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“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche
What exactly is the abyss? It’s a philosophical metaphor for existential dread. The abyss is the place the mind goes when you shed all your mental, psychological, and spiritual armor.
When you strip yourself of all your comfortable beliefs, all your mollycoddling dogmas, all your cultural conditioning, and you’re left with nothing but the sinister nothingness of absolute infinity—that’s the abyss.
When your utter smallness is crushed by the heavy weight of the universe, and your flash-in-the-pan lifespan is measured against a gaping eternity, and you are left with nothing more than the breath in your body and the fleetingness of the moment—that’s the abyss.
When all the buffers you fearfully set in place fall away, and you are stripped of your comfort zone, and you are left with nothing but barebones mortal dread—that’s the abyss.
But nothing is more transformative than an abyss rightly seen. Nothing is more cleansing. Nothing is more sharpening. Nothing is more empowering. Potentially.
It is only potentially, because most will blink. Most will balk and turn away. Most will be too afraid to embrace the dark. Most will lose out on the greatest potential for spiritual growth that could possibly be handed to them.
Don’t be like most people. Don’t blink. Dare to stare. Challenge the abyss to a staring contest and then win the damn thing. Open yourself up. Have the courage to practice absolute vulnerability. Gaze into the abyss until you see the light.
As it states in the Rosarium Philosophorum, “When you see your matter going black, rejoice, for this is the beginning of the work.” Indeed. Before soul craft, shadow work.
The abyss is the beginning of the work to better yourself. Overcoming hitting rock bottom is the path that leads to greatness. Discomfort is the path. For it is in the trenches where the beast of courage is born. It is in the throes of having everything stripped away where you learn how to adapt and overcome. It is in the abyss, in the lowest of the low, in the fiery underdark of the human condition, where the "roots" of fortitude can be discovered and gain the potential to grow into a "tree" formidable enough to reach the summit.
As Jung said, “No tree can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” Echoing Nietzsche’s profound statement, “Everyone who has ever built anywhere a “new heaven” first found the power thereto in his own hell.”
Get out there. Destroy your illusions. Sink into hell. Subsume your thousand and one snarling demons. Out-monster your plethora of monsters. Integrate your shadow. Incorporate death. Use the abyss as a furnace. Overcome yourself, again and again. Burn yourself of yourself. Then carry your hard-earned ashes to the nest of the Phoenix where rebirth awaits.
As Gustave Flaubert said, “The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror.” So be it. The quicker you can get to the terror, the sooner you can integrate it and make it a part of you (fearless interconnectedness) instead of allowing it to separate you (fearful disconnectedness).
For an ego which has not experienced the abyss (uninitiated), there is only fear, weakness, naivete, and fragility. For the ego that experiences the abyss (initiated), there is courage, strength, wisdom, and antifragility.
Staring into the abyss until you see the light is metaphorically killing the fragile ego (the weakest aspects of yourself) to rebirth the antifragile Soul (the most robust aspects of yourself). It’s double-dog-daring Infinity to sharpen you into a finer instrument. The abyss is a whetstone that you drag your dull ego across to sharpen it into a thing capable of deep inquiry. A thing sharp enough to cut through illusion, delusion, cultural conditioning, religious indoctrination, and false programming.
The abyss is a necessary “evil.” It’s an essential Dark Night. It’s a vital cocoon where the ego is annihilated, reformed, overcome and finally rebirthed into the “butterfly” of the Soul.
If you can stare into the abyss and win the staring contest, then your ego earns its wings. You free yourself to fly higher than yourself. The dark clouds part. The sun shines. The light penetrates the dark as precisely as the darkness needed to penetrate the blinding light of your uninitiated ego. You gain a bird’s eye perspective. You acquire a healthy nonattachment. You give birth to the Oversoul of the Overman.
You are finally ripe for overcoming yourself ad infinitum. You get above pettiness, sentimentality, and placation. The boundaries of your comfort zone transform into a horizon. You transcend pain and pleasure. You transcend rightness and wrongness. You transcend life and death. You see how it is all connected to everything else. You see how God is man awake and man is God asleep, and you can no longer pretend to be sleeping.
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About the Author:
Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.
This article (Gaze into the Abyss Until You See the Light) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.
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