The ABYSS
The eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood-A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is-Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
The Abyss
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The Journey of the addict takes her/him into the bottom of
an abyss where we surrender and begin the ways of
transformation or we may instead begin to rot in hellish
proportions
In the abyss we look straight in the face of our humiliation
and demise and here is the place of asking for support
We are fearful of the abyss and yet fascinated at the same
time
Is this not the impetus for addiction itself?
The Myth and
Legend of the Abyss
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Creative chaos
No-thingness
Other side of
being
The Whole
Collective
Unconscious
Blue Dragon
Cave
Creative Chaos
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Open to authenticity
Our very being is to question what it means to be - this is what our
addictions are asking of us (Heidegger)
If we must enter the chaos to create ourselves (to rediscover) we must be
prepared to accept discomfort, anxiety, restlessness, frustration, boredom,
loneliness, fear, panic, depression, tears, laughter, hunger, desire, brooding,
silence, and finally the expression of a new being
Most the above experiences are what we are trying to avoid in our addiction
- paradoxically - addiction can manifest all of the above.
We then may ask ourselves
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Who is experiencing these modes of “being”?
Inside the Abyss
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Once inside the abyss he / she must find the meaning time
there and a way to return
It can be fraught with anxiety and panic, but their is work to
be done there; work me must do ourselves.
In our addictions the abyss is our bottom
But as opposed to escaping (what happens in addiction) we
are held “there” and learn something from it and in our
return to the world we must not forget what was learned
their.
The Abyss of
Dwelling
•Rilke says this of the abyss...
•But this very abyss is full of the darkness of
God, and where one experiences it, let him
climb down and howl in it (that is more
necessary to cross over it). Only to him for
whom the abyss too has been a dwelling place
do the heavens before him turn about and
everything deeply and profoundly of this world
that the Church embezzled for the Beyond,
comes back...
Nietzsche Reporting
on the Abyss
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The creative process demands a descent into
darkness in order to bring something new into being
The addict has unconsciously been hung on the peg
of humiliation and trembled in terror before the
chaos in (her/his soul) this is the gift of the abyss
We need to burn the controller of rational thought
and this is found in the abyss of “fertile disorder” (pg.
221)
In the Abyss we
Sacrifice the Ego
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In our addiction we praise the ego and run side by side
with the “killer”
Our search takes us initially to the divine “seizing” the
headlong rush of feelings - eventually though - this rush
ends with the futility and knowledge that the ego cannot
offer up a “true god”
Instead we brought face to face with the a fathomless
abyss (the bottom maybe in addiction) and our if the ego
is sacrifice we may find something unexpected their
Moment of Surrender
Rilkean’s Conclusions and
Engendering the Dark Night of the
Soul
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Falling back on Basic Trust
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Leap of faith
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We have no reason to harbor any mistrust
against our world, for it is not against us. If it
has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has
abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are
dangers, we must try to love them. And if only
we arrange our life in accordance with the
principle which tells us that we must always
trust in the difficult, then what now appears to
us as the most alien will become our most
intimate and trusted experience.