[This is Part II in my series on Narrative Alchemy. Please see Part I: Seeking Flame: Calcination in Narrative Alchemy before proceeding to this section.]
“My adepts stand upright; their head above the heavens, their feet below the hells. But since one is naturally attracted to the Angel, another to the Demon, let the first strengthen the lower link, the last attach more firmly to the higher.”
Aleister Crowley
From the flame of calcination, we are cast into the abyss, the void, the chasm where meaning is suspended and darkness cradles us. This is Dissolution. Here we are stripped of illusory ideas of who we believed we were and why we have arrived. Narrative itself is torn away from us as though it too were simply a story told to us from childhood and hadn't meant anything at all. To be bereft of meaning and narrative is at once terrifying. To be without the narrator, after all, is to be without god. Exiled to the abyssal wood, grief and sorrow seem distant comforts. To be sure, the monstrous trap of Nihilism (the very antithesis to narrative) presents here and devours many who have come upon this journey.
Dissolution requires one to allow meaning and narrative to be relinquished to the greater will of the universe. In essence, it is a surrender, a declaration that what has been known is now unknowable and untrue, and a severance of the preconceived self from the self which now hangs above the abyss. This process is disconcerting as the self that was once believed to be the true nature or personhood is shown to be a muddied, false imitation; an amalgamation of survival mechanisms, expectations, projections and desires. One may find that beyond this false vessel (or “self”), there seems to be only chaos without identity or order.
We arrive at the threshold of existential and spiritual crisis. One may question existence itself and its purpose. The meaning of one’s lived experience, one’s beliefs and declared belief in this or that creed or doctrine appear as empty shells, void of any true consequence or purpose.
Too easy is it here, to fall into meaninglessness and Nihilism, given that what has been foundation and pillar for one’s understanding of what is and what is not has been turned upon its head, presented to us as an anti-image of what we thought we were. The road forward, therefore, requires us even to release the attachment to the feeling of being lost, bereft of meaning, and purposelessness. To give up the proverbial ghost or the remnant ashes of the self left by the process of calcination.
To remain attached to the outdated self and narrative is to remain in the abyss: to remain conditioned to one’s programming, to be yoked to an illusion.
We must, then, allow the abyssal waters to clear away the debris of our psychic constellation. We must surrender our idea of self and our narrator to become again the child, knowing not self nor god; meaning nor narrative. This process unfolds slowly and progresses in tandem with one’s willingness to allow it. Resistance manifests manifold here and in countless guises. Denial may appear as the demon; Fear as the devil; Shame as the golem; trauma as the apocalyptic dark lord. These aren’t true adversaries. Rather, these are protective measures against the ambiguity of rewriting our most significant narrative.
If trauma has previously been experienced, this procession can be grueling and of the utmost difficulty. Here we must face and examine injustice, abuse, pain, shame, grief and rage in order to free our inner child from their vices and our selves from their repetition in our spiritual narrative. Therapy and professional aid in this arena are highly beneficial, if not utterly necessary. It is at this point that our Virgil must appear. Not as a healer or a spiritual master leading us to greater spiritual heights, but rather as an anchor and guiding light amongst the treacherous water of dissolution.
It cannot be understated that this progress is time consuming. For some it may require months, years or decades. This is a critical point of impasse, however, if one cannot successfully free and recover that state of being known as the inner child. One’s demons, golems, devils and dark lords cannot follow us further. They are structures of our previous program and will not survive the alchemical process (that is, the rewriting of the narrative). It is a dangerous road to attempt to skip ahead of this process, one which can very easily lead one into madness where the narrative is reincarnated, warped and twisted into panic and emptiness.
It is essential to recapture the curiosity and ability to play (or, as I am fond of calling it: dance) with the world around us, with existence itself before we can begin to craft a narrative. Existence coils around us, a serpent ready to entice us with the dance of wisdom and understanding. All that is within us that is resistant to change, to allowing the narrator to return in a new form, must be given to the waters of dissolution.
It is only the inner child that can release that which it has become a vessel for. The adult will too readily fall into traps of realism and rationality to allow this process to come to completion. The inner child, however, yet holds the key to the mystical imagination or the creative genius and therefore must be recovered from the demon of sin and the angel of virtue. Both are antithetical to imagination, creativity and mystical union with the narrator or god-self. By both angel and demon, the ego is made prisoner to duality.
Now that the abyss has been crossed, the crucible is filled with the tempestuous waters of our emotion, habitual thought and behavioral patterns, our demons and angels, our grievances and our shattered pieces of narrative, the next step in the process of narrative alchemy can be undertaken: Separation.
It is here the horizon of liberation becomes apparent to us. We move slowly in its direction, guided by compassion.