reality flashes on and off like a strobe light. The whole world poofs into existence out of nowhere/nothing. In the gaps between the flashes, reality is not here at all.

There’s no stable watcher throughout it all: there might be moments where I think “I am here” or “I am aware,” but any kind of subjectivity is also just a discrete flash that instantly disappears into the emptiness. Although there’s “no one home” in those moments, there’s a memory trace when reality comes back, like my brain is trying to retroactively fill in the gaps between the pulses to create an illusion of stability. But despite these efforts, there’s really no such thing as past or future since it’s always just now, now, now. And no space because it’s always just here, here, here.

Each flash confirms that in seeing there’s only the seeing, because anything other than seeing would come in its own separate flash. Same with hearing, feeling, thoughts, etc. Subject and object cannot exist. Each flash also confirms that there’s no possibility of a doer. Actions and results are apparently just more efforts of the brain to fill in the gaps retroactively and create the impression of stability.

In meditation the other day, this strobing pattern synched up with my breathing, so that it would strobe out right at the end of the out-breath and strobe back on with the beginning of the in-breath. I think I could sense that there were actually faster strobes happening during the rest of the breath, but my concentration is not high-resolution enough to catch them all. I noticed that the strobe-out actually is something like a fade, while the strobe-in is more abrupt. A few times I thought I could very subtly make out how the incoming strobe quickly configures itself, sort of snapping into place just as it’s arising.

The on/off/on/off strobing took place hundreds (thousands?) of times during the meditation along with almost every breath. Somehow my meditation has become effortless. I don’t think I missed more than a few the whole time, and they were just getting sharper and clearer as I kept going.

Sometimes seeing these pulses has sparked big realizations, but during this particular meditation, they became just a silent perfection — no sense of “I” or “being” or “here” or even “this,” just the universe naturally doing its thing. Great Shakti doing her spontaneous dance of birth and death every nanosecond. Reality emerging at every moment, with each of her pulsations.

XXIX.

I work with drumming, dancing, prayers, and offerings. Gradually, the elemental and animal spirits begin to arrange themselves into a mandala. Earth, water, fire, wind and space bring their material support. Cells, bacteria, instincts, and emotions bring their life force. Power animals bring their energies and wisdoms.

My ancestral bloodlines join the mandala too. Mother’s father, mother’s mother, father’s mother, and father’s father form a matrix of DNA, shaping the raw materials of the elements and animals. Ancestral burdens are transformed from iron chains into golden strands of light.

Four guardian teachers emerge and mold me in their ways. Blessings flow from south, east, west, and north, combining in the center. Gifts are exchanged, candles lighted, words of love and support spoken.

The Goddess shines her radiance from above, her light dancing across the surface of deep wellsprings of the black underworld. In the center of the mandala, young Oholomo learns to dance the dance that connects the worlds.

XXX.

This entry must remain blank.
A true initiation cannot be spoken about.
The ultimate test remains unspeakable.

All I can say is that it was literally a matter of life and death.
It involved hospitals, ambulances, and ventilation machines.
Survival was unlikely and the pain extreme.

There is no question that it was only by blessings that Death was avoided.
Only by love was continued Life granted.
Only by our intimacy was the web held together.

XXXI.

It’s midnight as I take my seat facing the dark forest and the black sky. The demon horde gathers on the horizon. The fire-breathing dragons threaten to burn down the world. The forces of madness, chaos, and destruction amass for their onslaught.

The golden ally sitting in my solar plexus provides reassurance:
It is time.
Let them come.

Then, one by one, the waves of sheer terror wash over my body like the assault of a thousand tsunamis. But I do not resist; I do not run or flee. I simply sit still and accept and fully feel.

As these waves wash up on my shores, wash through my body and out the other side, the fear is unbearable. And yet, a slightly golden tinge on the crest of each wave indicates that this, too, is nothing but Her love.

Hail Holy Queen, Mother of All, Protector of Worlds.

XXXII.

One day, almost exactly two years after Her first appearance, it is finished.

The final fear to be alchemized is the very fear of being alive. The deepest, core terror of this human existence. But in the end, even this fear is only love in disguise. As soon as it is pulled out from the depths of the black waters, this too is seen to be made of golden liquid sunlight.

In the final vision, the Great Black Lady lifts her stony mask and reveals her true face. One glance and my scalp lights up in a sunburst halo, a helmet of brilliant light rays.

How can I explain what I saw behind her mask? The best I can do is to say that, in that moment, all of the power animals, ancestors, guides, and goddesses are revealed to be one and the same. They are all none other than me. And I, her lover and her child, also am none other than the Goddess herself, as I have always been.

My body, all my thoughts, all sensory perceptions, all experiences are her. There is nothing of me that is not her. I am life itself, the divine creative powers of the universe.

How could I ever be separate from her? She is literally everywhere, in literally everything. In every experience, I am always already in a full-bodied and full-being embrace with her.

I make love with her by living, by breathing, by sensing, by being. Through feeling this deep well of emotion, through imagining and dreaming and every other emergence. She is all around me and in me, embracing and loving and penetrating me with each breath and at every moment.

Our non-separation is a visceral bliss and a poignant joy. We are creating this world together, through the marriage of her creative energies and my conscious awareness. This is our lovers’ embrace. Everything I see, feel, experience, and am is our union.

Kundalini is complete.
I am Oholomo.
I am the Goddess.
I am the light.

XXXIII.

The dance that connects the worlds is the dance that draws up the underwaters and that calls down the light.

As Oholomo runs his fingers across the surface of the black pool, sparkles of reflected light dance in their wake. He scoops the waters from the deepest depths, spraying them into the air, each drop becoming a vibrant rainbow prism. He breathes in the darkness, and exhales it into the sun.

When he’s created his elixir, Oholomo unites the worlds in a shining orb of liquid golden light. He tears open his heart, and draws the circle of protection for all beings.

XXXIV.

In a vision, a wrathful deity chops me over the head with a battle axe, cutting me entirely in half down the midline. All my layers fall away in concentric sheaths, like a thousand Russian dolls. At the core, a golden angel is released in a flash of light. It is time to rise.

Oholomo spreads his wings and takes flight.

A record from Jan. 2020 to Jan. 2021. This cycle of transformation began with spontaneous mystical experiences of what non-dual systems often refer to as True Nature, Buddha Nature, or similar terminology, and the recognition of my identity as that (I–IV). A kundalini opening then led to the collapse of that identity and the realization of Emptiness and Non-self (V–VI). Several posts then describe the subsequent dissolution of the senses into a nondual perception of energy (VII–XIV). At the end of the cycle, these multiple perspectives became integrated as different co-existing frequencies of awakening, and steps began to be taken toward the Below (XV–XXII). While this whole series of events was kicked off by an exercise from the Headless Way, this was only the match that lit the fuse. Each of the major “breakthrough” experiences that are described below resonate with different traditions and teachings and draw upon different spiritual vocabularies.

Background.

Ever since I was a child, I have had a number of different kinds of mystical experiences. I can remember regularly speaking to spirits when I was a kid, and I apprenticed with a Lakota medicine man when I was in high school. Inexorably pulled toward spirituality, I began studying indigenous and Asian traditions in college. I practiced vipassana meditation intensively in my late 20s, and I also experienced a heart opening brought on by Buddhist practice. In my 30s, I became a scholar and researcher of Asian religions, and had a few notable experiences with practice of these traditions. I have also maintained a daily yoga practice for over 25 years.

Eventually, this all culminated in my 40s, when I had a series of profound awakening experiences that revealed to me a feminine embodiment of non-duality, which I write about on this website. It began in late 2018, when I started having bouts of severe anxiety. I hadn’t practiced vipassana intensively for over two decades, but I began again to practice body scans for 15 to 20 minutes per day. I’d say I probably succeeded in actually meditating 4–5 days out of the week. I’d sit in a comfy chair, so as to avoid the back pain I used to get from the cushion on the floor. Most of the time I was just lost in thought, and it didn’t do anything for my anxiety, which only got worse over time.

Around the same time, I also started doing a bit of qigong — really just 10 or 15 min of breathing and moving after sitting meditation and before going about my day. A few months after starting that practice, I began experiencing something that was so subtle I didn’t realize it could be related to awakening until much later. Whenever I’d start a qigong session, I’d get a sensation of rising energy from my feet to my head. A few times I noticed it rising when I was doing the meditation before even standing up for qigong. It felt like mildly cold shivers, that was somehow connected with sexual energy, breathing, and movement. It was interesting and fun to observe, but I didn’t think it meant too much at the time.

Just about two months after those energy flows began to become noticeable, a sudden and profound awakening experience took place, which kicked off the cycle of transformation I talk about on this website. This process wound up taking about four years to complete.

I.

It was late January, 2020. While driving home, I was listening to a podcast about the Headless Way. The speaker was mostly was talking about the life and work of the twentieth century British mystic and philosopher Douglas Harding. But, at one point in the interview, he led the audience through what he called an “experiment.” I won’t repeat it here, since it’s easy enough to find this information elsewhere.

The experiment lasted only a few minutes, but something instantaneously snapped into focus as I followed along. This was not a gradual clearing of understanding, or a layer-by-layer unpeeling of the layers of an onion. It was like those Magic Eye books that were popular back in the 1990s: one minute I was looking at the world in the normal way, and then in an instant my perspective popped into a new place. It felt somehow as if I had been living my life in a VR headset totally immersed in the images on the screen, but then suddenly someone pulled the headset out a bit and revealed that what I thought were objects were really just projections.

It was just a quick glimpse and I was intrigued, but I couldn’t concentrate on it while driving. A half hour or so later, though, I was in the jacuzzi at the gym, and I thought I’d give the experiment another try. When I did, it snapped back much more strongly, and I suddenly fell into a void.

Not only my vision but sounds and sensations and my thoughts, too, were taking place inside an expansive, blank, empty, dark space. Visual perceptions entered through a portal like a big all-seeing eye, but they seemed flat and unreal. Audio perceptions came in on a different stream. Body sensations were on a third channel; thoughts on a fourth. My awareness switched between the four streams, perceiving one at a time as separate bubbles in the vast emptiness: Vision! Sound! Sensation! Thought! Vision! Sound! Sensation! Thought!

The realization came that this is how the brain works, but that I’ve been reifying these perceptions and thoughts for my whole life, objectifying everything, and identifying with them. Including my body…. I’ve thought of myself as an object in the field “out there.” Now, I see that actually all of the “out there” is actually unfolding “in here,” in my awareness.

Where “I” am in all of this is unclear. Am “I” the empty space? The thought comes that this must be how I originally perceived the world as a newborn infant, before I understood what “I” means. I must have learned over time to create an illusion of a self by linking the visual perception, the sensations, and the thoughts together. I then must have gotten so immersed in the self I had created that I forgot how I had built it in the first place.

The realization arises that I am seeing what I’ve read about for decades in books by Buddhists and other spiritual people, that this what is meant by “satori.” I also realize everything I’ve ever done in meditation has been totally wrong, focused on seeking something “out there” somewhere, when it’s all right here all along. It is so simple, so easy to see that there’s nowhere to go. It is so clear that everything is already perfect just the way it is. I feel like I could sit here observing the bubbles and the emptiness for hours, effortlessly. In fact, it’s all I would like to do.

I laugh out loud. All of those cheesy Zen sayings I’ve assumed are metaphors — and mostly have written off long ago — are actually true in a very literal way. It’s all so obvious! Of course there is no path and no goal; of course the truth is in front of my nose, closer than my breath; of course this is my original face before my parents were born.

Maybe 30–40 min into the experience, things start getting a bit less vivid. Vision remains the clearest channel, but even that starts becoming harder for me to stay with. Eventually, I’m back to “normal,” but a queer feeling of distance and detachment lasts the rest of the evening, and all the next day. And there’s a seemingly permanent shift in perspective, ever so slightly, like I can now see a frame around the world.

I find myself very much am wanting to go back and explore the void. But at the same time that I want to return, there is no longer a feeling that there’s anything I need to attain. There is no need to strive for any kind of spiritual insight.

II.

Two days after experiencing the emptiness, I woke up in the middle of night. I lay in bed, and for about 30–40 min, the void is clear again. Again, the forms are coming in on different channels. The tiny specs of light inside my closed eyelids have never been so bright. I feel totally present. I am here. I am awake.

But who is this “I” exactly? It’s plainly obvious that nothing coming into my awareness on any of the channels are “me.” And there’s nothing here that’s not part one of the channels. I see clearly that I must be, and I must have always been, the void itself. Bodies and forms and thoughts and selves have come and gone for lifetime after lifetime. But I — The Void — have always been here, still, watching everything.

Not only that, but it’s now obvious that I am also the very same Void that is looking through everyone else’s eyes as well. That we are all end-points or sensors for the same, universal Void. Seven billion manifestations of the same vast and infinite Buddha Nature, looking out upon itself. That we are all the eyes of the Great Spirit. God’s eyes.

I realize clearly that all separate beings, including what I called “myself,” are interchangeable entities that don’t ultimately matter. These are meaningless projections, and it really makes no difference whether or not any one of us is here at all. After sitting with this realization for a while, there’s a sense of unease that starts to rise up seemingly from far, far away. It starts to get more and more vivid, until it starts intruding into the Void, growing into a full blown panic.

The sense of self comes rushing back: Being the Void may be dangerous! If I can’t snap out of this and come back to my self, I could lose my sanity! Maybe I’ve already lost my mind! If I can’t be myself, then I could lose my identity, my family, my job! I could lose everything I love and depend upon! The fear draws me out of the Void, and I’m back in my bed.

Eventually, I fall back to sleep. Over the next few days the effects of this seeing linger, but I’m not sure where it leaves me. I have seen the cosmic Buddha, the Dharmakaya itself. Looking back, it seems like such an important shift in perspective, but it also seems like it maybe was an opportunity that was missed. Did I lose my one and only chance because of fear? Will I ever be back there again? What does it all mean? What’s happening to me?

III.

For months after the two-part awakening experience, there have been some lingering side-effects. Strangely, my eyes seem to fall into two dimensional vision on a frequent basis, the whole visual field becoming flat like a paint-by-numbers or a stained glass window. I also feel a bit absent-minded: head in the clouds, and unable to really focus on detail-oriented work for very long. Several projects that I was very focused on no longer seem important, and I have let go of them without thinking twice. Also, although I had previously been very invested in following politics, that interest disappeared overnight.

Those are pretty minor, perhaps inconsequential, side-effects, which are outweighed by much more important positive shifts. In general, I feel like negative emotions or thoughts roll off me much more easily than before — in conversations with my wife or at work, for example. I used to be accosted by a feeling of anxiety on a regular basis, many times per day, and that has completely stopped. I’ve been hit a few times with strong waves of elation or bliss, and at others with strong feelings of compassion. As I walk around, the dance of light through the trees, a bed of flowers, a mailbox, even a piece of trash on the side of the road are all so much more vivid and beautiful than ever before. In my interactions with people, it seems that I am more able to listen and be present for others since I’m not constantly reacting personally to things, or planning out what I’m going to say.

My interest in spiritual practice has also greatly increased, become just about the only thing I care about. For about six weeks after the awakening, I was focused on trying to reproduce the breakthrough experience. On a regular basis throughout the day I kept reminding myself (or being reminded) of the Headless perspective, and I spent about an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon practicing the “experiments” introduced by the Headless Way website.

However, by about mid-March, I stopped actively trying to recreate the awakening experiences I had had, and began just sitting and observing sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts in an open and neutral way. Once I did this, it allowed me to open up of new realizations. Over the next three and a half months, I experienced a number of deeper and deeper revelations that seemed to come in waves.

During this time, I started consuming a lot of materials associated with Headless Way, in order to try to figure out what was this was all about. I also joined and participated in the Headless Way virtual meetups over Zoom, which I found to be extremely helpful in keeping headlessness on the front burner and in working out some of the implications of the experience. Ultimately, however, this group seemed a bit too single-minded, and I stopped attending after a few months.

I began to read books and listen to some speakers on Zen, Advaita, and other forms of non-duality, which were never things I was very interested in before but which I’m finding to be relevant as context or “second opinions” on what it was that I have experienced. I’m not looking for teachings or guidance, but for confirmation of the insights that spontaneously arose. Over the weeks and months, as I have kept practicing Headless exercises, I have come to see clearly though my own experience how the classical nondual “pointers” are literally true from within the Headless perspective. These are some of the lines of inquiry or contemplation that have led to especially powerful realizations:

• I am

• All there is is now, here, this

• The whole universe is inside of me

• The only thing that exists is the present moment

• I am the only one here — there are no others

• I’m not living my life, I’m just watching

• Where I’ve been looking from is what I’ve been looking for

Reflecting on each of these produced powerful shifts in my consciousness, mystical experiences in their own right. Each felt like it was unlocking another door of understanding. Looking back, I’d say that on the whole, the primary effect has been a shift in identity away from being an individual bounded person to being the awareness in which the person, and everything else, is unfolding.

I see clearly that I am the One. I am Everything. I am the Void. I am the Universe.

IV.

For five months from time of the awakening experiences, I remained pretty much in isolation. I stripped back my work to the bare minimum, and stopped a lot of my usual activities. I found myself spending 2 to 3 hours a day in meditation, inquiry, and Headless exercises, absorbed in everything that was being revealed to me.

Throughout this time, I kept oscillating between the feeling that I was “getting it” and then “losing it.” If only I could hold it steady enough, I thought, I could really imbibe the wisdom from these experiences. But I wasn’t able to figure out how to do that. It was clear that profound shifts had taken place, but I constantly wondered whether I was still moving forward, whether there would be more realizations to come. I had the feeling that there might be, but also had the nagging fear that I might be slipping back into “the old me” and losing my new perspective.

This oscillation came to a head at the end of June, as it became to me clear that I was going to have to have a confrontation with someone at work. The details of this interpersonal exchange are not significant, but I began to feel anxious about the inevitability of this unpleasant meeting. For five months, I had protected myself from the world. I had had virtually no negative thoughts or emotional experiences, and the return of the old feeling of anxiety being back in my body was surprising and unwelcome. I thought I had moved beyond feeling anxiety — or anything negative, actually — and seeing that I wasn’t was disappointing. More than disappointing, the fact I was anxious about such a minor confrontation made me more concerned that my awakening was slipping away and that I was backsliding into identification with my small previous self.

One afternoon, when I headed out for my daily hour-long walk, this cycle of thinking really started to ramp up. Anxious thoughts began to spiral more and more out of control. The fear of the confrontation and the fear of “losing it” intensified into a generalized fear about everything. I even started to panic for no reason about the parked cars I was walking by on the side of the road. I was aware that my heart was pounding, and my body was all jittery. I’ve never had a panic attack, but this must be what it is like.

Where is all of this coming from?, I asked myself. And just then it hit me that, actually, all of this anxiety — and all the anxiety I’ve ever experienced in my life — is really one core fear: the fear of lack of control.

And, where does this fear of not being in control come from? A number of memories of events in early childhood started coming up. It became clear that this is a pattern that has been in play for basically all of my life. I’ve always been fearful of not being in control.

But, I asked myself, have I ever actually been in control? I mean, have I ever actually had control over any detail or anything in my life? I’ve had a great life filled with good fortune, but has any of it actually been my own doing?

It suddenly became crystal clear that, while there has been an illusion of control and decision-making, actually life has always unfolded in ways that are mysterious and unpredictable. Any notion of control has been a justification after the fact, never an actuality.

It was clear as day to me that this is true, but the realization struck even deeper fear in my heart. Accepting this lack of control means relinquishing the ability to influence how my life goes… how my kids’ lives go… even if we live or die. It means relinquishing the ability to influence how events unfold… if my awakening stays or goes… even if I remain sane or have lost my mind.

All of it is beyond my control, I realize. But, if I’m not in control, who or what is? Can I just trust in the Void? Can I rely on karma? God? I feel myself grasping for something — anything — that I can be sure about. I even start to bargain a bit: I’ll surrender to the lack of control if you promise it will be ok. But who is “you”? Who am I talking to? Is there anybody out there?

It’s clear to me that the answer to all of these questions is simply “who knows?” That there are no guarantees of anything. That even trying to be certain about this question is in itself a form of trying to be in control.

Just as I this realization was sinking in, a thundering voice in my head clearly spoke to me: “STAND ASIDE, THIS IS HAPPENING.” Whose voice is that? I have no idea, but I think I have no choice here but to give up control and give in to whatever process is taking place.

V.

I was pretty emotionally raw after the voice, but I felt like I was on the precipice of some kind of transformation — good or bad, who knew.

Two days later, another major breakthrough experience occurred. I went out for my regular afternoon walk. Immediately as I left the house, I started to feel a tingling sensation in my body. It became stronger as I walked, and after about 10 minutes it had become quite pronounced. The sensations coalesced into an stream of energy running up my back and up my neck to the crown of my head. I started to feel like I was sending off sparks from the top of my head into the atmosphere, like a Fourth of July sparkler. I felt completely alive, brimming over with the energy of life.

My walk lasted for an hour. During that time, as I looked around me, I saw that everything everywhere was also part of this same flow of energy. The sun was a huge source of energy, like a power generator for all of nature; the trees and flowers were bundles of energy bursting forth out of the ground; the birds and squirrels were sparks of energy that flitted about; every color I saw was popping and humming with electricity and life.

It was clear to me that all of these were multifaceted manifestations of the same primordial energy that created the universe. The Big Bang that is continuing to unfold on a cosmic scale. Here, I could see only one small corner of the dance of the universe playing out, but I could perceive that what was taking place all around me and within my very own body was all part of this huge cosmic event — that we are all part of the same process of being and becoming.

The energy flow upwards through my body became increasingly intense. My body literally began bouncing off the ground with each step I took, like I was going to launch into the air. Every sound I heard was like a mini Big Bang going off in my ears. A dog barked… BOOM! A bird chirped… BOOM! Even a thought going off silently inside my own head… BOOM!

A car went by… BOOM!, and I instantaneously understood how human beings have harnessed the creative energy of the universe in the form of machines that roar and churn and propel forth even more creation and becoming. I heard a person speak… BOOM!, and I understood how whole cultures and societies are all part of the Big Bang’s energetic dance. I had a thought… BOOM!, and saw how all of humanity’s ideas, fears, anxieties, dreams, and aspirations are all at their core emanating from the same energy. Each BOOM! is all part of the same cosmic vibration, part of the cosmic play of Shakti.

I saw that there was nothing apart from this energy; nothing that was not part of this dance. I even saw how birth and death are two sides of the same BOOM coming and going, and indistinguishable from one another. Death and decay are part of the same dance of being and becoming.

My body shaking and my heart pounding, I was filled with excitement and exuberance. Everything that exists and that can be conceived, without exception, is part of this whole happening. And I’m here seeing, feeling, perceiving it all, while also completely inseparable from its unfolding.

VI.

Something shifted after ht kundalini opening. These changes seem impossible to communicate, but I am going to try to capture them.

The first thing that I noticed was the feeling that my Headless “experiments” no longer seemed to be working as they were before. Or, rather, the language I had been using seemed to no longer make sense for my actual experience. Since my initial awakening, I had been describing my realization in terms of seeing that objects “out there” actually are located “in here” within my awareness. I resonated with the common Advaita metaphor of awareness being a “movie screen” on which an illusory “film” of life is being played. Most of all, I felt that while I lost my sense of being my “small self,” I increasingly felt identified with the “big self” of the Void or of Awareness.

All of this collapsed in the aftermath of the kundalini opening. The notions of here and there, screen and film, small and big selves have completely lost their coherence. These differences — which previously had been so meaningful and important to me—have been completely flattened out, so to speak.

Gone is the feeling that “I” am some kind of stable consciousness, no matter how expansive or spacious. Gone is the notion that awareness is a “container” or a “location” for experiences to unfold within. Gone, in fact, is the idea that awareness is even an identifiable thing separable from experiences. Awareness, consciousness, the One, or the Void, is no longer the witness of phenomena. They all now seem themselves to merely be disconnected fragments of mental phenomena, fantasies briefly flickering in and out of existence.

What remains might perhaps be best described as a single flow of experience. Sometimes this experience takes the form of thoughts; sometimes it’s sensations; sometimes it’s sensory experiences; sometimes it’s a feeling of being lost in a narrative; sometimes a feeling of waking up from the dream; sometimes it’s a notion of being some kind of self; sometimes a notion of not being a self. None of the specifics of what is experienced seems to matter. It’s all always part of a unitary experience, a whole kaleidoscopic happening.

These experiences are not arising “in” awareness. Each experience arises without being “in” or “at” any place in particular, and without being “seen” by any particular witness. Or, if there is a feeling of any particular experience being “in” or “at” or “seen,” then that feeling is itself nothing but additional experience that is arising. Any attempt to locate, see, or explain what’s happening is simply further interpretation about the experience, just more arisings.

Furthermore, although this whole flow seems to be made up of discrete moments or objects, when I look at it more closely, it all blends into a seamless, unresolvable swirl. I find it impossible to separate any one aspect of experience from another in this flow. Each time I try to grab onto one thing in order to see it clearly, it’s already gone. Each time I try to investigate some individual thing more closely, it seems to dissolve into a fuzzy cloud of energy.

Every experience in this flow is revealed to be a mystery, but the realization of its mysteriousness is itself only another experience in the flow. It’s like all the ways of thinking that used to be there before awakening and all the ways of thinking that were there in my “Headless phase” all got swirled together in the blender, broken up into tiny pieces that are now all mixed together into a big collage where form and Emptiness are undifferentiated and non-hierarchical.

I’m not sure what any of this means, but I’ve lost interest in overarching explanations or metaphysical statements. Everything feels up in the air, and that’s all ok.

VII.

Reflecting back on what I’ve written up to this point, I can see now that the big experiences I’ve been describing in previous posts have been gateways. Each mystical experience was powerful and transformative, and seemed so important and valuable at the time, but each was also just a passing experience in its own right. They may have made me more sensitive to seeing what is happening in the moment, but there never was a need to change anything about that happening. Although there is a seeming unfolding over time, there really has been nowhere to go all along.

I sit out on the back deck with a cup of coffee in the morning. It’s a “do nothing” kind of meditation, just observing what’s happening. Just being with whatever is arising and letting my mind wander wherever it goes.

The arising is constant: every waking moment there’s an unrelenting flow of forms. These sounds, sights, body sensations, thoughts, smells and tastes, no longer seem like separate channels. They all bleed into one another, blurring into one. A chaotic symphony made up of various parts that are all united in playing the same song. Some days the symphony is dominated more by thoughts of this kind or that, some days by certain kinds of sounds. Some days I get drawn into some aspect or another and am less conscious of the unity of the whole. Some days the unity is all I can notice. None of this is in my control, and none of it has any impact on the flow or the unity itself, which is always there for the seeing whenever I look.

It seems that everything in this symphony is made up of or is a manifestation of energy. When I look closely, listen carefully, feel sensitively, focus in on anything, it all seems to be buzzing. No fireworks, just a low steady hum of life everywhere.

No object in this flow of experience is steady or stable. Whenever I try to isolate a single form or experience, I can’t hold onto it. The more I try to concentrate on it, the faster it dissolves into energy. Every sound that hits my ear is already gone before I can capture it. My eyes dance around all shapes, refusing to hold steady for even a moment. Thoughts are just as elusive, mysteriously arising, assembling into narratives, and then disappearing just as quickly.

I’ve read the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) countless times in the past, and it’s always just been a conceptual experience for me. But the other day I picked it up again and the first chapter astounded me as the most simple and clear description possible of what I’m experiencing now.

If I try to look at the whole of manifestation all I can see is specific forms, but if I try to look at any one form all I can see is its participation in the whole. This totality can’t be pinned down, can’t be named or conceptualized, but it is inseparable from all of the individual things with names and concepts. The non-separateness of the two, both sides of the coin being actually one and the same, that is “the mystery within the mystery.”

VIII.

Whenever I close my eyes, I see a flurry of lights of various colors dancing around. One day, I noticed that I see these lights with eyes open in a darker room or even in the shadows during daytime. From there, it wasn’t long till I noticed them even in full daylight, particularly if staring at a blank wall or single-colored object. There’s never just one color — it’s always sparkling stardust, flitting about like TV snow.

Later, I noticed that when I look directly at a light (of any kind, but candles and headlights are particularly clear), there’s never just one point of light, but a whole dancing aura of little sparks. Sometimes they seem freeze into snow crystals.

Also, don’t certain colors seem to have a pulsating quality to them? Throbbing? It’s particularly strong for me with purple and pink for some reason, but reds and oranges and yellow all have a particular glow, illuminated from within like hot magma.

Looking out at the whole field of vision, I see movement everywhere. Nothing is ever still, ever solid, ever concrete. Even when the objects I’m looking at are supposedly still, the whole display consists of millions of pixels, all blipping, pulsing, flashing. Constantly shifting like a kaleidoscope or a fractal.

I don’t think this is any special way of seeing, but just how things always would have been if I had ever stopped to notice. Now that I do notice, the jig is up. What once seemed so real is seen clearly to be just a virtual reality simulation: projections on a jumbotron screen being assembled into objects by the mind.

Often when I sit with my eyes closed, or in bed before falling asleep, I let myself relax into that sparkling visual light display. Not examining closely, but just letting it all flow however it wants to, like I’m passively watching a screen saver.

I relax my sense of hearing, not trying to listen to anything in particular, but just letting the sounds roll by. And I can hear underneath the sounds a slight hiss, a constant drone that is always present even in so-called silence.

I similarly relax my body, not trying to feel anything special, but just noticing what’s there. And I always find a gentle buzz underneath all the other sensations. You might say it’s a flow of energy perhaps, or just the feeling of the vitality of the physical body.

When I really sink down into a relaxed state, the visual sparkles, the auditory hum, and the buzz of body sensations seem to blend together. Words fail here, but it seems like there’s a single energy field out there that’s being picked up in slightly different ways through the various sensory organs. These sensory inputs normally get “congealed” or “constructed” into objects and sounds and sensations, but underneath all of these manifestations, it’s only ever just the same unified, diffused, and vibrant energy field.

IX.

I notice that I can feel my whole body as a single field of sensation. Almost always, this field is laid out spatially. If I’m sitting, it seems like the sensations in my feet are “down there.” If I lie in bed and look out at my feet, those sensations feel like they are happening at eye level. Likewise, sensations on the back of my head feel like they are above and behind.

Above and behind what? Above and behind who?

Even when I don’t feel like a self “here” looking out from some fixed point in space, there still seems to be a directionality or spatiality that is fused into my experience of body sensations. I find it’s also true with hearing, where most sounds inherently and obviously seem to be coming from left or right, in front or behind.

Most of the time, orienting in terms of spatial directions seems quite baked into the process of perception. Like my sensory perceptions are being structured into a 3D representation of the world at a very deep level in my brain. Every once in a while, though, I have experienced this sense of directionality drop away. Then, it’s just sensation or sound that’s happening nowhere in particular, or rather everywhere all at once. There’s no discreet feeling of up or down, left or right. Everything is just here.

It’s very strange and somewhat wonderful whenever I notice that happening. It feels like I’m getting a brief glimpse of how the mind puts things together to construct the world.

Smell is completely different, though, isn’t it? Smell just hits all at once. There’s never any left or right, up or down. The sensory field of smell is blank one second, and completely full the next. It comes out of nowhere. Vision, hearing, and body sensations are constantly present, but smell may be blank for hours at a time. Then, suddenly, the whole dimension of smell magically appears. For a moment, it’s full and present and completely entrancing. But then — poof! — it’s gone again.

Isn’t thought just like this too? Coming from nowhere; existing nowhere in particular; suddenly taking over and coloring everything; just as suddenly disappearing again. Just as mysterious and magical, and just as completely entrancing!

X.

Looking quickly, of course I see it’s a stop sign. I can effortlessly recognize it even from 100 yards away. But, if I stop and look, what is it really?

I try to look closely, but I find that my eyes can’t take it in. They dance around and around. First a flash of red. Then, a nanosecond later, part of the letter S. But, then I’m torn away from the visual field to notice sound. Right behind that, the white edge of the sign comes through, but immediately off to attend to a body sensation. Another sound. The word “STOP.” Another sound. Then the glow of red again. The word “POTS.”

All of this happens in an almost-simultaneous instant, so rapidly that it’s impossible to narrate in real time. The more I stare, the more wildly the scene dances. Now the sign is shifting, pulsing, changing color. Different parts of it flashing in and out. My eyes darting wildly. The more I try to keep it stable, the more the motion becomes obvious, unmissable.

Is this actually a stop sign, in the end, or is it a messy swirl of sensory perceptions? Is it a solid thing out there in the world, or a loosely differentiated field of energy I am constantly working to snap into focus? Everything I see or hear or feel is like this if I stop to notice… utterly unpindownable.

But yet, this mind is always a pattern finder. The brain scans the scene piece by piece and snaps it all together, assembling perceptions into objects. It’s fun to watch this process happening, and especially when I can catch where it fails.

Like when the mind sees things that aren’t there. Looking out at the tress, I often “see” faces. Eyes. Fish. All kinds of things looking back at me.

Or, when the mind struggles to interpret unfamiliar patterns correctly. The other day, I laughed as my mind tried and failed to make sense of that red blob in the neighbor’s yard. What was it anyway? My mind had all kinds of guesses that all turned out to be false. It turned out to be a big red inflatable pool toy blowing in the wind unexpectedly in someone’s yard. But chaos reigned as my brain tried to figure that one out!

Seeking and finding patterns seems to be one of the mind’s primary jobs. And, it is constantly offering up these interpretations. This is often helpful, but often not. And seeing the gaps and disconnects between the sensory inputs and the pattern recognition just goes to show how provisional ALL my interpretations are.

XI.

A lot of my recent posts have been about sensory experience. When I closely watch how things are arising, I can notice how every moment slips away before it can be grasped. I can notice clearly that there is constant change, a constant passing away of all phenomena. Constant death.

But, then again, I can also notice how every moment brings something new into experience. I can notice clearly that there is constant becoming, phenomena constantly coming into existence. Constant birth.

What I can’t notice is any of the phenomena sticking around. There is nothing but impermanence. Birth and death and birth, every moment, endlessly.

This is the pulse of the universe, the vibration of reality. I don’t mean that in a metaphysical or philosophical way. It’s a lived experience that is clear as day whenever I choose to notice how my perception and thoughts actually work.

XII.

Back in late January, it seemed like there was a precise moment when I woke up. It felt like I had been asleep, stuck in a dream for 45 years, and then an alarm went off and I shot up in bed, awake and fully present for the first time.

For a while, I thought I had to hold on to that awakeness, to be really careful not to fall back asleep. Now, it is Fall, and I have realized that awakening isn’t something happens in a one-and-done kind of way. It’s not a single or a final event, a state that can be captured, recreated, or preserved. Rather, both falling asleep and waking up seem to be happening all the time, cyclically repeating many times per day.

I might be plugging away at my computer answering emails, caught up in busy thought-trains coming and going for an hour or more. But then, something (a sound, a feeling, a sip of tea) will snap me out of it. I suddenly realize “I am here; I am present.”

If I’m relaxing on the deck or out on a walk instead of working, this cycle might happen much more often. I drift off into a thought or a day dream for minutes or even just seconds, and then become present over and over again.

I just wrote “I am here; I am present,” but there isn’t really an “I” or an awareness watching this happen. There’s just a feeling of presence for everything that’s happening at this moment. It’s just Now. Here. This.

Sometimes, a memory comes about how I was not present just a moment ago, or a thought comes about being aware of this awakeness… but then that’s just thinking starting up for another round of the cycle.

I think I now see that the idea isn’t to wake up for once and for all, but rather to continually wake up over and over again. To wake up in every different kind of setting, within every different kind of environment, during every different kind of action. To awaken while relaxing on the porch, while on a walk, while writing an email, while talking with the kids, while watching TV, while taking out the trash, while scooping dog poop, while in pain, while giving birth, while dying. To “wake down” into—and amidst—every facet of this human life.

Of course, one can’t possibly live out every dimension of humanity in one lifetime. So, this must be an endless process of discovery undergone by an infinite number of beings across an infinity of time and space. A fractal-like collective process as each awakening discovers the possibilities and opportunities for infinitely more.

XIII.

My experience is filled with ever-moving visual stimuli, ever-changing sounds, ever-vibrating body sensations. Thoughts come and go, and occasionally smells and tastes too.

But underneath all that, very subtle feelings are also coming into focus. It’s all under the radar and normally unseen by the mind. But, if I sit quietly and tune in, I can feel them bubbling away just beneath the surface. Buzzes and and vibes that don’t have names and that lie beyond the normal five senses. Slight flickers that are impossible to pin down or describe or even fully experience. Unformed impulses, desires, intuitions, that have not yet coalesced into something tangible. A formless realm of possibility that has yet to emerge.

Do these mean anything? Do they carry useful information? I’m not sure, but I’m starting to listen.

XIV.

Who knew that anxiety could be a mystical experience? The other night, a complex situation with one of my kids triggered intense anxiety right before I went to bed. I have not felt anxiety — or really any negative emotion to speak of — in months, and I was completely unprepared for it.

I tossed and turned all night, my body wracked with stress. When I was conscious, I was present to all of the physical sensations and the mental dimensions of the experience, and I could perceive it all clearly as a flow of energy. When I did start to drift into sleep, I watched as it all dissolved into chaotic flashes of more subtle phenomena. Dreams would begin form in front of my eyes, the random flurry of energy crystallizing into coherent pictures. But then, rather than entering deeper into sleep, I would be ripped back into wakeful presence.

These fluctuations repeated over and over again all night long. When morning came, my meditation was shaky, with lots of distractions caused by thoughts and stories. My first reaction was that this all seemed so overblown, all such unnecessary overreaction. Wasn’t I done with this sort of thing? Have I come crashing back down into my “old self” — the self of entanglement, emotion, and personal narratives. Have I lost the “nondual” or “flow” perspective?

No, wait, all of that is just thoughts! Instead of jumping to any conclusions, let me instead look, and feel, and see what’s here. Let me just be patient and see what emerges from this experience.

Over the next few days, a series of revelations begin to come forth one after the other. All kinds of memories of the past come into the foreground, mostly concerning difficult relationships, many long-forgotten and some long-repressed. I can see clearly my entanglements with others, what they had done and what I had done to create these troubles. I don’t just see, but also feel. The act of retelling how these snarls were created, and to hold these stories with empathy, seems to allow them to resolve themselves. As they spontaneously unravel, I feel a release. A peace as each knot comes untied.

Far from crashing down into an old self, I see there is a new mode of being in the world that is wanting to emerge. Something new that wants to be explored that can’t be done from the impersonal equanimity of the Void or from the impermanent fluidity of the flow. A new mode of engagement based on empathy for the storytelling self. A new way of interacting with others that heals rather than entangles.

I don’t know yet what this new mode is all about, but I am welcoming it, exploring what it feels like, and beginning to ask how I might embody it in my life.

XV.

For over four decades at least, I experienced a third-person world. Objects were “out there” in the physical realm. My body was also an object, navigating among all the others. My mental and emotional experiences took place inside yet another object, my brain.

Then, with the initial awakening, I experienced the first-person world. There is only consciousness. All objects — including my body — existed inside of my awareness. There was nothing outside of me because literally the entire universe was within me.

Of course, people who live in the third person mode say that the physical world is the ultimate truth, while spiritual people say it is “a dream” and prefer to hang out in Awareness. But, from where I sit, I don’t have enough evidence to call it either way. The third person perspective seems to be undeniably real (which is why I won’t step in front of a truck), but the first person also seems undeniable (which is why I can see that the truck is inside my consciousness even while I’m avoiding stepping in front of it).

Now, though, I’m experiencing something new: a “second person” mode opening up. In the third person I’m an object among objects, in the first there’s just me. But in the second person, everything is connected, entangled, swirdled together with everything else. There are no independent objects and no universal me, just webs of interdependence, relationships within relationships, connections upon connections. I am my relationships. In a sense, I am you. Or rather, you and I are both “we.” This mode is just as real, just as undeniable, and just as important as the other two modes.

XVI.

A thought experiment: From the standpoint of nonduality, only This exists. I am the only consciousness here, a Buddha “awareing” the cosmos into existence. The “others” I interact with are appearing sometimes as suffering beings, sometimes as wayward demons causing suffering, and sometimes as bodhisattvas here to help alleviate suffering. But these “others” are all just apparitions within my dream.

I can’t experience it first-hand, but I can also imagine how all this appears from another’s perspective. In that Buddha’s dreamed universe, they are the only conscious being. What I call “me” in my cosmos appears in theirs as just another “other.” I can ask myself, do I appear to them as a suffering being, as a demon, or as a bodhisattva?

I know I’ve read about “manifestation bodies” of the Buddhas many times before, but never understood how simple it all is. Buddhas in one world are constantly manifesting as bodhisattvas in billions of other worlds simultaneously. And, although we can’t ever experience it first-hand, we always have a choice about how we are showing up.

XVII.

My earlier posts have described a number of transitions that took place this year. First, I was a physical self living in the conventional world. But then I awakened to the fact that I am the Void, an emptiness or pure awareness that is witnessing everything happening. Later that framework collapsed and everything became a flow of experience, a constantly changing and morphing energy. And, more recently, all of that collapsed again into a framework of relational empathy and understanding.

From my vantage point today in December, all of these frameworks appear as equally viable perspectives or viewpoints that are available to me. They are all modes through which I can fluidly operate and engage with the world.

I can see how an irrefutable case could be made for each of these frames, and have heard certain teachers or authors opine that one or another is the ultimate truth. (For example, arguing that it’s all just happening in the brain, or that it all is just happening in Awareness, etc.) I have been there myself. I can easily see how one can get fixated on a particular frame, making it a worldview that supersedes all others.

For a while, I was compelled to seek out “framelessness,” to find a perspective beyond all perspectives. But, in my experience, no such resting place can be found. Any framelessness that might be discovered would itself be just another frame.

I’ve realized that it’s best to leave the question of ultimate truth as an unsolvable mystery. I am much more interested in the phenomenology than the ontology. I am interested in closely examining what different frames feel like and look like. What can I do with them, what are they useful for, how can they help? What new perspectives, new truths, and new abilities do they reveal?

Rather than searching for the single ultimate truth that ends the journey once and for all, I am interested in exploring as many of the possible destinations as I can. Rather than framing, constant reframing.

XVIII.

For many months now, I’ve been “tuning in,” or being aware, or being present in a particular way. I didn’t realize it was “a particular way” until just recently when things started to shift

In hindsight, I’d say that I was previously much more oriented around my head. I prioritized vision and hearing, and body sensations seemed to be happen “down there.” Recently, though, I’m paying more attention to body sensations, particularly around my heart, belly, and pelvis. And I’m noticing that I’m starting to feel primarily oriented around this area, and my vision and hearing are somehow “up there.”

As I shift back and forth between the head-oriented and torso-oriented awareness, I notice a subtle change in the overall feeling tone. When prioritizing vision and hearing, awareness or presence feels alert. It seems seems crisper, sharper, and clearer. When prioritizing body sensations, though, presence feels more relaxed. Everything seems to be slightly warmer, slightly fuzzier, slightly fuller. It’s like the difference between digital music and old vinyl.

XIX.

I’ve heard people talk about the process of embodiment, whereby awakening descends from an initial location in the head, down to the heart and hara. I’m starting to agree. In my experience, there has been for a year a sense of expansion of awareness/consciousness that largely was centered in my vision and hearing. Body sensations were there as well, but these were like a somewhat uniform field of buzzy electric vibrations.

But now, I can feel a deeper level of sensations underneath that uniform field. There’s a cluster or concentration of sensation that is centered in the middle of my chest, and another is in the lower abdomen between the solar plexus and the pelvic bowl. These feel like energy centers, concentrations of body sensations that are interacting with my emotions and feelings. I can see what people have been talking about when referring to chakras or the three dantian.

The sense of presence that previously was primarily located in my head and in my visual and auditory perception is becoming more full-bodied. It’s not like there’s a solid material physical body taking up space. But, “being present” is now definitely more than just seeing and hearing vastly. It’s also sensing in a full-bodied way. When I relax into it, the body becomes like an instrument, resonating with my experience of whatever is in awareness.

XX.

How much effort to put into practice? Recently, I felt motivated to practice more intentionally. Previously I was sitting an hour and walking an hour per day, but I found myself sitting quite easily for three hours or more. Instead of just relaxing and maintaining an open awareness, I found myself motivated to do more directed inquiry. Instead of my usual “sitting on the back porch with a cup of coffee,” I found myself “doing meditation.”

In these sessions, things really started to shake up. Bright lights, sudden changes in head pressure, reality itself starting to pulse in and out of existence, intense excitement in the body, heart pounding out of my chest at certain points. I often felt like something huge was about to happen.

But, as this went on for a week or so, I also saw myself getting more goal-oriented about achieving certain experiences, clinging to what was coming up during meditation. In daily life off the cushion, I began to notice I was feeling more detached, less connected with people and my surroundings. So, I eased off quite a bit, back to just two hours a day, and letting go of any thoughts about goals or making effort. The experience during practice became more sweet, more about beauty and joy. And there was more fullness of presence and heart during the rest of the day.

In the last few weeks I’m back to a gentle groove. I do sit in the morning and walk in the afternoon, but I don’t really follow any technique. I start with an intention to be open and to welcome whatever is coming, and then I just watch and listen and feel. It’s a sense of open-mindedness but also open-heartedness. Like I’m plugged in, turned on, and fully awake for whatever is coming, even while knowing there’s nowhere to go.

XXI.

While sitting, subtle sensations sometimes arise that make me feel like a “me.” Sometimes it’s a thought, but just as often it’s a feeling in my chest or a sensation in my head or throat. It’s like my mind is grabbing onto these fleeting sensory experiences and identifying with them, constructing a feeling of being a self on the fly.

The other day I turned toward these selfing patterns and really welcomed them to emerge. Just then, a gentle tenderness for myself arose from my heart area. This feeling of self-love then turned outward and became love for all the world. Not just for other beings, but for all things. All sensations and perceptions even. Love and kindness and openness to every instant of vision, hearing, feeling, and thinking.

It’s happened a few more times since. It’s like there’s a source or fountain of love locked away somewhere inside, which comes forth when the processes of self-making are welcomed instead of repressed.

XXII.

Just shy of a year after the first awakening experience that started it all, I had a strange vision. A visual flash of a jaguar, an indigenous Amerindian woman, and a waterfall in succession. Normally I wouldn’t make too much of a stray thought like this, but they seemed both uncannily clear and eerily unworldly, as if I was dreaming while I’m awake.

Shortly after that, a sudden impulse arose to embrace the earth. It’s wintertime and the ground is frozen, but I had a strong impulse to take my clothes off and lie in the grass looking up at the sky. There’s no particular significance to that image, but I bent over and touched the ground with my hand, and it felt very important somehow.

That night there were storm clouds and big flashes of lightning. The sky was a surreal deep red. There was a thrill in being surrounded by the night, and a feeling that the clouds and trees were conscious.

I can feel something coming… something wanting to open.