Energies and Spirits
Excerpted from "Awakening the Below" by Oholomo, available now from Aeon Press!
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.