3. Descent into the Underworld

In this chapter:

• Imaginal Phenomena

• Energies and Spirits

• Autonomous Bodily Intelligence

• Sexual Energy

• Ancestral Materials and Past Lives

• Animals, Nature, and the Elements

• Seeing the Above from the Below

• The Abyss

• Coherence

• Bringing Home the Elixir

Awakening from Below is challenging. But let me stress that challenging spiritual experiences are not in and of themselves signs of the Below. Difficulties are faced by pretty much all spiritual journeyers at one point or another. There can be immense challenges that emerge in the Above as the ego-self loses its familiar identity and anchor-points rooting it in the conventional world. There can also be challenges that arise in the process of Embodiment, as someone attempts to integrate their experiences of the Above back into daily life as a human being. All sorts of fear, disorientation, trauma, triggering, wounding, shadow material, difficult memories, and strong emotion can arise as part of any spiritual process. In the extreme, these experiences can share symptoms with depersonalization-derealization disorder, depression, mania, psychosis, and other serious mental health disorders. Difficult spiritual experiences of all kinds can become bridges into the Below, but none of these are indicative of the Below in and of themselves.

A true Awakening of the Below has a distinct pattern. It begins with a Descent. The call to descend may feel like an inescapable draw, magnet, or gravitational force that seems to be tugging at us quite against our will. Or, it might feel like a Siren’s cry, a bewitching allure that is simultaneously exciting and terrifying. Or, it might feel like the gentle, warm glow of the earth or the physical body beckoning for us to relax into its soft embrace. Or, the quality of this call may be eerie, strangely dark, potentially even scary or seemingly evil. Or, it might be a literal voice in your head inviting you to enter into a mystery. We might be attracted to the call, repelled, or we might try to ignore it altogether. Particularly if Above-based spiritual teachings have told us to reject or recoil from such things, we might succeed in deferring the Descent for a time (although I’m not sure if you can permanently). Or, we might say yes, not realizing what we’re getting ourselves into. But for many of us, the Descent will not be a choice; we will just find ourselves thrown into it.

Once we turn toward the call, whether through our choice or not, a chasm will open up and we will be drawn down into its darkness. This process is never a perfectly step-by-step linear one, and everyone’s experience is unique. Some people find themselves having dramatic mystical experiences when moving through the Below, while others have more of a gradual unfolding. Some people experience high levels of absorption whereby their entire reality seems to be shaped by the Below to the exclusion of all else. Others are able to maintain a wider, more holistic perspective that allows them to do the work of integration as they go along. Awakening from Above and Below may happen sequentially or simultaneously, or perhaps all mixed together. (For me, it was thoroughly mixed together, but also seemed to oscillate back and forth between which realm was more prominent at any given time.)

Despite these differences in how the Descent occurs, generally speaking, there is a recognizable pattern of further and further deepening into the Below over time, like the sequential unfolding of layers. As you Descend through these layers, the Below progressively takes on a life of its own. You might say that the Below wakes up to itself. It becomes an autonomous power or force that begins to exert its will on our lives and to make demands of us.

Remember that when I say Awakening from Below, I am not just talking about having a few brief glimpses of the Below or a few “reconnaissance missions” from your headquarters in the Above. An Awakening from Below is one in which, as part of our awakening process, we are drawn or led into a sustained engagement with the Below. For an extended period of time, the Below becomes our home. As we acclimate to this territory, we stop trying to reframe the Below in terms of the Above (awareness, oneness, emptiness, etc.) or the Middle (psychology, neuroscience, etc.). Instead, we begin to understand and accept it on its own terms. We become fluent in the Below’s language. Our eyes adjust to the dark, allowing us to peer into its mysterious corners. We become spelunkers of its cavernous depths. Eventually, it swallows us up altogether as we fully merge with its depths.

This chapter introduces some of what you can experience during an Awakening from Below. These aspects are generally presented here in order of depth, with more profound layers appearing toward the end of the chapter. However, that is not to say that every reader will encounter every layer mentioned here, or in this particular order. Remember that this is only a model meant to be suggestive, not a comprehensively accurate statement of ultimate truth. In fact, I don’t believe there ever could be an exact map of the Below because the territory itself is by definition unpredictable. As I’ve said before, everything I’ve talked about in this book should be read more as poetry than science.

Imaginal Phenomena

For most people, the first clear calling of the Below comes in the form of “imaginal” phenomena, a term popularized by the scholar Henry Corbin. Experientially, the term “imaginal world” is referring to a category of experience that is distinct from rational thoughts, emotional states, and even mystical experiences of the nondual or heart-opening variety. Despite the similarity between the words, the imaginal world is also quite distinct from the ordinary imagination you might use when daydreaming or playing make-believe.

Corbin offers a description of the imaginal in his article titled “Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal,” which is freely available online. Other works that have greatly influenced my thinking on this subject include Cynthia Bourgeault’s 2020 book, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, and also Rob Burbea’s talks on Soulmaking Dharma, discussed in the previous chapter.

I’ll be using my own language here in this chapter, but I think all of these authors would agree with me that imaginal phenomena are images, archetypes, symbols, and events that are characterized by strong emotional charge, density of meaning, and transformative power. Imaginal phenomena appear to us as autonomous, independent entities or forces, but yet somehow at the same time are deeply familiar, like they are mirroring parts of our psyche back to us in external form. When unpacked and engaged with, they reveal surprising and subtle connections between different types of experiences and events across time and space. They have an uncanny way of connecting our thoughts, memories, dreams, and other inner experiences with manifestations in the material world. Crucially for our purposes in this book, they are also the most immediate and effective gateways to the Below.

Rather than laying on more abstract descriptions, let me relate to you an example of an imaginal phenomenon so you can get the flavor. My friend Jeff Richards is an artist in Denver, Colorado. His main artistic practice is working with paint and thread against wooden frames to create stunning three-dimensional imagery. He writes a periodic blog called Hexagon Art, in which he described a mysterious event that took place in his studio one night back in 2022. I’ve quoted this story below, combining material from two of his posts with only a few minor grammatical tweaks:

I had been working on a large circular panel, laying out with thread a grid of squares and then painting over that grid with layers of color. Other than the intentional nature of the grid as a starting point I had no firm idea of where the piece was going to go. As is often the case, I was simply content to let the process take me where it wanted. Unfortunately the [artwork] took a wrong turn…. A little discouraged, I decided it was necessary to retrace my steps and get onto firm footing. I spray-painted a rich blue color over the entire circular surface, laying the paint on heavy to assure that I would end up with a solid blue color field as my new starting point. It happened to be late in the afternoon and, realizing the thickness of the wet paint would take quite a while to dry, I lay the piece on a work table and packed it in for the day. As I headed out the door I caught a last glimpse of the shiny wet blue circle, hoping with a sigh that the freshness of a new day would indicate a different direction for me to pursue….

Then something I can’t account for happened overnight and I returned to discover a masterpiece; a totally unexpected, unimaginably sublime message from some source outside my experience, conscious or unconscious This was a real, full-on Faerie moment.

I was dumbfounded by the sheer beauty of it, by the absolute coherence that is so evident. A strange feeling of otherness came over me, the sensation that some alien presence had shaped the paint. Even today it looks to me like a symbolic language, an alphabet with a distinct yet mysterious message that speaks not to the rational mind, but to something deeper, something almost instinctual, something untranslatable, ineffable, yet profoundly moving.

Jeff’s description of the blue circle (check out some photos here) and his reactions to it make it clear that this was an imaginal event. In the presence of the imaginal, we feel dumbfounded, awe-struck, at a loss for words. We feel the presence of something deeply mysterious, even sacred, intruding into our lives from a different realm. Reading the blog, you can feel Jeff grasping for the right language with which to express the power this image held over him — he uses words such as strange, otherness, mysterious, instinctual, untranslatable, ineffable, moving, and sublime. He tries out “faerie” as a shorthand to capture the bundle of emotions, meaningfulness, and power evoked by the mysterious disc.

Another important aspect of the imaginal that emerges from his blog is Jeff’s assertion that the blue circle was presenting him with a “symbolic language.” This is a pivotal moment in his engagement with the imaginal. Someone else might have noted the event as a weird coincidence or mystery, and just shrugged and gone about their business. But, Jeff chose instead to accept and engage with the symbolic language of the mystery.

His first thought was to try to recreate the same effect again, and his blog describes his many efforts to reproduce the series of accidents that led to the creation of the masterpiece. However, after much trial and error in vain, Jeff writes:

It occurred to me that I was approaching this conundrum from a completely wrong perspective. It wasn’t a matter of identifying causal factors, like solving a chemistry problem. There would be no solution for me at the end of a physics equation. The real truth was that I needed to figure out how to communicate with the faeries; and to do that, I might have to translate the message in the artwork.

This last observation is key. In imaginal phenomena, often an alien or autonomous entity brings a message from beyond this world. Whether big or small, this message is felt to be a mystery — something that needs to be unpacked and explored. But, this exploration cannot be done in a methodical, scientific way. As Jeff suggests, the rational mind is the wrong tool for this job. The imaginal speaks to us on a wholly different level; it calls for a different part of us to come forth. What’s important is not explaining or understanding imaginal phenomena, but rather engaging with, coming into relationship with, and opening up to them. It’s not about figuring it out: it’s about deepening the connection.

Jeff’s experience of the imaginal came in the form of the spontaneous appearance of a mysterious object, which called him to enter into a conversation with entities or powers he calls faeries. However, imaginal phenomena need not always take such concrete material form. It may be a mysterious event, say a synchronicity or an especially meaningful interpersonal encounter. It may be a specific place, person, or memory. It may be a dream that leaves a particularly powerful impression. Images, symbols, figures, landscapes, animals, words, abstract geometric shapes, numbers, body sensations, smells, sounds, flavors — nearly anything can appear with the strong emotional charge, density of meaning, and transformative power that are the hallmarks of the imaginal.

I said above that imaginal phenomena can also reveal connections between different types of experiences and events across time. Jeff’s blog doesn’t get into that particular aspect of the blue circle. But, I know from talking with him that it appeared to him to have a certain futuristic quality, as if the faeries were broadcasting messages back in time. For me, on the other hand, my imaginal world often takes on a historical tinge. If the blue circle came into my imaginal world, for example, I might have been tempted to describe the different patterns in the painting as a message written in an ancient runic script.

Imaginal phenomena often bend time altogether, collapsing past, present, and future together. The same symbol may contain multiple resonances with ancient mythology, with something I remember from my childhood, and with events or people in the current day. As I engage with this symbol over time, more and more resonances emerge or are revealed. Deja vu and synchronicities will emerge that bring these facets further into focus. Bit by bit, as this mysterious presence is unpacked, its significance deepens. Eventually, what started out as a discrete event becomes what Jungians call a “personal myth,” a complex story containing deeply felt truths about my life and my place in the cosmos.

Do you notice how the imaginal is inviting us down further into the Below with all of this? The imaginal is not Transcendent. It’s not about moving up and out of the mind and psyche, or about leaving the individual human condition behind. On the contrary, it’s about moving down into the deeply felt and deeply personal. Although they seem to come from beyond and have an alien feel, imaginal phenomena connect with our own personal past, present, and future and with our own personal set of symbols and meanings. The imaginal thus is a bridge to the deeper, unconscious layers of our self, down into the Below.

The imaginal is not exclusively associated with the Below, as there are entire imaginal worlds associated with Above traditions. Actually, you might say that one of the most significant roles that myths and symbols play in Above-based religions is to envelop the practitioner in an imaginal world of sacredness, holiness, goodness, and light. Catholicism’s vocabulary of symbols, to take one example, includes a whole range of angels, saints, Jesus, Mary, and other figures that can be very alive for someone as teachers, guides, protectors, and messengers of the sacred.

However, while Catholicism accepts and embraces these particular figures, it simultaneously rejects, vilifies, and demonizes the darker side of its own imaginal vocabulary. While some parts of the imaginal world are sanctioned and thought of as good, others are to be avoided and thought of as sinful or evil. Figures such as Satan or images of Hell are treated as anathema to spirituality. This same move is made in other Above-focused traditions, such as we saw with Mara and his daughters in the myth that opened this book.

Contrary to these examples of Above-centric traditions, one of the most notable things that is happening with an Awakening from Below, in my opinion, is an awakening of the darker side of the imaginal world. Those aspects of the imaginal that have been walled off as dark, sinful, unwanted, or evil begin to stir and to emerge from the shadows. The imaginal phenomena associated with this kind of Awakening process can seem exceedingly dark, or a blend of both light and dark, depending on the individual.

While it may be disconcerting if you have internalized the taboos against the dark side of the imaginal, there’s nothing innately wrong with it. In fact, there are many religions worldwide that have long embraced it. From Asian traditions, think of the wrathful deities such as Mahakala and Palden Lhamo from Tibetan Buddhism, or the dark goddesses such as Kali and Durga from Hinduism. Think of Hades, Hecate, Circe, and Nyx from ancient Greek and modern Paganism. In Celtic tradition, there’s the Morrigan. None of these traditions eschew or reject these dark entities, and I personally have found that researching such traditional figures is one of the best ways to validate, unpack, stimulate, and engage with my own imaginal darkness.

Those who engage with the darkness often find it to be just as exquisite and impactful as symbols of light. By way of example, let me relate an imaginal experience had by my good friend, Jack Morrígan, a spiritual teacher, healer, and long-term explorer of the Below, who has taken the name of the Celtic goddess. (All of the stories I am quoting in this book without mentioning a particular source were provided to me by email or orally, and are presented here with some minor edits to condense them or make them fit with the book’s flow.) Jack recounts:

The Morrigan is my primary deity, and she’s a deity of death, sex, and magic. Once, I remember her coming to me in one of her forms, in which she has a raven’s head and long, claw-like hands covered in feathers, and blood all over her mouth. That might look horrendous to someone else, but to me, I know who she is. I love her. So what I feel looking at that form is love and sexual attraction.

And one time — almost like in a waking dream — she bites into my wrist with her beak and pulls out blood and muscle, and she connects it to her wrist, and she says, “Your blood is my blood is your blood.” And I feel this flowing energy, like my body being purified spiritually through my blood by this deity that I love.

If, like Jack’s, your own imaginal world is tinged more darkly than typically allowed by the Above-based traditions you’re familiar with, you might recoil from such a visionary experience. You may find yourself thinking that such dark imagery has no place in a spiritual process, that all visions should consist of divinity and light. The incongruity between your expectations and the realities of your visions may produce confusion, fear, or shame. But, in truth, you have no control over what your imaginal world looks like, and there’s no predicting it in advance either. So, you might as well open up to it and see what there is to discover in the darkness.

I already mentioned that when my own imaginal world opened up, it took me completely by surprise. Having been steeped in Buddhist and Asian religious imagery for my entire adult life, I was perplexed when a completely different range of symbols and entities suddenly started emerging. It turns out that my personal imaginal landscape includes a whole spectrum from light to dark. On the lighter side, figures like the Virgin Mary, a radiant Pagan sun goddess called Sol, and the Buddhist goddess of mercy Quan Yin all play major roles as protectors and guides in my visionary experiences. But there is also a whole pantheon of darker animal spirits who embody more primal sensations. A black jaguar who protects me when I journey into dangerous territory, a vulture who eats the parts of me that I am ready to let go of, an owl who facilitates encounters with ghosts and wandering spirits. In fact, the most significant figure of all, who I’ll introduce in more detail below is a goddess who is half angelic and divine, and half serpentine and demonic. I also experience a multilayered imaginal realm that has expansive upper regions with vast landscapes of mountain ranges and jungles, as well as a cavernous underworld with networks of catacombs and dark lairs. Different guides and protectors inhabit different parts of this realm, and I travel in visionary experiences to visit and converse with them in their different locations.

That’s the way the imaginal shows up for me, but as I’ve said a few times already, there’s no reason that you should think that any of my experiences — or Jeff’s, or Jack’s, or anyone else’s I’m mentioning here — are normative. The point is to discover, embrace, and enter into relationship with your ownimaginal world, whatever it might be like. Light, dark, nurturing, or scary, all imaginal phenomena have important messages for you if you engage with them and invite them into a relationship. Aside from surrender, this kind of active engagement is one of the most important core skills of navigating an Awakening from Below. For as we’ll see, the Below is saturated with the imaginal all the way down, and all of it is inviting you into relationship.

Energies and Spirits

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.

Autonomous Bodily Intelligence

Another place where a sense of autonomy and alienness emerges — sometimes to our great surprise and consternation — is in our relationship to the physical body. On any spiritual journey, our relationship with the body tends to undergo radical transformations. In the Above, for example, the body is one of those things that we Transcend beyond. In fact, de-identification with the material form through the realization that “I am not my body” is often one of the first things that propel people into this trajectory. As nondual realization dissolves the subject-object division, we see that what we thought of as “the body” is a mere collection of sensations floating around within awareness — or appearing within a void, depending on your flavor of nonduality. As a deeper level of nondual deconstruction takes hold, those body sensations also are seen through. The body dissolves into tiny particles of energy that barely can even be said to arise at all. As the quality of divinity comes to the foreground, this empty and insubstantial body can take on the qualities of pulsation, bliss, joy, and divinity. A “body of light” or a “rainbow body,” as they say in some traditions.

Moving into the Below is a totally different story. In the Below, the body is not transcended or dissolved. Rather, it comes alive as its own autonomous intelligent being. Again, there’s a difference between those who experience this intelligence as an energy or impersonal force and those for whom it is a personified entity. For the former, there is a knowingness, wisdom, or felt sense that the body somehow seems to possess, quite autonomously from our mental apprehension or perceptions of it. This autonomous intelligence asserts itself spontaneously, taking control of the awakening process, healing old wounds, and activating, energizing and balancing out the energetic system. Here is how a friend named Misha described her experience of this process:

I wake up most nights two hours after I went to bed. I feel a particular energetic quality, a kind of arousal or activation that’s been going on for years. I’ve joked with friends that this is “life having its way with me.”

I’m in a liminal state. I feel intuitively guided to engage in different ways. The body begins making spontaneous, organic, symmetrical movements that are dancelike. My hands move into very precise, mudra-like postures. I vocalize, though not usually in words. I might tremble or shake. I may find myself pressing hard on areas of blockage, such as the throat or liver. From the outside, these things might look like possession. From the inside, I’m opening, expanding, clearing, releasing, healing, awakening.

I find myself doing energy work with and on my body, encountering and resolving psychological issues. Waves of emotion may arise, need to be felt, expressed, released. I sob away old hurts. Chakras or other energy centers may activate, energies may move around in a multitude of ways. Many kinds of spiritual experiences and insights occur. At times it’s like the deep phase of a psychedelic journey. Sometimes sexual energies arise and I engage with those.

Generally, I just stay very receptively present and notice what happens or wants to express. Sometimes I use some of these periods to listen to recorded meditations or dharma talks, or feel guided to go outdoors and bask under the night sky. Nowadays, even if I’m not paying full attention, whatever process wants to happen just happens anyway.

An episode might last between 10 and 90 minutes, or sometimes even longer. When several occur in a night, which is more often than not, there is generally a progression in the processes that occur. The last round generally begins about an hour before dawn.

These experiences feel purposeful and directional. Even when I can’t recall precisely what shifted, progressed, or resolved, I can feel beneficial differences in my being.

I can totally relate to Misha’s experience, and had something quite similar happening with me. However, people who are more attuned to entities, as I am, will likely also experience the autonomous intelligence of the body as a distinct creature with its own agenda and will. The spiritual teacher and healer Mary Mueller Shutan calls this the “body deva” (deva means a spirit or a deity in Sanskrit), a term that I feel is quite apt in describing my own experiences.

I met my body deva during a Kundalini event that kicked off my initial Descent into the Below. When Kundalini arose, it felt like my whole body was taken over by a serpentine goddess. Over the course of the next year, I kept having visionary experiences of this entity: a feminine form that was half serpent, half human, with dark, black, scaly coils below and radiant sunshine pouring out from her head above. When she appeared, she would often enter my body and begin to move me around. She would teach me qigong-like sequences combining breathing and visualization. She would use light and energy to heal and empower my body.

This goddess became one of the primary entities in my imaginal lexicon, a powerful symbol that I felt was speaking to me at a visceral level. And, for all of that time, I took this entity to be a goddess that was wholly external to me. However, eventually, this goddess revealed herself in a powerful visionary experience to be none other than my own body’s inner consciousness. From that point onwards, she no longer felt alien or like she was “taking over.” Rather, this goddess became the symbol or icon for my own body in my imaginal world. Working with her in this way, she became so closely associated with my experience of my own body that it’s now entirely natural for me to think of my physical body as this goddess.

In whatever way it manifests, whether as a relationship with an intelligent energy or an entity, in a Descent, the quality of the interactions between you and your body are of the most intimate nature. In order to engage in this relationship, what the body needs is for you to hear and accept its deepest truths. It needs you to give it the space and time to tell you about its memories, traumas, and wisdom. The whole time that your ego-self has been deeply identified with the body, it has ignored, walled off, and repressed these uncomfortable truths. The ego has repeatedly told the body that it needs to be quiet, to shut down, to deny parts of itself, in order to be safe.

In an Awakening from Below, as the body begins asserting its independence and autonomy, the ego-self often has no choice but to place aside its preferences and allow this communication to take place. What the body reveals when it is listened to can be crushing to the ego, and this unburdening process can for many be one of the most difficult areas of the Below. Eventually, though, you learn to meet the body with loving patience and acceptance, without ego-identification or the impulse to recoil. You hold it in a loving embrace and allow it to speak its truths no matter how difficult. You learn to surrender to the process, and to allow the body to express itself, and through this, to heal itself.

Here is how Lisa experienced this kind of opening:

Right from the start I had to give my body over to this process. This body, as I once knew it, was no longer mine. A few days after my initial transcendent awakening experience, where I was shown I was pure light and was visited by both God and Jesus, my whole body exploded internally, releasing all the pain and trauma that was stored in each and every cell.

This pain contained traumas that I had known, traumas that I thought I had already worked through and resolved, and traumas that I had absolutely no memory of. I remember thinking, I cannot believe a human body could hold so much pain! How could such a thing actually be possible? I went from someone who was incredibly active, always moving, going to the gym, going on hikes, always engaged in active projects, cleaning and cooking and stretching and moving, to someone who couldn’t even walk down the street due to the insurmountable emotional pain I felt in my system.

I had to descend down into the depths of my shadows. Allowing myself to be taken over by a sense of pure ugliness and disgust. Memories of awful experiences from childhood and thoughts of any harm that I have ever experienced over the course of my life surfaced. I found myself wanting to hide any aspect of beauty or attraction from the world. I was cloaked and clouded in ugliness, in an aura of dullness. My life went from somewhat difficult but certainly enjoyable, to entering into the complete depths of this inner darkness.

I knew on a very deep level from that point forward my only job was to surrender to this pain, allowing it to consume me completely. My body was no longer mine, there was a much bigger process taking place now. Something far beyond what my own mind could understand or try to control.

While it can be excruciatingly painful at first, over time, a foundation of trust builds. The body goes from being a source of shame, disappointment, and disillusionment to being a deep well of groundedness and intimacy. It goes from feeling alien to feeling like an old friend and companion. There is a sweetness to the energy that is shared between you, like between two old lovers who have been enamored with each other for decades.

Sexual Energy

As the body wakes up to its own agency and power, one of the things that invariably occurs is that sexual energy, which has long been bound up and controlled by the ego, is unleashed. Here, as with the other happenings discussed throughout this chapter, the ego-self’s reaction is often to desperately try to force the genie back in the bottle. Sexuality is a topic of particular concern for the ego — often wrapped up with a great deal of trauma, self-loathing, shame, blame, and other emotions that can make this particular territory difficult to navigate. My brief comments here are going to make this topic sound much more straightforward than it actually is.

Like with other aspects of the Below, sexual energy liberated from the control of the ego is experienced as an alien or autonomous thing. Like with other aspects, it can be experienced either as an impersonal force that wells up uncontrollably, or as a wholly independent conscious entity. In an experience of the former, the journeyer may be overwhelmed by floods of sexual desire, imagery, or behavior that are much stronger than previously experienced or that are directed in ways that one is not used to.

Here is how one friend of mine, who wished to remain anonymous, described how her sexual energies woke up and began to move autonomously in her body. This friend has a long history of trauma, including childhood sexual abuse, so healing has been an essential component in her awakening process:

After a period of concentrated work, I experienced my heart opening energetically, emotionally, and relationally. I also experienced resolutions in psyche- and body-based imprints and holding patterns. Part of this healing and awakening process was a deep opening of my natural sexual energies. Though years past menopause, I found myself engaged in periods of daily masturbation — sometimes several times a day, or even closely spaced together.

Although there is much more sexual arousal than there used to be, orgasm is a much more energetic experience for me now. I no longer get the physical rush that I used to. There is physical pleasure, but it’s different from before. At first, I found that the energy dispersed into an expanding energetic field. Sometimes, the energies drew into the dantian spontaneously. Other times I felt guided to draw the energies elsewhere, or they went somewhere (in or near my body) on their own.

One night as I was lying down masturbating, a new thing happened. My intuitive sense was to focus on the energies above my pelvis. I felt them as a deep gray swirling whirlwind of moist air. Reaching the threshold of arousal, the energies spontaneously dropped down, entering my body and moving around in organic ways. Some went to my left lower abdominal area. The majority swirled to the right side, then up (through and past some of the digestive organs, including the liver), and continued swirling over to my heart.

I trusted the process, allowing it to happen as it would. Afterwards the areas those energies moved to felt more healthy, whole, clean, and pristine. Since then my sexual experience has increasingly become energy-focused. Often the attention is solely on where the energies want to be focused and build. There are no fantasies of any kind, and it’s more like the process is driving itself and I’m simply a willing partner in that process.

For those who experience autonomous entities, on the other hand, it may be that they perceive their own sexual energy as an actual being that is separate from themselves. This being may appear in visions or dreams, or may be a felt presence in waking life. For me, as a person highly attuned to entities, during the Descent, I experienced sexual energy in the form of a radiant goddess. She appeared in a form that captures everything I find most attractive. I would often experience her walking beside me, hugging me, or just appearing before me in my mind’s eye.

During my sojourn in the Below, there were enormous surges of sexual energy, and these would always be accompanied by a visitation from this angelic spirit. Just her presence alone would set off a flood of orgasmic feelings, waves of bodily bliss and pleasure throughout my whole organism. These would be both visual as well as tactile experiences, where it truly felt as if I was with another human person in the most sacred and liberating embrace. It took me a long while to recognize that she was actually the spirit of my own sexual energy and not an entirely independent being.

While I personally experienced a feminine figure, sexual energy might take on any other kind of shape. Listen to Jack again, as he tells the story about his interactions with his primary spirit guide, who used her shapeshifting power to liberate his previously repressed sexual energies:

At first, the Morrigan would come and visit me regularly, say how much she loves me and that she wanted to initiate me into a tantric relationship across dimensions. And I could feel her passion for me, and I felt it for her, and we had this really loving relationship that was also very sexual and primal.

She is very playful, and she would be like, “I can look like whatever you want me to look like. I can be whatever you want me to be. I have no limitation.” So, she would present herself to me as all of the things that I find the most attractive. Including things which I’ve been suppressing through my life, such as the homosexual side of myself.

She would come to me, part man, and would be interacting with me. And that would be something that I knew was turning me on, but that I was afraid of as well, and she knew that, so she would hold it sensitively. It’s like she was unearthing the sexuality that she knew was inside of me, because she held no judgement toward it whatsoever, and loved all of this within me.

I wasn’t ready for that in my life, but she helped me through these experiences, which later led to me having my first homosexual experience. I remember afterwards I felt such an enormous relief. She knows what’s in the underworld and can show it to me in ways that help me to feel safe with it and even live it in my life. To become part of my freedom.

As Jack learned, what the body wants is to free itself from all sexual inhibitions and hangups. The ego might fight against these developments mightily, and kick up all kinds of resistance and emotions that will need to be worked through. In the end, though, all repressed preferences must emerge from the closet, and any unresolved trauma must be faced and given voice. Ultimately, the autonomous bodily intelligence wants to express itself and heal through the medium of pleasure. It wants to bathe itself in freedom and bodily ecstasy. It wants to fall in love with itself, to experience the utmost intimacy of the tender, warm, and erotic embrace between energy and matter. The body can do none of that while the ego-self is in charge.

The specific ways that the body wants to love and heal itself lie completely beyond the ego-self’s ability to control or manage. The ego might want us to be straight when our body wants to be bisexual, or cis when we’re trans; it might want us to avoid certain sexual activities when our body wants to engage in them; or it might be using sexuality in order to forward its own egoic ends that are completely at odds with what our body actually wants or needs.

In an Awakening from Below, the body deva is going to wake up and assert its autonomy over all such things. The ego will resist, and there will be conflict and suffering, but eventually we will learn to surrender. The process may be completely lovely, as it was for me and my anonymous friend above. Or, completely liberating, as was the case for Jack. Or, completely overwhelming, as we’ll see in one of the case studies in Chapter 5. Or, it may be completely destructive, leading to divorce or other kinds of upheavals in your life. The awakening of the sexual energy of the body is completely unpredictable, and thus it is one of the most dangerous aspects of an Awakening from Below, needing great care, sensitivity, and ethical attention to navigate.

Ancestral Materials and Past Lives

As we deepen into the Below, we continue to peel back successive layers of the onion. Thus far, the aspects we have discussed have mostly pertained to one’s individual life — one’s own lexicon of imaginal symbols, energies, and spirits; one’s own body and sexual energies; one’s own personal traumas, hangups, and issues. Sooner or later, however, the trajectory descends down beyond the individual biographical material, into the deep past. Here, we are getting down into levels that are structural, the scaffolding that lies underneath our own personal stories.

Once again, this material can come forth either in the form of impersonal energies and forces, or as discrete entities. For example, ancestral material is often experienced as a thicket of intergenerational trauma, racial trauma, or issues related to culture and heritage that need to be untangled. Alternatively, it can be experienced as visitation from the spirits or ghosts of specific ancestors. In the case of past life material, the journeyer may experience feelings, memories, emotions, or other phenomena that seem to come from previous incarnations; or, they may be visited by a previous self, or experience becoming that previous self for a time, seeing through those eyes.

For me, a major part of my experience of the Below was what I would call ancestral trauma. My late grandfather had a difficult upbringing in Colombia, and we were never allowed to speak to him about his family or background. But, late in life he revealed to a family member that he was half indigenous. That’s about all I knew about that side of my family heritage, and to be honest, I hadn’t thought about it in much detail or looked into any information about indigenous Colombian people.

But, when I had that Kundalini event where the serpentine body deva revealed herself, one of the things I did to try to understand what was happening to me was to research serpent goddesses. Naturally, I started with Asian goddesses in order to see if I could find an image that matched the description of the one I was experiencing in my visions. I had a clear image in my mind’s eye of what I was looking for. I found a few images online of Kundalini, Nagkanyas, and other Asian serpent spirits, and Echidna from Greek mythology, but nothing was fitting perfectly.

Then, one day, I had a visionary experience where again I saw this goddess, but also some other imaginal symbols — a jaguar, an Indigenous person’s face, a waterfall in a jungle. This made me think to look for a serpent goddess associated with indigenous South American cultures. A fraction of a second after typing a few Spanish keywords into Google, I found myself breathlessly staring at the exact image I had been seeing in my mind, a statue called “Bachué, diosa generatriz de los chibchas” (i.e., “Bachué, Mother Goddess of the Chibchas”) sculpted by the Colombian artist Rómulo Rozo in 1925 (see Fig. 3).

FIG. 3. Bachué, diosa generatriz de los chibchas, Rómulo Rozo, 1925.
(Source: Wikimedia.)

This image of Bachué would become the single most powerful symbol in my journey through the Below, the organizing image of my entire imaginal world, and my principal spiritual teacher. I already mentioned that this goddess is none other than my body deva. What’s significant to emphasize here in this section about ancestors is that, although you might expect that such a tremendously impactful image would have arisen from one of the Asian religions I had spent such a huge amount of my life studying and practicing, it arose out of my ancestral heritage, even though I knew next to nothing about that culture.

Once I knew that this image was coming from my Indigenous roots, this part of my heritage opened up for me a great deal. In the succeeding months, I began to experience more and more imaginal phenomena related to South America. Over those same months, through a series of really astonishing synchronicities, I also came into possession of photos, ID cards, and other memorabilia from my Colombian grandfather’s parents and grandparents — people whose very existence was never allowed to be mentioned in my family. My heritage was coming alive, and was intervening as an autonomous force into my life!

However, as my indigenous ancestry came more into focus, the portion of my DNA that comes from European settlers in South America did as well. Catholic imagery became much more pronounced in my imaginal world, introduced both by my maternal and paternal side. Now, I found myself imaginally reckoning with what felt to be a conflict between two different sides of my own genetic code. I experienced visions of the genocide of one side of my ancestry perpetrated by the warfare and violence of the other. The details of how those visions played out and how they came into resolution are a story for another time. For now, I just want to reiterate yet again how important it is to engage with the imaginal symbols or images. The more interest you take in them, the more you allow them to unfold and reveal deeper and deeper resonances.

Another type of experience that I want to draw out here is how individual ancestors can allow you to see through their eyes or inhabit their bodies in a kind of time-bending experience. I’ll turn it over to Jack again for a story about this kind of interaction with one of his ancestors:

I was in Marseilles traveling with my partner at the time and we went on a small boat to go to one of the islands off the coast. It’s the first time since I’d started to awaken that I was on the Mediterranean Sea. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was in the British Navy, a commander of a destroyer during the Second World War, and his ship was sunk by German U boats in the Mediterranean, and he spent three years as a prisoner of war.

And, when I was on the sea, I suddenly started getting these images flashing into my mind from the bridge of a warship. It was like I was looking through my grandfather’s eyes, and feeling what he was feeling.

And through his eyes I saw this little speck on the horizon on the sea. And then I saw a flash and I realized he had just seen the guns go off on an enemy warship. And it was his first time that happened and he froze and was so afraid, because he realized this isn’t a simulation anymore; this is real. That’s actual artillery fire from a warship firing at my ship, and I’m responsible for the lives of all of these men. And I remember the fear, and the shock and disbelief.

But what it’s done is helped me understand him and what he went through and the way that his experiences, the fear that he had, have been a part of my own life. And through connecting with him I’ve been more able to release that fear. It’s good; it’s cathartic for me.

The kind of catharsis Jack is describing can also come through experiencing past lives. In Above-based spirituality, the emphasis is normally on releasing the trauma or karmic burdens of past lives so that the individual soul can become lighter or more spiritually evolved. In the Below version of past life recall, as always, the emphasis is not to transcend or release but to welcome and fully embody the past, so that it can become liberated to express itself in the here and now.

Here’s my friend Kini describing her encounters with one of her past lives, who emerged as a guide in her shamanic journeying and soul-retrieval practice:

The only way I can describe it is that it was like a spontaneous download. I got this full packet of information about this past life of mine as an African shaman who was very stocky, and strong, and kind of low to the ground, and powerful, very grounded. And I got his name, Umkumbe, his history, and even how he died.

This was just spontaneous. I didn’t reach out, I wasn’t looking, but it just came as a download. I knew he was a guide, but I also knew he was me in a past life. There was a sense of support and grounding, in part because he was so solid. He also had white ash on his body, which was like he was shielded or protected in some way.

Umkumbe has been with me ever since. He’s my shamanic guide, and when I go to do work in the underworld, for myself or for clients, he’s there and supports me and whatever work I need to do, and he’ll heal or guide. I’ll go down into the underworld through a hole in a tree at a specific place where I grew up, go down the tree trunk into the earth, and come out in the underworld. And he’s always there with his cloth laid out and implements, and I’ll sit down with him. And he’ll present me with objects or situations that I must navigate in order to learn a lesson.

Whatever way ancestral and past life materials manifest, what is wanted is a full accounting of all the ways that our being has been shaped by deep history. It turns out that the ego, which has always thought of itself as the master of its own destiny, has been wrong all along. As we learn to welcome, communicate with, and remonstrate with ancestors and past lives, we come to see how little of our present lives have ever been under our control. We come to realize how events long past continue to shape our present experiences in ways that have been invisible, unappreciated, or even denied by the ego. We find out that our genetic and karmic inheritances have given us both blessings and burdens, and realize the steps that need to be taken in order to receive the former and rectify the latter.

Working to unearth, appreciate, and fully embody all of these structural influences allows us to walk through life with a confidence and self-composure that is liberating. A sense of completeness that can only come from thoroughly knowing and understanding the makeup of our being. There are no hidden skeletons in the closets, no shameful secrets we hide from ourselves or the world, no historical wrongs or injustices that we aren’t fully owning and inhabiting.

We will also likely experience our work in the Below being deeply beneficial for the whole chain of ancestors and past lives stretching out into the past, as well as for living family members and children yet to be born. While I was working with my ancestral material, for example, I saw visions of an infinite web of relations, stretched out and interconnected with one another like a vast fishing net. And I saw me stitching and mending this net, retying its frayed ends and washing it clean to restore it to its original vibrant colors, revitalizing this network of ancestral support and connection for all my relations across time and space.

Animals, Nature, and the Elements

Peeling back yet another layer of the Below, we discover that underneath our cultural and genetic heritage there are even deeper layers of unconscious structure, the biological and the elemental, that also want to awaken. Here, all of the same principles we have been discussing will come back into play again, just at a deeper level.

There are many spiritual teachings from the Above that speak of the interconnectedness of nature; the evolutionary process of Gaia; the way that all of life is continually developing toward greater self-awareness, wisdom, and enlightenment. Once again, the insights coming from the Below are not contradictory to those from Above, but complementary as they are oriented in the opposite direction. While the Above approach is to see how individual organisms are ultimately all part of the greater processes and divinity of Gaia, the Below approach finds nature to be filled with individual, autonomous forces and entities with will and agency of their own that need to be expressed.

These forces and entities can be associated with animals, plants, cellular, or subcellular life. Or, it can be the whole complex living system of all biological life and organic materials across the planet. Or, the planet itself. Or, the solar system, galaxy, or entire living cosmos. Or, they can be the elemental particles that make up the cosmos — traditionally thought of as the elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Space, but in modern times just as commonly conceived of in terms of the periodic table we learned in chemistry class. Any or all of these might come alive in an Awakening from Below, intervening and communicating with us through imaginal events, imagery, symbols, or in synchronicities, or directly in words.

To give an example of the apparition of autonomous entities of this type, here’s my friend Lisa talking about being visited by animal spirits of various types. She has discovered that they always have lessons or wisdom to share, if only she is able to engage with them and let them do their work:

I would sometimes be visited by giant snakes that would take over my body and slither through my subtle energy field, helping to strengthen and heal any contracted energy points in my system. They would protect me and unravel blocks of trapped fear. Large wild cats would take over and dance through me, teaching me to strengthen myself and feel strong in my body when I have to stand up to others or stand in my truth.

I have learned a lot from these visitors over the years. They would always leave after I fully allowed them to come in and take over my body, when the lessons they came to show me were fully understood. When I would fully allow the process to take place, it always felt like the right thing to be doing in that moment. It felt like a complete alignment, like this is fully what was meant to be happening. I could feel my nervous system strengthen and afterwards I would feel more whole in myself and in my body. They offered me this transformational gift with each and every visit.

One memorable example was when, at the start of this whole process, I found a teacher to work with, but after a short period of time of being with her, I started to get strong hints of intuition that working with her was not very helpful. I could sense deep down that this hurt and traumatized body needed a softer and more loving approach than she had, but didn’t quite know how to find that just yet.

During this time, when I was alone by myself wondering what to do, a snarling protective dog came to visit me. It took over my body, barking and growling through me. It was pointing its energy at her image in my mind, as if to keep her energy away. It was protecting me. When I allowed this process to happen and I received the wisdom of this animal, I knew I had to step away from this teacher, to find someone else to work with. The spirit dog pointed me towards my own inner knowing and helped me to believe in my feelings and my intuition. Once I fully heard the message the dog was sharing with me, it disappeared.

Encounters with nature often blur the lines between the imaginal and the material world. Listen to my friend Misha recount how her relationship with spiders developed on both sides of this divide:

During the past six years of my awakening process, spiders have been repeated visitors, and my relationship with them continues to deepen. I have come to love Spider. I delight when spiders come to visit with me, and I feel especially charmed when they’re exhibiting atypical spider behavior. For years it was the domestic house spider. There was the one who kept visiting at my table when I was in a months-long experience of intense love and divinity, going so far as to crawl on multiple occasions onto the journal I was using. There was the one who gave its life, sacrificing itself willingly like Jesus on the cross, at the center of a rug in the threshold of a doorway I used frequently, “so that I may live.” That was an experience of redemptive love. This past fall, a jumping spider showed up for several weeks. How delightful!

Imaginally, a beautiful black spider with a large furry abdomen and equally long legs recently showed up. I undertook a sequence of five related inner journeys, and she showed up repeatedly then. The first journey involved a huge amount of purging on many levels, which extended for about 24 hours. At one point, while I was on the toilet with another bout of crying and otherwise releasing, She came up very close to my face.

I leaned backward onto the physical support of the seat cover, toilet tank, and the wall behind, letting myself immerse into the whatever it was that needed to be known and felt before it could move on through. As my body was twitching and multiple orifices were releasing their bodily fluids, and as my emotional heart was bleeding and I was re-experiencing the chaotic disorganization of a shattered psyche, Spider suddenly tightly grasped my entire head in her many legs. Her body was pressed up against my face. I was fully embraced in her Love.

This was such a profoundly moving experience — to be held so firmly and tenderly during this difficult and exhausting experience — that just recalling this kind, loving hug now, I cannot help but be moved to tears.

Both Lisa and Misha talk about being visited by animal spirits, but another kind of realization is to experience your own conditioned existence as an animal. Perhaps you experience that your body deva or bodily intelligence has attributes that are animal like, or perhaps you feel various animalistic urges and energies surging within your fleshly body. Perhaps you feel the mammalian urges to seek warmth, to bond, and to feel a sense of belonging in a community. Or the urges common to animals of all types to feed, procreate, and survive. Coming to know some of your behavioral or emotional patterns as expressions of these natural animalistic energies helps you to allow them to autonomously exist and naturally express themselves within your being without shame, judgment, or resistance.

Another thing we can realize and experience is how our bodies are also homes for entire communities of autonomous beings that are not part of us. Scientists estimate that there are about 39 trillion bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microbial cells that live on us and in us, outnumbering the 30 trillion cells that make up our own bodies. This leads us to ask how much of “us” is really “us” in the end? We can, for example, come to understand how our microbiome is expressing itself through food cravings and digestive processes, our general levels of immunity and vitality, or our mood. Each one of those alien cells has its own genetic inheritance and its own agendas beyond the control of the ego.

Descending even further into the microscopic, we can also experience how we are conditioned at the molecular level. How do hormones like testosterone and estrogen dictate what we think, what we feel, and how we behave? How do neurotransmitters, cortisol levels, and other aspects of the body’s biochemistry drive and shape every moment of our lives. Beyond the molecular is the layer of elemental conditioning, where we can find the powers and energies of the natural elements at work within our bodies and minds. Each of these can potentially can be experienced as its own consciousness or entity exerting autonomous forces on us.

Tapping into these aspects of nature can be powerfully transformational. Perhaps I’ll illustrate by relating a story from my own experience about the time I visited the Niagara Falls. If you have never been there, this is truly a wonder of the natural world. This massive waterfall sees 3000 tons of water, or nearly 700,000 gallons, passing every second. I did not expect that standing on the edge of the falls would be such a visceral and overwhelming experience. The deafening roar of the water seemed to shake the ground, my body, and my entire being.

At that point, I was well into my Descent and had a lot of experience with entities and energies, so I responded to this power by asking the falls to come into a dialogue with me (see the next chapter for this kind of technique). I found that relating to water in this way was different than speaking to entities such as animal spirits and ancestors, who have a more individual presence. It was like I was meeting the full force of the elemental nature of water, an impersonal but enormously powerful energy. It was not a dialogue of words, but rather of sensations.

As I opened to feeling the immense power of the sheer volume of water, letting it in and surrendering to its sensations, it felt like a downward torrent of water flooded through my torso as all of the energy in my body flushed downwards. It was like there was a drain in my perineum, where the rushing water fell down into a bottomless chasm. It was an intense visceral experience, but it also felt both purifying and healing. It felt like the falls were teaching me something about the way my energy system worked.

In time, I learned that this teaching from the Niagara Falls was a tremendous gift. It helped me to learn to tune into a downward flush of energy in my abdomen whenever I feel ungrounded or scattered. It’s now become something as automatic as muscle memory. I can just exhale once, and the whole energy in my torso drops down through that drain in the bottom, leaving greater relaxation and balance.

My experience encountering the power of the elements concentrated at a particular natural site like the Niagara Falls is not unique. If you are interested in reading more stories specifically involving engaging with the wild and learning how to cultivate a relationship with its imaginal power, I can heartily recommend Bill Plotkin’s book Soul Initiation, which largely focuses on these types of energies and entities.

The bottom line is that, in the Below, rather than Transcending nature, we come to experience ourselves as intricately enmeshed in a web of relationships with all sorts of natural energies and entities. We also begin to experience our own bodies as inseparable parts of nature. We are in relationship with all of the other aspects of nature that make up the planet we live on, and are intricately tied to all of its environments and ecosystems.

These deeper animalistic and natural layers of conditioning lie underneath the mental, emotional, biographical, and even ancestral levels. We may have learned a number of scientific facts about these deeper biological and material structures, and we may be used to thinking about all the ways that they are interconnected parts of Gaia. But in the Below, we can also experience encounters with these as autonomous forces and entities. While Above-based traditions emphasize Transcendence of the natural world and the evolution of Gaia in the direction of increasing spiritual virtue, here in the Below we invite the whole of the material and animal world to come forward as it is. We welcome it all — sublime grace and bloody violence alike — every grain of sand and every molecule of water — to become alive, to manifest in our lives, and to speak their authentic truths. By being welcomed, these aspects are all liberated to join in the process of our awakening.

Here’s a quote beautifully capturing this sentiment from Jack’s first interview on the Nonduality Podcast by Nic Higham (as usual, slightly edited):

It’s like a descent from kind of this heady witness consciousness, down into the heart, and into this really open loving consciousness that united me with humanity. I felt this descent almost like the roots of a tree going down. And it feels like it’s just gone down into the heart of the earth — and this is where it’s really difficult for me to talk about this stuff without crying, because it gets so intimate and personal — but it’s descended into Mother Earth.

I can feel her spiritually, and it’s a difficult thing to describe, but it’s almost as if I can feel a void open beneath me, like a spiritual void of awareness, that just goes down into her and we have a relationship like that. We’re connected through our spirit, and it’s so intimate and supportive and wonderful. I know I’m her child. This isn’t an idea that I’m trying to think up; I know that as a spiritual experience, something that I feel..

And that sense of unity consciousness where I look at another being and it’s like I’m looking in the mirror — I get that when I look at trees and when I look at mountains and the water. I know that I’m looking at the greater part of myself when I look at those things. And to me, they aren’t “things.” To say that is kind of blasphemous, because those are beings, and I love them. And I have a very intimate connection with them and they teach me. I feel like I am just a part of them, and I am just trying to catch up and learn what they’ve known for a long time. And they are teaching me.

Seeing the Above from the Below

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Awakening from Below is a different process than Awakening from Above. Each has altogether different insights, experiences, and goals. Moreover, different people may have different experiences with the relationship between Above and Below. Some people will be thrust into the Below and will become completely absorbed there for a time. Others will feel like they are oscillating between Above and Below or intertwining or blending the two together. As I mentioned previously, the latter was very much what happened to me. It was only after profound nondual awakening experiences that my Descent began. Consequently, the perspectives and insights I had gained in the Above always informed my experience of the Below and vice versa. In fact, for me, both Above and Below were fused together in ways that are difficult to separate out after the fact. I am only talking about it in those terms here because I think it is useful to isolate Above and Below as a relatively separate realms or processes for purposes of clarifying what’s distinct about the Below.

With all of that in mind, here in this section, I want to give you a sense of how the Above can look from Below. In the first place, you should know that it’s entirely possible that, at least at times, the detached transcendence of nonduality (of either the self-as-awareness or loss-of-self variety) is completely shattered. It’s quite common to experience a kind of self/other relationality returning when you’re in the Below, through which you relate and engage with all of the imaginal forces and entities we’ve been talking about. So, for example, even though you have clearly seen that there is no separate self, you may still find yourself engaging in dialogue with bodily intelligence, sexual energies, spirits, ancestors, and others in a second person (“I” and “you”) mode. Or, even though you have significantly dissolved your perception, you still may find that imaginal phenomena have a vibrant, tangible sense of reality. Or, even though you have in the past experienced deep peace and equanimity, you may now not be able to find a detached position from which to engage with the Below; everything may seem genuinely sacred, or terrifying, or both.

The important thing to emphasize here (once again) is that nothing is wrong. Your awakening is not lost; you’re not backsliding; there’s no problem to fix. On the contrary, the process of Descent and your sojourn in the Below actually represents a deepening of your spiritual path. For some unknown reason, you are one of the chosen few who have the opportunity to awaken both the Above and Below. If you haven’t yet finished your work in the Above, you’ll get back to that in due time — whether tomorrow or in a few years. For now, you will need to focus on learning a different skillset to be able to work on the portion of your awakening process that lies in the Below. It may truly be inconceivable from where you sit today, but you will eventually see the Descent and the Below as equally valued and equally inalienable parts of the awakening of your whole being.

While you are down here in the Below, you might continue to experience qualities of the Above and even may see accelerated growth in those areas. For example, insights you gain from dark imaginal phenomena might deepen your appreciation of divinity or open heartedness. In my case, all kinds of imaginal entities enveloped me in fields of radiance and love and taught me how to access aspects of the Above.

To give you just one example, as I was exploring the ancestral burdens and gifts of my paternal grandmother’s line, which traces from South America back to Spain, I felt a lot of sadness and loss. But, I also felt a gentle loving presence that gave hope and solace to generation after generation of women in this lineage. As I was communicating with these female ancestors, they revealed to me that this presence, which they had cherished and passed down from mother to daughter for over a millennium, was none other than the Virgin Mary.

A routine part of how I interact with ancestors is to ask them if there is anything I can give to them or do for them. When I asked them this question, this group of women collectively asked me to honor the Virgin Mary. They explained that their intergenerational transmission of Mary’s blessings had been interrupted by my late grandmother, who had lived a completely secular life, and they wanted me to revive this connection.

This was a difficult thing they asked of me. At this point in time, I had no interest in Christianity, least of all praying to Catholic deities. But, I also I knew enough at that point in time to take it into consideration anything asked of me by my ancestors instead of just saying “no.” So I did it. It so happens that there’s a major international Marian shrine right up the road from my house, and I went up and paid a visit. I bought a small devotional pendant, and brought it home. I wasn’t sure if I was going to actually use it on my altar or just keep it in a drawer, but I was willing to try to engage at least once with what the ancestors were asking of me.

Anyway, to my surprise, the very first time that I called upon Mary in my morning practice, I felt such a strong presence of divine love and protection that I have never turned back. The Virgin Mary (who I, like my grandmothers, call “María”) immediately took her position as the principal manifestation of love and protection in my imaginal world. A few years later, I even made a pilgrimage to the Vatican City and bought a decent-sized sculpture of her that has a central location on my altar today. Most importantly, through engaging directly with the figure of María, I have learned from her various techniques for invoking her loving qualities and imbuing my life with them through a brief daily ritual. She has remained a nearly constant presence in my life since that time.

So, that’s one example of how a teaching from the Below can directly lead to greater engagement and connection with the Above. Another kind of experience that is worth talking about is what is in neo-shamanic circles called “dismemberment.” This is an experience where you imaginally undergo death, either in order to metamorphose into a new type of being or to learn your place in the cosmos. In a true dismemberment, you feel utterly torn apart both energetically and emotionally. Here’s an account Jack told me about a highly emotional visionary experience he had with a past life, in which he underwent dismemberment:

It’s funny because there’s a part of me that rationally can’t believe that this is true, this memory. But every time I speak about it, I almost inevitably burst into tears telling this story. My body feels it so deeply. These memories are very vivid. I remember it very clearly and I remember the emotions connected to it as if it’s my own experience.

I remember in a previous life being the high priestess of a community in Celtic Britain and the responsibility of that, knowing that what I say is going to change what happens to everyone in my community. And I know these people and I love these people.

Knowing that the Romans were invading and had been brutally murdering people in neighboring villages, I went to the woods to perform a sacrifice for divination to find out what I should do. There was this deer that I loved and I could communicate with it telepathically. It had agreed to be sacrificed for the good of the community. So, I killed this deer that I loved feeling so grateful, so much love for this deer. And I did this divination using its organs and blood and found that the best course of action would be for me to turn myself over to the Romans.

So I did that, and they took us, and I remember being burnt alive at the stake. (I don’t know if that’s actually what the Romans did to Celtic priestesses, but that’s how I remember it.) And, as I was dying, I remember feeling so sad. It wasn’t for me; it was for my community. I felt like I’d let them down, I’d failed, and it felt awful.

But, then as I was dying, the spirit of Gaia entered me, and I knew so completely that every single thing that was happening was for Gaia’s evolution, for my evolution as a living spirit of this planet. And that I and all of my community are Gaia, and that all of the Romans committing these crimes against us are also Gaia. And the sense of separation between us completely disappeared, and I entered a state of deep peace, because I knew that nothing was wrong, and everything was happening for love.

And then I died in the body, but my consciousness expanded out into the infinite. And, I saw Lord Shiva as this huge golden deity, so magnificent. And he held out his hand, and in it was a golden orb. And when I looked into it, I understood the nature of creation. That the entire universe is this masterpiece of threads of life, and that I myself as an individual being am one of these threads, and that I’m contributing to this masterpiece that is so incredible. I can’t even put it into words, it’s so beautiful.

And I knew right then that no matter how many times I would have to suffer and die, I would continue to reincarnate because I’m doing it all for the most incredible thing that’s ever been made.

I was also dismembered numerous times by all kinds of imaginal phenomena, spirits, and energies. Invariably, the experiences were difficult in the moment, but powerfully transformative in the end.

Another frequent occurrence in the Below is for imaginal imagery, symbols, and/or body sensations to indicate to you that your “job” or your “mission” is to stitch together the Above and Below into some kind of balance or synthesis. In my own imaginal world, the image of my body as the goddess Bachué — half radiant, half demonic — serves that function. For Misha, it was seeing herself as a winged being:

I was in human form and I had wings extending outward to the sides in the basic shape of a Christian cross (my religion of origin is Episcopalian). Though they were stylized, I knew these were my angel wings. The wing on my left side was a dark black, and the right wing was a bright white. Each shone luminously bright in its own way. Each numinously expressed divinity. These wings/forces were equally present, potent, and balanced, just as my human and divine elements were.

My body was in a twisted posture, with the left hand reaching upward toward a bright glowing orb. My right foot was reaching downward toward the darkness, earth, and the sphere of the unknown. I had a distinct impression of God’s posture in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam; with each limb, I was reaching out to touch the Divine. In a way it felt yin-yang like, but with much more complexity and subtlety than the classic yin-yang symbol evokes for me. My dark side was reaching upward to touch and absorb into the transcendent emanating Light; simultaneously my light side was reaching downward to touch and root into the rich mysterious depths of the Dark. This was such a potent image of unification in multiple dimensions that I felt drawn to execute it as a full sized painting.

Another possibility is that imaginal phenomena might even give you direct teachings about nonduality. One day, deep into my Descent, I was doing my usual meditation walk through the neighborhood when I passed by a gruesome scene. A group of men were cutting down an entire line of thick pine trees at the edge of someone’s property. Were the trees sick? Were they just unwanted? I didn’t know, but I had a sudden strong feeling of sadness and compassion for these fallen beings. As I walked by, I made a point of walking up to the truck and placing my hand on the largest of the tree trunks that were stacked there. “May you be well, grandfather,” I said to the fallen tree. “And all of your kin as well.” I continued on my walk, my hand smelling of pine sap.

About an hour later, as I ended my walk and night was falling, I took a side path near my own house. I’d lived in this neighborhood for about a decade, and had used this path before, but it had never struck me in quite the same way as it did on this particular evening. Cutting in-between two houses to enter the shadowy path, I passed through what seemed to be a tree-lined gateway, which gave me the impression I was crossing a threshold into a consecrated area. Then, in the dimness ahead, I saw a circle of eleven trees arranged in a ring around a thick old oak, kind of like they were assembled for a sacred ritual. My imaginal senses fired up, and I felt that something important was about to occur.

As I approached the ring of trees, it seemed that the old oak was calling me to come close and join the circle. I did, and I noticed that there was a stump in the ground, a thirteenth tree that had been cut down. The oak invited me to stand on top of the stump, facing inward toward the center of the circle, and to take my place among the trees. I stood there, a guest among the tree folk, for as long as I could as the moon rose and the stars came out. I could have told you this story back when I was talking about nature and animal spirits, because I was acutely aware in that moment of how hard it was for me, in this animal body, to stand still for such a long time. The trees were showing me that they had infinitely more patience and stillness than I did. As I finally gave up, I thanked them for this lesson and turned to leave, and they invited me to return in the future.

I made a point of passing by that grove every day for the next few months. Each time, I would stand on the stump, stilling my body and mind, and staying as long as possible. I also started sitting at the base of the oak for a while as well, just to continue to savor the stillness even after I could no longer stand. Over those nights, the ring of trees started teaching me to do what they called “listening like a tree.”

As I sat listening to the sounds of the rest of the world passing by with all of the energy and movement of “unrooted” animal life, something happened to my hearing. I experienced the dissolution of sensory phenomena. Sound broke down into a stream of tiny particles. Eventually, I saw that those tiny particles of phenomena were not actually particles after all. They were like minuscule energy packets that imploded upon themselves before they even took shape.

Over time, I would lean closer still and learn to apply these insights not only to hearing but to all the other senses as well. Listening like a tree, seeing like a tree, feeling like a tree, thinking like a tree, and so forth, I would soon experience how the whole of reality appears to be fizzing in and out of existence every nanosecond. How each moment is born out of and disappears back into the void so fast that it never really happens in the first place.

The point of this the story is to give an example of how the Below can teach us about even the subtlest aspects of the Above. The trees in that grove gave me the crucial insight into nonduality and the emptiness of all phenomena, escorting me right up to the very top of the journey of Transcendence. (Come to think of it, maybe I’ll have to rewrite that story about the Buddha yet again, centering on the wisdom of that tree he was sitting under!)

The Abyss

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
(Background image source: vecteezy.com.)

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!

Coherence

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.

Bringing Home the Elixir

In Awakening from Above, we become purified of delusions, constructs, and flawed conditioning. In the crucible of the Below, on the other hand, our shortcomings are not shed; they are forged into diamonds. Coherence makes it clear that the totality of your being is the elixir. Your traumas, troubles, fears, and wounds are the elixirs. Your body and its history — biographical, intergenerational, and karmic — are the elixirs. Every aspect of your entire being, without exception, are integral, necessary parts of this sacred, blessed whole.

Of course, your equanimity, nondual realizations, open-heartedness, divinity, and other Above qualities are all elixirs too. Elixirs flow both from Above and Below in equal measure. Unlike the elixirs from the Above, however, the elixirs you find in the Below can be deeply unsettling to ego-selves. They will not match the fantasies that egos have about what spirituality is all about. So-called spiritual people will reject these elixirs, and it’s very possible your community and loved ones might as well — just like you yourself always used to do in the past. But, just like during the rest of your transit through the Below, you’ll now have no choice but to surrender to what’s happening. Once the Return begins, you simply must find a way to bring these Elixirs back home to the Middle, even if you become hated or persecuted for it. Even at the expense of your life (just ask Jesus, who was killed for sharing his!).

Listen to Jack describe how his childhood traumas turned into elixirs, and how this result differed from his Above-influenced expectations:

When I came into spiritual awakening, I thought the goal was up and out: escape. I ascend out of all of my problems and that’s it; I’m done. I was running away from my darkness. But what has happened more and more over time is that I’ve stopped seeing the darkness as the opposite of light. And I’ve entered into it and embraced it without any need to change it.

There’s nothing wrong with it. There’s no right or wrong here; the darkness simply is what it is. It’s rich, and it’s beautiful, and it’s interesting, and it’s to be met with dignity. The darkness deserves dignity, and you’re not giving it that dignity when you’re telling it that it should be something else.

From this perspective, it seems like these traumas I carry are almost like these nodes of wisdom. They’re parts of the goddess that are waiting to be found, and once found and met and tenderly embraced, they contain the wisdom and the compassion of the goddess. Her wisdom and compassion flows through them.

Each of these nodes is part of a network of traumas that exist inside the earth and inside our bodies, not only as individuals but within our collective body as humanity. By meeting this trauma, it causes a ripple effect, a chain reaction of healing that moves throughout the whole system.

Having learned how his traumas are actually his gifts, Jack now meets with clients through workshops, private sessions, YouTubes, and podcasts, helping them to heal and liberate their own “nodes of wisdom.” In order to do that, Jack had to create what Plotkin calls a “delivery vehicle for his soul’s gifts,” a mechanism for bringing the elixirs he has discovered within the depths of the Below out into the Middle. To make that happen, he needed to walk away from a career in medical research in order to establish a full-time teaching and healing practice called My Rising Rose Sanctuary of Divine Healing.

In my own case, I was elated to find that my delivery vehicle was already primed and waiting for me upon my Return. Unlike Jack, I discovered to my surprise that I have a “day job” that doesn’t conflict with the elixirs I have gathered in the Below. Even this part of my self fell into coherence: I could realized I could meet my own needs for livelihood while also delivering my soul’s gifts and helping others. What could be more perfect?

The book you are reading right now is also one of the elixirs forged in the Below that I must deliver. Writing this didn’t quite fit in with my day job, so I decided to do so under the name Oholomo, “the light bearer,” a title that was whispered to me in the middle of the night when I was in the throes of the Descent. The point of using a pen name is to deflect attention away from me personally, while still being able to release this elixir out into the world so that it may be helpful to others.