The Abyss
Excerpted from "Awakening the Below" by Oholomo, available now from Aeon Press!
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!