In some forms of spirituality, the mind is demonized and blamed for all of our suffering. But, as I’ve stated throughout this book, the process of Descent into the Below is the process of liberating every part of you to fully be itself. The mind is no different than any other autonomous component of your sacred wholeness. Thinking is a natural capacity of the brain, and its activities are pretty much beyond our control. As such, there is no need to silence thoughts, any more than there is a need to silence sounds or visions or other sensory phenomena.

It might be useful to tamp down the mind and the senses for a time, while on retreat for example, in order to achieve certain psychedelic effects or rarified states of consciousness. But, sooner or later, thinking returns, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Where there is a problem, however, is in believing that thinking is the whole picture. Rational thinking offers one perspective on things, but we should never imagine that is the final word. This is particularly important when engaging with the Below.

The mind is constantly taking in the raw data of our experience, and weaving it together into webs of connotations, implications, memories, and plans for the future. Because it is constantly doing this, it is unavoidable that your mind will have a lot to say about the entities, energies, and events you encounter in the Below. The mind will want to know what’s going on and why, how to categorize and label it, how what’s happening now connects with the past and what it means for the future, and so on and so forth. The mind might try to explain away imaginal phenomena, try to attenuate your Descent, or even shut down the process entirely. Or, if it is really taken aback by an experience it can’t figure out, the mind can kick up a lot of fear, rumination, doubt, and other thought-loops that can be experienced as negative or troubling. At the far end of this spectrum, panic, paranoia, and existential terror are all products of a mind that can’t find its familiar footing.

In order to survive the Descent, part of what we need to learn to do is to live in the ambiguous liminal space of not knowing. That is not to say, however, that the mind has no role to play in engaging with the Below. The mind is actually a very important tool when used properly: not to explain, but to create meaningfulness.

What’s the difference? Explanation is reductive and linear while meaning-making is associative and opens up possibilities. As an example of how each kind of thinking changes your experience, take the following imaginal event that happened to me:

For several weeks I had been seeing in visions an image of myself, riding on the back of my jaguar guide, carrying a little red bag on the end of a stick. In each hand I wielded a sword made of quartz crystals. The two glowed brightly and lit my way through the darkness of the underworld.

One day, I was looking through some old possessions of mine, and I came across a little red “mojo bag” full of magical implements that my late grandmother had given me when I was a teenager. Inside, there was a small sword-shaped quartz crystal. A few weeks later, I was cleaning out the incense pot I was using for altar offerings, taking out the rocks and rinsing them with water. There, among the rocks, I found a second, identical quartz sword. I have no idea where it came from or how it got there.

Those are the facts. Now, let’s see how two different kinds of thinking can weave radically different interpretations out of them. First, let’s use linear thinking to explain these events. One line of linear reasoning is that I must have subconsciously remembered the quartz crystals being in those locations, and then those memories must have influenced my vision. Another linear explanation might be that my grandmother must have sent me the crystals to use in my practice. This kind of thinking is reductionistic: its purpose is to decide on an answer to the question of why something happened. It wants to choose which explanation is the right one. That is to say, its purpose is to limit the possibilities of the thing being explained, to eliminate the mystery and to come to a firm conclusion about “what’s really going on.”

In contrast, let’s see how associative thinking would unpack the same events. Here, for example, I might reflect upon the connection between my vision and the crystals I found and allow my thoughts to wander a bit. There might be a lot of thoughts running through my mind about this, but I don’t have to give too much credence to any one of them. Amidst that mental noise, there may be some gems that I feel like cogitating on for a bit. For example, I may realize that red bag my grandmother gave me decades ago, in addition to the crystal, also contained a number of other magical implements related to guidance and protection. It included, for example, a miniature compass and pocket knife, as well as a tiny Buddha image. Perhaps, I think, the quartz crystal in my vision could be associated with these other objects and their meanings, thus not only with lighting my way, but also giving me guidance, strength, and protection?

Another thought perhaps arises that the grandmother who gave me this crystal “sword” was herself a practitioner of Chinese martial arts — and sometimes used a sword in her own daily practice. Maybe there’s something important here about continuity between the generations in our practice of Asian spiritual traditions. Come to think of it, she died within a few months of me rediscovering the mojo bag. Could the quartz have represented a “passing of the baton” from her to me? An invitation for her to guide and mentor me in my spiritual questing from the afterlife? Speaking of batons, I’ve never used a sword, staff, or similar tool in my own movement practice. What would that be like?

Now, what about the other crystal, the one from the incense pot? I’ve burned incense in offerings for ancestral spirits many times, so that’s reinforcing the ancestral connection. But, I’ve also used it for other purposes, such as honoring Quan Yin and the other goddesses I pray to. Speaking of Quan Yin, I remember that my wife has a protective quartz amulet of Quan Yin that was given to her while we were traveling in Asia. Is there a special connection between Quan Yin and quartz crystals?

I hop online to research this question, and start delving deeper into the associations of quartz crystals in other traditions around the world. Again, I’m not glomming onto any particular piece of information, but just gathering more associations. I read that quartzes are widely used by spiritual practitioners for their empowering and cleansing properties. I discover that they are said to be the strongest crystals in certain shamanic traditions. I read more about their traditional and modern uses in order to further inform myself about the powers my imaginal sword might possess.

Notice that the point here isn’t to figure out “what’s really going on” or even to dwell on whether or not these associated ideas I am collecting are true. The goal is to generate more and more potentials, more and more layers of connotations, which in turn can pack the event with richer and richer meaningfulness. Far from landing on a single explanation, as my linear mind wanted to me to, through this process of association, the one event now comes to be entangled in a web of associations having to do with my childhood, ancestors, goddesses, spiritual practices, and a global web of symbols of protection, illumination, enlightenment, and connection.

Best of all, because the mind is a meaning-making machine running essentially automatically, all this associative thinking happened with minimal effort. All I had to do was steer my mind away from jumping to linear explanatory conclusions, and keep it on the associative track. (For some people, journaling might help with maintaining this mindset.)

One kind of conclusion that the linear mind seems to especially like to jump to is to answer definitively the question of whether or not these mysterious imaginal phenomena are real. But, answering these questions in any definitive way is a linear explanation that shuts down the possibilities inherent in the experience. If you decide that the Below is actually a product of your own psychology, then that will limit your experience in certain ways; if you decide it’s actually coming from some external source (particular deities, astral realms, aliens, or what have you), then that will limit your experience in other ways. Instead of letting your mind jump to explanatory conclusions, can you just sit in the unknown, and let the fullness of the mystery unfold? Set your mind to deepening the mystery by unpacking it in more and more meaningfulness, but don’t let it settle on any one detail as the ultimate answer. You’ll find that the meaningfulness evolves through a process of ongoing unfolding, exploration, and discovery.

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Awakening the Below

Meaningfulness