Coherence
Excerpted from "Awakening the Below" by Oholomo, available now from Aeon Press!
What lies on the other side of the Abyss? What could you possibly find at the heart of a black hole of infinite darkness? Well, when you finally totally surrender and die to the thing you have feared the most, a most astonishing and profound transformation takes place. This is at once the deepest mystery of the Below and also the simplest thing imaginable. Spoiler alert: it turns out that the thing that your ego has always feared the most is exactly the elixir that, all along, your soul has been called to gather up.
It has always been so. This has been the central tension throughout your entire life: you have unconsciously been pouring an enormous amount of energy into denying, repressing, holding at bay, and otherwise ignoring this existential terror. But, when you finally accept the Abyss and allow it to fully consume you, you realize that behind this terror had always lain nothing less than the very destiny that your entire life has been preparing you for and that your entire being has been perfectly designed to fulfill.
To put it bluntly, you realize that what you have always been deeply, utterly terrified to accept is the fact that the elixir is actually you.
Of course, I don’t mean that the elixir is the ego-you, but I also don’t mean it’s just the part of you that is awareness, or your heart, or your higher self, or any other specific part of you. The elixir found in the Below is the whole of you, every level and layer of you, including all the virtues and kindness and open-heartedness, of course, but also all the traumas; all the wounds; all the unconscious aspects of your psyche; your physical body and its energies; all the decisions, successes, and disappointments in your life story; and all the hidden ancestral, karmic, natural, and material structures all way down to every last atom.
When you Transcend through the Above and into the Void, you experience ego death because you go beyond all reality and even consciousness itself ceases to exist. Ego death is totally different in the Abyss. When your ego dies in the Abyss, every other aspect of your whole being is completely present. The death of the ego allows these parts to autonomously heal themselves. It allows them to become relaxed, undefended, and liberated from all that controlling and micro-management. All of it can now be awake and alive and vibrant, for the first time free to actually be the elixirs that they all along have wanted to be.
What word can we use to capture all of that? Plotkin speaks of “soul initiation,” and I personally love that term. Yes, to me, the awakened being can indeed be called the soul, and the transit through the Descent and down into Abyss for sure is an initiation. But, because both of those words have a lot of other connotations and are used in various different ways that could be confusing or off-putting for some people, let’s just use a neutral term like “coherence” instead.
I call what lies beyond the Abyss coherence because, once you have been initiated into the totality of your awakened being, the entire journey through the Below, no matter how difficult, is seen to always have been perfectly orchestrated to arrive at this exact moment. All the pieces fit together, and everything turns out to have been both necessary and completely worth it. All of the imaginal phenomena, spirits and energies — even all the drama and terror around the Abyss — snaps into alignment. Or rather, they are all revealed to have been in perfect alignment with the soul’s plan all along.
I mentioned earlier that, during my own Descent, I had approached the Abyss many times over the course of two years, and that I had repeatedly recoiled from that precipice in fear. As the experiences came more and more frequently, I prayed to all of my guides for help and guidance. I also reached out to my good friend Jack. By this time, he and I had become quite close through sharing the details of our spiritual experiences and giving each other support and advice. When I asked him how he dealt with the Abyss of terror that lurked at the bottom of the Below, in typically Jack fashion, he responded with the advice to lean in and embrace the darkness. “Just reach down into that chasm,” he said, “pull up all the terror you find down there, and spread it to the four directions, surrounding yourself in a sphere of fear.”
It sounded to my ego-ears like exactly the worst advice imaginable, but early one morning not long after, as I did my predawn meditation, I resolved that the next time I found myself at the edge of the Abyss I would do exactly what Jack had said. After meditation, I felt sleepy, so I took a nap before continuing with the rest of my practices.
While I slept, I had a distinctly imaginal dream. For many years, I had different versions of a dream where I am pulling on a string that goes down my throat into my stomach. As I pull and pull on that thread, mucus and bugs and various other nasty things come out from inside. That morning, however, for the very first time, I came to the end of the string. With one final tug, something deep in my abdomen released and there was a sensation of deep visceral relaxation. I immediately awoke.
Feeling that this was a good omen, I continued with my morning practice of drum-assisted visualization. Practically as soon as I closed my eyes, the Abyss was there before me. Like many others also report, I experienced it as a deep black tunnel located at my perineum. The Abyss felt like a chasm of fear underneath me, a roiling ocean of terror upon which no stable ground could possibly be found. Specifically, it was fear of madness and annihilation — and, deeper at the core, fear of loss of control.
So many times in the past, I had arrived at this precipice and had recoiled, but this time I felt I was ready. With Jack’s advice still fresh in my mind, I decided I would reach down into the black hole and unleash the darkness. In my visionary mind’s eye, I placed my hands down into the depths. My physical heart was pounding and every cell in my body was telling me to run away. But, I simply accepted and surrendered to whatever was about to happen.
As my whole being screamed in terror, I grabbed a handful of the darkness and drew my hands up to “place it in the four directions” around me, as Jack had advised. But, as I opened my hands, I made the most astounding discovery of my life. I found I was holding a golden, liquid light with the quality of the most profound and divine love imaginable.
I must have done something wrong! I reached down again into the Abyss, looking for the darkness, trying to grab ahold of the terror that had been so menacing, but each time I pulled up my hands, there was nothing in them but radiant love, all the way down. I realized in that moment that the terror the ego had felt about going mad and being swallowed up by the Abyss was always just love in disguise. I realized that all the machinations of the ego had been due to the love my being had for itself, for my family, for life, and for the world. I realized that all of it — every last it of suffering and pain I had ever experienced — was always just another face of love. There never had been a problem in the first place! I burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all, as a wave of bliss shot through my body and lit up my scalp.
And just in that instant, I saw the form of the goddess Bachué. Like in every other vision I had ever had of her, she was wearing a mask of tranquil equanimity (see Fig. 3). But this time, she took it off and revealed her true face underneath, which I recognized as none other than my own brilliant soul.
Seeing that vision, everything snapped together at once. Up until that moment, I had been relating to all of the aspects of the Below that I have been describing here in this chapter as separate entities, spirits, deities, and forces. But, now, like a series of Russian dolls nested one within the next, they all clicked together. I knew in that moment that all of the guardians and protectors, the power animals, the angel of sexual energy, the body deva, and all of the higher imaginal beings and goddesses with whom I had been communicating throughout my sojourn in the Below — all, without exception — were part of one single, multifaceted being. It was also clear that all of the ancestors, past lives, natural forces, and structural elements, as well as my own personal biography, were all parts of this being as well.
All of the aspects of this multidimensional being cohered into Bachué’s body, with each piece of the overall puzzle assuming a different location within her form. This whole assemblage then merged with my body, and the brilliant golden light of my soul, Bachue’s true face, flooded the whole system. It exploded out the top of my head, creating a blazing mandorla of radiance and bliss around me.
Now that it’s been a few years since this coherence event, it’s not that the process of awakening was complete, leaving me fully enlightened (although it certainly did feel like it for a little while!). Make no mistake about it: my ego has come back on line a million times since that day. But that is perfectly okay, because now I know that, despite all its fumbling and bumbling, it too is made of love. Astonishingly, on the other side of the Abyss, it turns out that even the ego can be welcomed back as a coherent part of the awakened whole.
The way I am describing my experience here suggests a single, magnificent coherence event that reveals the alignment behind everything all at once, accompanied by a lot of imaginal fireworks and the peals of angel’s trumpets. As you’ve no doubt realized by now, I am prone to these kinds of dramatic mystical experiences, and this event was no exception. But, that’s just one way of experiencing it. For other people, coherence on the other side of the Abyss may be more of a gradual process, a whole chain of happenings taking place over many years or even decades, where different aspects are gradually brought into coherence. To illustrate, here’s a story from Jack, comparing his ongoing process of coherence to my sudden definitive moment:
I think we’ve gone through a similar process at a different speed. For you it was instant, and for me it’s been over several years. I have felt greater and greater coherence with all the different levels of life, like I am unifying with them. There are lots of stories not just one.
The overall theme is a deep trust in life, and a realization that I am life, and a letting go into all of that. It’s like a surrender. I don’t have to do anything to become more free, because the ego doesn’t have to control anything. So, I just allow myself as life to take my form, and I use my form as it needs to be used. You could say that this is my sole mission, but I don’t have to do anything to achieve it.
I used to be dragged kicking and screaming into things, but now my trust in life is so much higher. I’ll know when I’m supposed to do something, or where I’m supposed to go, and I just do it. There’s a lot less inner resistance and I don’t feel like I need to know as much as I used to. So I can trust in the flow of life.
Your own final coherence might come as a spectacular divine revelation or as a quiet whisper of relief after a long series of insights. Either way, there will come a moment when the perfection of the whole finally falls into place. When that happens, there will be no doubt in your mind that the work of Descent has been completed. It’s like a veil suddenly lifts, or like dawn suddenly breaks. For perhaps the first time in a long time, you suddenly feel human again. You realize that your work of being alchemized in the Below is finished. It is time to begin the Return.