Chapter 2

What is the Below?

In this chapter:

• As Above, So Below

• An Example of Awakening from Below

• Completing the Circuits

• Useful Resources

In this book I am using “Above” and “Below” as metaphors referring to whole clusters of experiences, ideas, practices, symbols, and realizations that can arise in the course of an awakening process. These metaphors should not be taken as literal or precise descriptions. If there’s one thing that every single tradition has agreed upon, it’s that words cannot possibly be adequate to capture the ineffably mystical nature of spiritual experiences. Let’s agree to use these metaphorical phrases as pointers to a range of experiences, without confusing the finger with the moon.

My choice of using the specific metaphors Above and Below is deliberate. When I first began speaking about this topic, I initially was drawn to using the words Spirit and Soul. However, I soon found out that distinction had already been popularized among depth psychologists and in certain spiritual communities by the prominent Jungian theorist John Hillman. I therefore wanted to use terminology that had fewer preconceived notions packaged into them, and felt that Above and Below would be more neutral. I am aware that there is a similar usage of the terms “Awakening from Above” and “Awakening from Below” in some Jewish traditions, but this is not where I got the terms from and these are not common terms in mainstream Western spirituality, so I don’t mean to invoke any of those connotations.

Even before I found out about Hillman, it was already perfectly obvious to me that I was not the first to distinguish between these two types or orientations of spirituality. Friedrich Nietzsche influentially distinguished between the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses he identified in Ancient Greek culture, based on differences between the mythologies and rituals associated with these two deities. In his model, the god Apollo was associated with the sun, rationality, heroism, and order, while Dionysius was associated with intoxication, ecstasy, emotion, and chaos. At first glance, these are not entirely dissimilar from what I am going for with Above and Below.

More recently, an analogous split has been identified in ancient India by the scholar of religion David Gordon White, who in books such as Kiss of the Yogini distinguishes between the Dharma-based current in Indian religion versus the various Tantric goddess traditions. The former (characterized mainly by male deities) tended to value order, morality, wisdom, and meditative practices focused on stillness, while the latter (centering the feminine) tended to involve ecstatic trances, intoxication, ritual sex, and sensual pleasure. Again, at first glance, a lot of that fits with my model of Above and Below.

Other models that overlap substantially with what I have written here include Mircea Eliade’s and Michael Harner’s notions of shamanism, which strongly distinguish between the overworld and the underworld, as well as Carl G. Jung’s notion of the ego’s descent into the wilds of the shadows of the psyche. While I learned about all of these models through reading scholarly books on them, this book you are holding in your hands is emphatically not an academic one. It is a personal one. So, when I use the terms Above and Below here in these pages, I am not intending to make historical or theoretical distinctions. What concerns us here is not the accuracy of these categories for describing particular cultural, religious, or spiritual traditions, but rather their emotional and poetic valence in describing the qualities of our own individual spiritual experiences. I am trying to paint an intuitive, subjective, and intimate picture, not a literal one.

As Above, So Below

I am going to spend a bit of time in this chapter trying to define more precisely what I am talking about when I say “the Below.” Let me start with Fig. 1, where I offer a map of the simplest version of the model I am proposing.

FIG. 1. The Three Realms and Two Trajectories.

In the center of this image lies the Middle, the realm where we humans ordinarily spend the majority of our lives. In this domain, I experience myself as an ego (what many people call the separate self or the narrative self) with a material body. It is from this perspective that non-awakened people typically experience pretty much all of their everyday activities, relationships, and identities related to work, family, hobbies, and so forth.

The quest for fulfillment in the Middle realm involves developing one’s personality, intellectual interests, creative outlets, and social connections. We use these skills to become adept at whatever challenges, missions, or tasks our society and culture set out for us. In the modern West, some milestone achievements of the Middle include becoming established in a career, achieving financial independence, finding a mate, raising a family, and finding a meaningful way to contribute to solving some of our most pressing social problems. Personal healing and growth in the Middle is often facilitated by interactions with therapists, coaches, teachers, parents, and other mentors, who help us to work on our physical, psychological, and social wellbeing. We don’t usually refer to these pursuits as spiritual, but I would argue that, ultimately, integrating spiritual realizations back into our Middle lives is precisely the point of spirituality. More on that later.

In any case, not all people are moved in this lifetime to explore the territory beyond the Middle. For that reason, mainstream spiritual and religious opportunities tend to stay within its boundaries. Religious institutions operating in this domain teach morality and kindness, and promise a comfortable afterlife. Spiritual teachers and communities operating at this level include mainstream yoga and mindfulness classes focused on wellbeing, and teachings about praying or manifesting your way into wealth and happiness. Shamanism and magick that ultimately are serving egoic, psychological, or material ends are also examples of Middle-based practices, although they might claim to be otherwise. These forms of spirituality frequently offer beneficial practices, but the benefits they hold out are limited to the ordinary, everyday human world.

When one’s quest for meaningful answers begins to look beyond the bounds of the ordinary and everyday, there are essentially two paths to choose from. Actually, people rarely make a conscious choice between them; more likely they are intuitively drawn in one direction or the other — or for some people, toward both simultaneously.

Those individuals drawn toward the Above are enticed by the promise of transcending the human condition, elevating oneself above suffering and “worldly” concerns and discovering the “ultimate truth” about the universe. Escaping the bondage of the ego and the physical form through a journey into the Above is what I call Transcendence. Traditions that emphasize this trajectory include Theravada Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Christian mysticism, all traditions that have had a huge impact on Western spirituality.

What does the final goal of liberation look like in Above-based traditions? From Theravada we get the ideal of the serene monk, living in perpetual meditative bliss. Advaita has a similar idealized view of the Hindu sage (Ramana Maharshi comes to mind). Christianity likewise has its monks and nuns who ideally live lives of chastity and faith while preaching love and virtue (think of St. Francis of Assisi, for example). Traditions that prioritize this Transcendent trajectory consider the ultimate goal of spiritual practice to be to see through and rise above the vicissitudes of samsara (the everyday life of the Middle) once and for all, and then to reside permanently in the tranquility and bliss of Transcendence.

As they begin to open up to the Above through various spiritual practices, practitioners may experience a range of phenomena that pertains to this realm. In the most general terms, the first-person experience of “awakening the Above” involves four main aspects. First, and most characteristically, there is a shift in identity that transcends the personal, separate ego-self of the Middle. In Advaita and other Hindu-influenced systems, this is normally talked about as a shift in identification from the ego-self to the True Self, Pure Consciousness, or Brahman. In Christian mystical systems, the shift is from identification with the ego-self to identification as God, Christ, Child of God, Bride of Christ, or other terms. Buddhist systems speak of the dropping away of identification altogether, which they normally refer to as Non-self or Emptiness. In all cases, the ego-self is seen as less and less relevant as the trajectory of Transcendence continues, ultimately disappearing altogether from the practitioner’s experience.

A second, equally important, aspect of the Above is the dissolution of perception. Generally, this involves the breaking down of the mental constructs that interpret the world as being composed of discrete physical objects, as well as seeing into the constructed nature of sensory perception. Again, there’s a difference between how traditions express this. Hindu systems will tend to speak of this as the realization that all phenomena are “made out of consciousness” or are “inseparable from Brahman” or “part of the Self.” Christianity will refer to this as the realization that all phenomena are “part of God” or “have a Divine nature.” Buddhists, as always preferring the language of negation, tend to emphasize the Emptiness, non-arising, non-existence, or mirage-like nature of all phenomena.

Both of these aspects of the Above, the shift in identity and the dissolution of perception, are referred to in contemporary Western spiritual circles as non-duality. Some systems of Above-based spirituality, such as the teachings normally referred to as “radical nonduality,” hold these realizations to be the only goal of spirituality. However, most traditional forms of Above-based spirituality teach one to discover and to interweave these strands of nonduality with other aspects or dimensions of the Above. One of the most common is a sense of sacredness — either experienced as gods, goddesses, or angelic beings, or else in shapeless, nebulous, or formless manifestations such as radiant light, bliss, joy, peace, and so forth. It is not unusual as part of awakening the Above to experience oneself fully merging with this sacredness or becoming divine. Experiences like this bring healing, wisdom, blessings, and other positive sensations. Eventually, it can settle down into a pervasive but gentle sweetness or tenderness that is a common background feature of all reality.

Another aspect that is often present in Above-based teachings is the opening of the heart. An open heart overflows with kindness and good will. Again, it is spoken about differently by different traditions, but think of the Buddhist practice of loving kindness meditation, the activities of Ama the Hindu hugging saint, or the symbol of Virgin Mary or the sacred heart of Jesus. The shared idea here is a universal love that is extended globally regardless of the specific details or circumstances. Another feature of an open heart is that it can be easily heartbroken, filled with empathy, or even feel like it is taking on the suffering of the world. These two varieties of love — kindness and sensitivity — are the two sides of the same open-hearted coin.

While these four aspects are core experiential features of the Above, there are many other experiences that are reported and prized by different traditions. These include things like communication with disembodied teachers, psychic phenomena of various kinds, energetic flows, bodily bliss, auras, lights, colors, synchronicities, psychokinesis, and much more. There are a lot of books out there on all of this, so I’m not going to go into any more detail about any of that here. Let’s just suffice it to say that all of this Above stuff differs markedly from the Below.

I am going to discuss the experiences of the Below in much more detail in coming chapters. For now, let’s simply give a list of terms that can convey a general sense of the territory: bodily intelligence, sexual energy, emotions, trauma, the earth, the elements, ancestors, spirits, ghosts, demons, the imaginal, the soul, the dark feminine. Rather than Transcending up and beyond our individual humanity, in the Below we Descend, sinking down into and inhabiting the deepest layers of our embodiment and our psyche. Parallels to this Descent are perhaps suggested in Greek mythology in the form of the katabasis, or the descent into the Underworld. A clear Below-oriented model is found in Jungian-influenced systems of Depth Psychology focused on the exploration of the darkness and liminality of the unconscious. Shamanism gives us another example, where the classic Descent trajectory involves a “Shamanic Crisis”: an illness or existential event that brings the journeyer to the brink of death, which occasions an encounter with the deepest dimension of the soul.

In my experience, the majority of spiritual seekers who talk about “awakening” in the contemporary West are exclusively thinking about the Above, and may be completely unaware of the Below, or even hold negative views about it. These biases are not their fault. The narrative about the Buddha defeating Mara, discussed in the preface, is an influential myth that strongly shapes people’s ideas of what “proper” spirituality looks like. Christianity’s millennia-long tradition of characterizing the Below as Satanic and sinful also plants seeds of fear, distrust, and disdain in Western spiritual seekers (even those who eschew Christianity). Buddhism, Christianity, and Advaita all denigrate sexuality and sensual pleasure, whether as a form of greed and self-gratification or as an immoral act that is offensive to God. This can often set up a guilt and shame dynamic between Above-oriented spiritual seekers and certain experiences in the Below.

As a consequence of prejudices such as these, many Western people who are experiencing an awakening process know nothing about the Below or even actively demonize it. However, in talking with people over the past years, I have noticed that a certain percentage of these people may nonetheless find themselves spontaneously thrust into the Below in the course of an awakening process. When this happens, it is common for spiritual journeyers to be thoroughly confused about why their awakenings don’t seem to match those of their colleagues or fit into the maps they have been given. They may realize that they’re on a different track than the norm, but have taken to understanding the Above as the “right” kind of awakening and the Below as a deviant or harmful cul-de-sac. Many people I have spoken to have come to believe that there’s something wrong with them personally; that they are deficient or broken in some way that is hindering or preventing their spiritual growth. I also know people who have had more extreme reactions to the Below, such as believing that they have gone mad, checking themselves into mental hospitals, and going on psychiatric medication to stop what they assume must be symptoms of psychosis or other mental illnesses.

The purpose of this book is to help people recognize the signs of the Below when they appear, to navigate this territory more confidently, and to fully integrate these experiences into their spiritual development in a healthy and meaningful way. Helping journeyers to better understand and benefit from the Below begins by doing away with the prejudices and hierarchies we have inherited from various traditional sources. While the founders and followers of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions may have expressed strong opinions about which kinds of experiences are better than others, we can and should do our own investigations and come to our own conclusions. In this book, I will share my own ideas based on my own personal explorations. My basic premise is that the Above and Below each hold out unique opportunities for growth, fulfillment, wisdom, and liberation. Those of us who find ourselves in the Below — whether by choice or by chance — can feel confident in the knowledge that it is a great blessing.

The idea that there are blessings in the Below may seem counterintuitive to you if you have been used to dismissing or denigrating this realm, or if you are experiencing a lot of fear about it. But I am far from the first person to have made this discovery. Many years ago, the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell popularized the phrase “Return with Elixir,” which I like quite a bit. He was referring to the final stage in what he called the “Hero’s Journey,” the narrative arc of many a mythological narrative, literary work, and even Hollywood movie. This is the point in the journey where the protagonist, having faced the darkness and threat of annihilation and having come out the other side, now returns back to the everyday world with a valuable boon (the elixir) for their community. For an example of this pattern, think of the shaman who travelled through the ghost world and is now back in the village serving as a healer and counselor to her people. Or the myth of Jesus being crucified, only to then rise from the dead to guide his followers to salvation.

In the last decade or so, I have noticed that Western spirituality is increasingly placing importance on a particular Above-based variation of Return with Elixir, which these days is commonly referred to as Embodiment. If Transcendence is “waking up” (notice the Above-oriented language), then Embodiment is often called “waking down,” bringing one’s awakening down into the physical body and into the material world. Instead of the recluse who leaves society in order to live in a state of permanent bliss, the ideal here is the bodhisattva, an awakened being who lives in the world compassionately integrating their enlightenment back into everyday life. In Zen Buddhism this is commonly referred to as “returning to the marketplace with gift-bestowing hands,” after a famous series of paintings and poems called the Ten Oxherding Pictures. Tantric Buddhism (aka Vajrayana), Kashmiri Shaivism, and Daoist traditions each teach a whole suite of physical, breath, energy, visualization, deity, and meditative practices designed to integrate awakening into the body. Christianity, of course, has its own take on Embodiment, whereby God himself descends in the human form of Jesus in order to spread his love in the world of suffering and sin. What these traditions all share is the notion that residing eternally in the Above is not enough; one has to bring the elixir back down to the Middle.

The traditional myth of the Buddha’s enlightenment I told in the preface also has a Return with Elixir. In the original telling, the Buddha defeats Mara by exercising a detached posture of equanimity, an appreciation of impermanence, and resolve in the face of suffering. This allows him to bring back the elixirs of Dharma — i.e., teachings on how to transcend the human condition — from the Above. However, in my modified retelling, the Buddha brings back altogether different elixirs from the Below. What are those gifts and how do we access them? That’s what this book is about.

An Example of Awakening from Below

When I say “awakening theBelow,” I am not just referring to brief glimpses of the Below, but an awakening process that involves extended journeys into the Below or that, at least for a time, feels like the center of gravity is located in the Below. Here, I am going to give you just a taste of what awakening the Below can look like by briefly outlining my own story. (Keep in mind that this is just a preliminary example and that details can vary significantly.)

My spiritual explorations began when I was in elementary school. By the time I graduated from college, I had learned two forms of East Asian martial arts, served for several years as assistant to a sweat lodge ceremonialist, taken courses on shamanism and Asian religion, danced publicly with my power animals, experimented with ceremonial earth magick, and taken psychedelics a few times. I had also read classical Buddhist, Hindu, and Daoist scriptures, and had become curious about yoga and meditation. I did not know enough at that time to differentiate between Above and Below, but in retrospect I clearly felt drawn in both directions.

After graduation, I lived in Asia for several years, continuing to vacillate between Above and Below. I spent many months at Buddhist meditation centers, monastic retreats, and long-term retreats at yoga ashrams. I became an energy healing practitioner. And I learned how to ritually honor nature spirits and other unseen beings from various kinds of “spirit doctors.” During this time, I began to viscerally feel the difference between Above and Below, and I felt acutely torn between these two seemingly incompatible directions of growth and development.

It was during this time, when I was staying at a Buddhist monastery, that I had my first major spiritual breakthrough, a heart-opening experience that blew me open with universal compassion. After that heart opening, things were relatively stable for nearly 20 years while I established myself in my career and raised two children. However, in my mid-40s, I had another dramatic spiritual opening, this time a classic nondual awakening experience. This experience came on as I was listening to a 10- or 15-minute description of a technique called Headless Way. I find it highly ironic that I had listened to countless in-depth descriptions of Buddhist and Hindu contemplative techniques for decades without any dramatic results, but a quirky British guy gushing about how he can’t find his head somehow broke through!

Anyway, you can read more about the details of my whole awakening process under the “About the Author” section of this website. Here, I just want to give the basic outline. As it happened, this initial glimpse of “headlessness” set off a series of dramatic mystical experiences over the next four years. Initially, these had to do with deepening into nonduality. My identity shifted from the ego-self to awareness, and six months later from awareness to non-self. I experienced rushes of Kundalini energy up my spine and out the top of my crown. My sensory perception started to dissolve as I began to experience the emptiness of all phenomena, and I had a few “cessation events” where consciousness turned off.

If you’re following along, you’ll have noticed that, so far, while I had a certain earlier proclivity for the Below, the truly impactful spiritual openings I had in my life were all oriented toward the Above. I could easily find analogues for everything I was experiencing in the Buddhist and Hindu teachings I knew well, and I could easily share them with others within my spiritual circles and be readily understood. Things felt amazing and I was certain I was on a trajectory to becoming enlightened.

All of that remained true for the first year or so after the awakening process began. However, after that point, my trajectory took a downward turn, into the Below, and things started getting much weirder. Over the following two years, I continued to have Above-style experiences that made sense to me based on my background in Asian traditions, but I simultaneously began to experience a whole range of Below-style phenomena. These began when the flow of Kundalini energy in my spine reversed direction, strongly gushing downward from my crown into the depths of my pelvis. I felt like something had been deposited in my hara, a dark gem that now seemed to take over and became the “engine” behind my awakening process. After that, I started to feel that my body was an autonomous intelligence with its own kind of embodied consciousness and sensitivity, and that it was teaching me how to sink more deeply into its depths.

My whole subtle body system lit up with each chakra being clearly defined and vibrantly alive with an energy that was at once blissful, sensual, and unspeakably tender. During this time, I was visited frequently by nature spirits, elementals, ancestors, goddesses, angels, and other ethereal beings that taught me valuable lessons and played a hand in orchestrating my spiritual journey. I navigated encounters with a few intensely dark denizens of the spirit world, and had a near brush with death. Two years into the process, deep in the depths of the Below, I encountered a bottomless abyss of fear, and on the other side of it, the radiant divine light of my soul.

One thing worth mentioning about this period is that, although I had been steeped in Asian spiritual ideas and practices, the experiences I had in the Below felt much more closely aligned with my family heritage, which is predominantly Latin American, with both European and Indigenous roots. For example, the spirits that were the most significant guides on my journey all turned out to be Catholic figures, Pagan deities, or animals and plants native to South America rather than Buddhas or bodhisattvas. Another notable facet of my own process (as a cisgendered heterosexual male) was the predominance of feminine forms. Most of my most important spirit guides were female. My energy body felt like it had transformed into a feminine form. When I saw my soul, the form it took was that of a goddess.

These qualities of my experiences perplexed me. They seemed to be so far off the map of the familiar Asian traditions that, for a little while, I was not sure if I was having an awakening experience or if I was going insane. Fortunately, I was well-resourced enough to be able to keep my wits about me while I gradually made some sense of what was happening. My earlier exposure to indigenous traditions, shamanism, spirit healing, and energy work, along with nearly 25 years of daily yoga practice and deep study of religion, had all prepared me for exactly this kind of work.

After several months struggling to understand and trust the process, I decided to surrender to it. The message was coming loud and clear from my guides that I needed to integrate Above and Below into a coherent whole, and I took this to heart. I consulted books by authors who were adept at navigating these kinds of experiences, and created my own synthesis of practices that resonated with my unique experiences. Over the course of the next three years, I created an amalgamation of energetic, ancestral, shamanic, magickal, sexual, yogic, heart-opening, devotional, visualization, and meditation practices. I will describe the ingredients in that synthesis in Chapter 4. (Of course, the whole idea here is to encourage you to create your own DIY tools, so I am just giving you some starting points for your consideration.)

There will be a lot more to say in the coming pages about how certain practices can help you to to open up to the Below and to unlock the blessings and gifts that it offers. However, if you would permit me to share the single most significant insight I learned from my own journey with you right now, I would say that it was the importance of surrender. This is going to be the major overarching theme in this book. To sum up my whole message in the most pithy form, it is simply to fully surrender to the Below and it will reveal its blessings.

Completing the Circuits

This book is for those who find themselves on a similar path to mine. We have been to the Above; we have seen clearly the nondual, empty, divine nature of reality. Yet now, for who knows what reasons, we find that the techniques we mastered in the Above don’t seem to be working for us anymore. We are intuitively feeling that we are being called to something deeper, more feminine, more intimate, more human, more alive.

If you have already begun to awaken the Below, you may have been feeling lost, or even trapped, down here. Perhaps you have felt scared and lonely, thinking that things have gone wrong or that you’ve gone crazy. If that’s true, I am here to tell you that awakening the Below is a great blessing. You may not be able to see this yet, but your journey into the Below and the elixirs you will learn to bring back are absolutely critical to the evolution of your community and to humanity as a whole. We need you to be doing the work you are doing — in fact, the entire cosmos is depending on it. Thank you, most deeply, for every step you’re taking on this journey!

Perhaps, for some readers, despite the difficulties you might be facing, you may already have begun to suspect that great blessings lie in the Below. Have you perhaps felt like purely Above-based awakenings are missing something? I mean, thank goodness that we have people who have gone far, far out into the Above and brought back those teachings. They are like beacons of light for the rest of us, and I am super grateful to them for doing that! But, aren’t you a bit bored with enlightenment that lacks an equal amount of soulfulness? Awakened people who can’t deeply inhabit their bodies, cook food with friends, or love their children madly? Awakened people who can’t feel deep in their bones their own woundedness, the intergenerational trauma of racism, or the brutalization of the planet? Awakened people who can’t light a candle for their ancestors, cry over the evening news, get lost in a piece of music, or have wild sex in the back seat of their car? I know I have.

Fig. 2 adds to our simple model the culmination of both trajectories I’ve been talking about. What this book is calling for is the completion of both circuits: fully awakened beings who are also fully human. Awakenings that both Transcend to the farthest reaches of the Above and Descend to the farthest reaches of the Below, and then Embody and Return to integrate all of the gifts, wisdom, perspectives, and other elixirs gathered along the way back into the everyday for the benefit of all of life.

FIG. 2. Completing the Journeys

What does completion look like? Eventually, once you have traversed both of the loops shown in Fig. 2, you will discover that you are able to shift your consciousness back and forth at will between the Above, the Below, and the Middle. (Of course, the Middle will have transformed for you; it will still be the domain of the personality and the everyday, but now it is no longer dominated by the ego or the idea that the body is merely physical.) Different people may experience this flexibility in different ways. For me, I could draw my energy into different regions of my body, which caused my consciousness to sink or rise into these three realms. But, again, that’s me; your experience will likely vary.

However it happens for you, once you can freely shift your consciousness in that way, the elixirs of the three realms will start flowing together. You will then gradually experience the Above, Below, and Middle begin to cohere. From the Above, you will have learned definitively and permanently the nondual nature of reality. You will find yourself expressing an open heart that is unambiguously compassionate toward all beings. You will recognize and fully embody your own radiant divine nature. From the Below, you will have gathered a deep intimacy with the living intelligence of your human body as well as with the natural environment. You will have reconciled ancestral, intergenerational, and past life traumas. You will have received the blessing and protection of spirit guides, angels, and deities. You will have worked through your deepest fears to discover and become totally aligned with your soul’s mandate.

Bringing everything I’ve just said back into the Middle, you will achieve wellbeing and balance as an individual operating in the ordinary world, whatever that looks like for you. You will have inhabited (not erased!) your old wounds so thoroughly that you will overflow with presence and empathy in all of your relationships. You will become an effective channel to deliver your deepest gifts to your society and culture. And you will manifest your unique blend of elixirs in everything you do in your daily activities of work, family, and community. Your work of living out your awakening in the world will not be finished — in fact, it never will be — but the three realms will forevermore be integrated, whole, and inseparable parts of one seamless awakened singularity.

This kind of awakening is something that unfolds over the long term — years or even decades. So, if you feel trapped in the Below right now, try not to worry too much. It’s just a sign that you haven’t gotten to the bottom quite yet. Eventually, though, when you have passed through the final trial (which I call the Abyss; see Chapter 3), your Return will naturally and effortlessly begin without your needing to do anything. Likewise, if you haven’t yet completed the Transcendence portion of your journey, don’t worry about that either. That can be completed before, during, or after your transit through the Below, and it will happen just as effortlessly. (In my case, which isn’t to be thought of as normative, I started the Transcendence first, then did the Embodiment and Descent roughly simultaneously, and then completed the Return.) Wherever you are in your own trajectory, just surrender to being right there. You will discover that there are elixirs to be found absolutely everywhere.

Useful Resources

Before we jump into the remainder of the book, I wanted to briefly mention a few other presentations of the Below that I have personally found interesting and inspirational. I also will make explicit how these models are different than mine.

First and foremost of these, in my opinion, is the model forwarded by Bill Plotkin in his book The Journey of Soul Initiation (2021). I will admit that the impact this book had on me was like no other I can remember in a very long time. I found it after I had completed my own journey into the depths of the Below, and after I had already formulated in my own language a lot of the ideas that are now being given expression in this book. However, in reading Plotkin’s work, I immediately recognized a fellow explorer of the same territory. (Actually, in the book, he traces the trajectories of a half dozen or so people as they traversed the Below, so I recognized multiple fellow explorers.) It’s a brilliant book, which I highly recommend.

There are many similarities between Plotkin’s book and the one you are holding in your hands right now. Some are due to the influence that Plotkin has had on me, such as the fact that I was inspired by Plotkin’s use of stories, and have emulated that approach here. A substantial amount of the similarity is because we are both tremendously inspired by Carl Jung. However, most of the similarities between the books are due to the fact that we are describing the same territory that we experienced in similar ways. I also think The Journey of Soul Initiation could be quite complementary to this book because Plotkin talks a lot about vision quests, fasts, and wilderness expeditions as his primary modes of accessing the Below. These have never been part of my own modus operandi and are therefore not prioritized here. However, aside from different terminology and practices, I would say that the major difference between Plotkin’s book and this one is that his is exclusively concerned with navigating the Below and bringing back elixirs into the Middle. There is virtually no mention of the Above. Therefore, to me, it is a very on-point and extremely helpful description of only half of the story.

Another thing I found electrifying when I first encountered it is Rob Burbea’s work on “Soulmaking Dharma.” Burbea was a Buddhist teacher and a senior teacher at Gaia House in England, who was primarily known for writing Seeing That Frees, an extensive book on emptiness that became a classic among serious Dharma practitioners. Burbea passed away in 2020 from pancreatic cancer. In the last few years before his death, along with his collaborator Catherine McGee, he had started to articulate a new vision that combined Buddhist teachings on emptiness with a Jungian-inspired model of “the imaginal.” Unfortunately, he died before he was able to complete much writing on this topic; however, there are a number of recordings of his lectures and retreat instructions available online in the Gaia House archives. This material was extremely helpful to me, both validating my experiences and accelerating my Descent.

To me, Burbea’s articulation of Soulmaking Dharma is perfectly calibrated for practitioners who are highly experienced with Buddhist teachings who wish to start to orient toward the Below. His recordings point listeners who already have some mastery of the Above toward the Descent using Buddhist concepts in a way that I think is quite skillful and inspirational. On the other hand, if you are not that kind of reader, then it will probably not speak to you at all. Another limitation of Burbea’s materials, as far as I can tell from the online recordings, is that he walks people right up to the door to the Descent but does not lead them down into the depths. Therefore, it again is an on-point and helpful, although limited, view of the territory. (McGee continues to give retreats and develop this work, and perhaps her retreats are more comprehensive; I don’t know.)

A third model that is both relevant and also quite popular in spiritual circles is Adyashanti’s teaching on awakening the Head, Heart, and Hara. Personally, I like this model a lot and I think that it has a ton of overlap with this book. I haven’t followed Adya closely, but if I’m understanding him correctly, it seems to me that his Head and Heart awakenings correspond to my Above, and his Hara captures some of what I mean by the Below. While his three forms of awakening cover a lot of ground and I have no objection to them, I still feel like there’s more to the Below than is articulated in his teaching. To my ears, Adya’s descriptions of the Hara don’t seem to evoke the darkness, difficulty, terror, and sheer weirdness of my own journey through the Below. Perhaps we could imagine adding an extension onto his Head-Heart-Hara model, a fourth realm located under the Hara, deeper down into the Abyss. (Maybe I’d suggest something like Head-Heart-Hara-Hades, but I don’t know if that would pass muster with Adya’s marketing team!)

Finally, I wanted to mention one last model that I think is relevant to our discussion here: the one forwarded by tantric Buddhist and Hindu systems of practice. While there are many others, the most well known of these in the contemporary West are Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and Kashmiri Shaivism. While I have not engaged in formal training in either, from what I can tell from my reading about them, these two traditions recognize and teach practitioners to work with many of the categories of experiences I outline in this book. (While I have critiqued Buddhism in this chapter as an Above-focused tradition, Tantric Buddhism is an exception.)

Both Vajrayana and Kashmiri Shaivism involve formal instructions for working with the divine feminine, Kundalini and other energies, light, imaginal symbols, dreams, deities, ghosts, and spirits — most of the areas we’ll explore in the chapters to come. They each also have a general outline of how spiritual progress typically is meant to unfold. Buddhist Tantric frameworks, for example, typically begin with practices that prioritize opening the heart and engaging with beneficial deities, then proceed to developing higher states of concentration and nondual consciousness, and then lastly move from there down into the body and the energy system through physical and breathing exercises. In contrast, Kashmiri Shaivism, like other forms of Hindu tantra, tends to incorporate the body from the very beginning.

While the more systematic nature of these Tantric traditions is truly one of the great advantages they hold for many practitioners, this is also, in my view, their principal limitation. Both systems require initiation or empowerment in order to get started, rigorous preliminary practices that go on for years in many cases, and personalized instruction from an accomplished guru. Their teachings are structured, understood, and expressed in a certain traditional way, and deviations from the standard model are typically discouraged or devalued. Moreover, since these Tantric spiritual systems are the products of Indian and Tibetan cultures, teachers in these traditions are not necessarily open to symbolism or practices from other cultures.

These more rigid structures can limit people’s ability to participate in these systems if they suddenly find themselves thrust into the Below and need more immediate and more customizable tools. For example, during my own process of Awakening from Below, when I suddenly started being visited by Catholic, Pagan, and Indigenous South American deities and spirits, I wondered if a Tantric teacher steeped in Asian symbolic and spiritual lore might be able to help me interact skillfully with the beings I was encountering in their own symbolic and ritual languages. I reached out to a few people with this question, and they laughed at the very idea.

In a way, you could say that what I wound up doing in creating my own synthesis of practices was inventing a DIY version of tantra, so to speak, that resonated with my own unique journey. This wound up being much more efficient for me than if I had started formal training in tantra at that point in time. It also allowed my awakening process to have a totally unique symbolic vocabulary that reflected my own individual cultural, psychological, and spiritual makeup. (Of course, you might feel differently and prefer the security and structure that established systems can provide over the DIY ethos I am presenting here. If that’s the case, then by all means, follow your own intuition!)

One last thing that I wanted to mention about tantra is that I do really like Kashmiri Shaivism’s appreciation for the divine feminine. This is pretty much completely absent in all the other sources I discussed above. The gendering of consciousness as masculine (Shiva) and the manifestation of phenomena as feminine (Shakti) is something that makes intuitive sense to me, and the exuberant celebration of Shakti that you find in the tradition matches my own felt sense of things very well. For me, the whole Below has a strongly tangible feminine quality to it. In fact, I almost wrote this whole book referring to the Below as “her” instead of “it.” Even though I chose not to for stylistic reasons, for me, I very much see these pages as my own honoring and celebration of the goddess. Someday, I’ll figure out how to express what I really want to say about her, and I’ll write a whole other book. Meanwhile, although we have other priorities to attend to here, and I may not draw attention to the fact as often as I’d like, please know that the divine feminine is always here, behind every word.

Since I’ve already mentioned a few books above, let me include a list of a few more resources that may be helpful for people sojourning in the Below. While I learned most of my “DIY tantra” techniques from the Below itself, each of the books listed below provides more detail and tools about various aspects that we will be exploring here. Note that I am not recommending them because I agree with any claims they might make about what’s ultimately true. I am recommending them because I appreciate the practice advice that they give. Some of these were published more recently, after my journey was completed, but overall I have a lot of gratitude to these authors and I acknowledge a great debt to them for influencing my journey and my thinking on this topic.

• David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996)

• Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (2017)

• Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm (2020)

• Barbara Carrellas, Urban Tantra: Sacred Sex for the Twenty-First Century(2007)

• Robert Falconer, The Others Within Us: Internal Family Systems, Porous Mind, and Spirit Possession (2023)

• Daniel Foor, Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing(2017)

• Bonnie Greenwell, Energies of Transformation: A Guide to the Kundalini Process (1995)

• Julie Henderson, The Lover Within: Opening to Energy in Sexual Practice(1999)

• Langston Khan, Deep Liberation: Shamanic Tools for Reclaiming Wholeness in a Culture of Trauma (2021)

• Chöying Khandro, Dakini Journey in the Contemporary World (2023)

• Matt Licata, The Path Is Everywhere: Uncovering the Jewels Hidden Within You (2017)

• Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche(2003)

• Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation: A Field Guide for Visionaries, Evolutionaries, and Revolutionaries (2021)

• Martín Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: A Mayan Shaman’s Journey to the Heart of the Indigenous Soul (1998)

• John J. Prendergast, In Touch: How to Tune In to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself (2015)

• John J. Prendergast, The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence (2019)

• Reginald Ray, Somatic Descent: How to Unlock the Deepest Wisdom of the Body (2020)

• Reginald Ray, The Awakening Body: Somatic Meditation for Discovering Our Deepest Life (2016)

• Lorin Roche, The Radiance Sutras: 112 Gateways to the Yoga of Wonder and Delight (2014)

• Evelyn Rysdyk, The Nepalese Shamanic Path: Practices for Negotiating the Spirit World (2019)

• Sarangerel, Chosen By the Spirits: Following Your Shamanic Calling(2001)

• Mary Mueller Shutan, The Spiritual Awakening Guide: Kundalini, Psychic Abilities, and the Conditioned Layers of Reality (2015)

• Mary Mueller Shutan, The Body Deva: Working with the Spiritual Consciousness of the Body (2018)

• Tara Springett, Healing Kundalini Symptoms: Proven Techniques That Really Work (2020)

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