Animals, Nature, and the Elements
Excerpted from "Awakening the Below" by Oholomo, available now from Aeon Press!
Peeling back yet another layer of the Below, we discover that underneath our cultural and genetic heritage there are even deeper layers of unconscious structure, the biological and the elemental, that also want to awaken. Here, all of the same principles we have been discussing will come back into play again, just at a deeper level.
There are many spiritual teachings from the Above that speak of the interconnectedness of nature; the evolutionary process of Gaia; the way that all of life is continually developing toward greater self-awareness, wisdom, and enlightenment. Once again, the insights coming from the Below are not contradictory to those from Above, but complementary as they are oriented in the opposite direction. While the Above approach is to see how individual organisms are ultimately all part of the greater processes and divinity of Gaia, the Below approach finds nature to be filled with individual, autonomous forces and entities with will and agency of their own that need to be expressed.
These forces and entities can be associated with animals, plants, cellular, or subcellular life. Or, it can be the whole complex living system of all biological life and organic materials across the planet. Or, the planet itself. Or, the solar system, galaxy, or entire living cosmos. Or, they can be the elemental particles that make up the cosmos — traditionally thought of as the elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Space, but in modern times just as commonly conceived of in terms of the periodic table we learned in chemistry class. Any or all of these might come alive in an Awakening from Below, intervening and communicating with us through imaginal events, imagery, symbols, or in synchronicities, or directly in words.
To give an example of the apparition of autonomous entities of this type, here’s my friend Lisa talking about being visited by animal spirits of various types. She has discovered that they always have lessons or wisdom to share, if only she is able to engage with them and let them do their work:
I would sometimes be visited by giant snakes that would take over my body and slither through my subtle energy field, helping to strengthen and heal any contracted energy points in my system. They would protect me and unravel blocks of trapped fear. Large wild cats would take over and dance through me, teaching me to strengthen myself and feel strong in my body when I have to stand up to others or stand in my truth.
I have learned a lot from these visitors over the years. They would always leave after I fully allowed them to come in and take over my body, when the lessons they came to show me were fully understood. When I would fully allow the process to take place, it always felt like the right thing to be doing in that moment. It felt like a complete alignment, like this is fully what was meant to be happening. I could feel my nervous system strengthen and afterwards I would feel more whole in myself and in my body. They offered me this transformational gift with each and every visit.
One memorable example was when, at the start of this whole process, I found a teacher to work with, but after a short period of time of being with her, I started to get strong hints of intuition that working with her was not very helpful. I could sense deep down that this hurt and traumatized body needed a softer and more loving approach than she had, but didn’t quite know how to find that just yet.
During this time, when I was alone by myself wondering what to do, a snarling protective dog came to visit me. It took over my body, barking and growling through me. It was pointing its energy at her image in my mind, as if to keep her energy away. It was protecting me. When I allowed this process to happen and I received the wisdom of this animal, I knew I had to step away from this teacher, to find someone else to work with. The spirit dog pointed me towards my own inner knowing and helped me to believe in my feelings and my intuition. Once I fully heard the message the dog was sharing with me, it disappeared.
Encounters with nature often blur the lines between the imaginal and the material world. Listen to my friend Misha recount how her relationship with spiders developed on both sides of this divide:
During the past six years of my awakening process, spiders have been repeated visitors, and my relationship with them continues to deepen. I have come to love Spider. I delight when spiders come to visit with me, and I feel especially charmed when they’re exhibiting atypical spider behavior. For years it was the domestic house spider. There was the one who kept visiting at my table when I was in a months-long experience of intense love and divinity, going so far as to crawl on multiple occasions onto the journal I was using. There was the one who gave its life, sacrificing itself willingly like Jesus on the cross, at the center of a rug in the threshold of a doorway I used frequently, “so that I may live.” That was an experience of redemptive love. This past fall, a jumping spider showed up for several weeks. How delightful!
Imaginally, a beautiful black spider with a large furry abdomen and equally long legs recently showed up. I undertook a sequence of five related inner journeys, and she showed up repeatedly then. The first journey involved a huge amount of purging on many levels, which extended for about 24 hours. At one point, while I was on the toilet with another bout of crying and otherwise releasing, She came up very close to my face.
I leaned backward onto the physical support of the seat cover, toilet tank, and the wall behind, letting myself immerse into the whatever it was that needed to be known and felt before it could move on through. As my body was twitching and multiple orifices were releasing their bodily fluids, and as my emotional heart was bleeding and I was re-experiencing the chaotic disorganization of a shattered psyche, Spider suddenly tightly grasped my entire head in her many legs. Her body was pressed up against my face. I was fully embraced in her Love.
This was such a profoundly moving experience — to be held so firmly and tenderly during this difficult and exhausting experience — that just recalling this kind, loving hug now, I cannot help but be moved to tears.
Both Lisa and Misha talk about being visited by animal spirits, but another kind of realization is to experience your own conditioned existence as an animal. Perhaps you experience that your body deva or bodily intelligence has attributes that are animal like, or perhaps you feel various animalistic urges and energies surging within your fleshly body. Perhaps you feel the mammalian urges to seek warmth, to bond, and to feel a sense of belonging in a community. Or the urges common to animals of all types to feed, procreate, and survive. Coming to know some of your behavioral or emotional patterns as expressions of these natural animalistic energies helps you to allow them to autonomously exist and naturally express themselves within your being without shame, judgment, or resistance.
Another thing we can realize and experience is how our bodies are also homes for entire communities of autonomous beings that are not part of us. Scientists estimate that there are about 39 trillion bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microbial cells that live on us and in us, outnumbering the 30 trillion cells that make up our own bodies. This leads us to ask how much of “us” is really “us” in the end? We can, for example, come to understand how our microbiome is expressing itself through food cravings and digestive processes, our general levels of immunity and vitality, or our mood. Each one of those alien cells has its own genetic inheritance and its own agendas beyond the control of the ego.
Descending even further into the microscopic, we can also experience how we are conditioned at the molecular level. How do hormones like testosterone and estrogen dictate what we think, what we feel, and how we behave? How do neurotransmitters, cortisol levels, and other aspects of the body’s biochemistry drive and shape every moment of our lives. Beyond the molecular is the layer of elemental conditioning, where we can find the powers and energies of the natural elements at work within our bodies and minds. Each of these can potentially can be experienced as its own consciousness or entity exerting autonomous forces on us.
Tapping into these aspects of nature can be powerfully transformational. Perhaps I’ll illustrate by relating a story from my own experience about the time I visited the Niagara Falls. If you have never been there, this is truly a wonder of the natural world. This massive waterfall sees 3000 tons of water, or nearly 700,000 gallons, passing every second. I did not expect that standing on the edge of the falls would be such a visceral and overwhelming experience. The deafening roar of the water seemed to shake the ground, my body, and my entire being.
At that point, I was well into my Descent and had a lot of experience with entities and energies, so I responded to this power by asking the falls to come into a dialogue with me (see the next chapter for this kind of technique). I found that relating to water in this way was different than speaking to entities such as animal spirits and ancestors, who have a more individual presence. It was like I was meeting the full force of the elemental nature of water, an impersonal but enormously powerful energy. It was not a dialogue of words, but rather of sensations.
As I opened to feeling the immense power of the sheer volume of water, letting it in and surrendering to its sensations, it felt like a downward torrent of water flooded through my torso as all of the energy in my body flushed downwards. It was like there was a drain in my perineum, where the rushing water fell down into a bottomless chasm. It was an intense visceral experience, but it also felt both purifying and healing. It felt like the falls were teaching me something about the way my energy system worked.
In time, I learned that this teaching from the Niagara Falls was a tremendous gift. It helped me to learn to tune into a downward flush of energy in my abdomen whenever I feel ungrounded or scattered. It’s now become something as automatic as muscle memory. I can just exhale once, and the whole energy in my torso drops down through that drain in the bottom, leaving greater relaxation and balance.
My experience encountering the power of the elements concentrated at a particular natural site like the Niagara Falls is not unique. If you are interested in reading more stories specifically involving engaging with the wild and learning how to cultivate a relationship with its imaginal power, I can heartily recommend Bill Plotkin’s book Soul Initiation, which largely focuses on these types of energies and entities.
The bottom line is that, in the Below, rather than Transcending nature, we come to experience ourselves as intricately enmeshed in a web of relationships with all sorts of natural energies and entities. We also begin to experience our own bodies as inseparable parts of nature. We are in relationship with all of the other aspects of nature that make up the planet we live on, and are intricately tied to all of its environments and ecosystems.
These deeper animalistic and natural layers of conditioning lie underneath the mental, emotional, biographical, and even ancestral levels. We may have learned a number of scientific facts about these deeper biological and material structures, and we may be used to thinking about all the ways that they are interconnected parts of Gaia. But in the Below, we can also experience encounters with these as autonomous forces and entities. While Above-based traditions emphasize Transcendence of the natural world and the evolution of Gaia in the direction of increasing spiritual virtue, here in the Below we invite the whole of the material and animal world to come forward as it is. We welcome it all — sublime grace and bloody violence alike — every grain of sand and every molecule of water — to become alive, to manifest in our lives, and to speak their authentic truths. By being welcomed, these aspects are all liberated to join in the process of our awakening.
Here’s a quote beautifully capturing this sentiment from Jack’s first interview on the Nonduality Podcast by Nic Higham (as usual, slightly edited):
It’s like a descent from kind of this heady witness consciousness, down into the heart, and into this really open loving consciousness that united me with humanity. I felt this descent almost like the roots of a tree going down. And it feels like it’s just gone down into the heart of the earth — and this is where it’s really difficult for me to talk about this stuff without crying, because it gets so intimate and personal — but it’s descended into Mother Earth.
I can feel her spiritually, and it’s a difficult thing to describe, but it’s almost as if I can feel a void open beneath me, like a spiritual void of awareness, that just goes down into her and we have a relationship like that. We’re connected through our spirit, and it’s so intimate and supportive and wonderful. I know I’m her child. This isn’t an idea that I’m trying to think up; I know that as a spiritual experience, something that I feel..
And that sense of unity consciousness where I look at another being and it’s like I’m looking in the mirror — I get that when I look at trees and when I look at mountains and the water. I know that I’m looking at the greater part of myself when I look at those things. And to me, they aren’t “things.” To say that is kind of blasphemous, because those are beings, and I love them. And I have a very intimate connection with them and they teach me. I feel like I am just a part of them, and I am just trying to catch up and learn what they’ve known for a long time. And they are teaching me.