The Greeks have a word for that sinking feeling you feel in your gut this today: Katabasis.

Katabasis describes the inevitable sinking in every quest. By definition, katabasis means descent, such as heading downhill, the sinking sun, a military retreat, or a trip to the underworld. We have many words in the English language for such a sinking, but none captures the fateful sinkholes that swallow a heretofore lucky life.

Suzuki Roshi, who brought Zen Buddhism to the U.S., described katabasis more succinctly:

I learned this word from Robert Bly, whose book Iron John, the seminal 1990s book behind the men’s movement, described how men experience the intensity of their wounds through katabasis:

When katabasis happens, a man no longer feels like a special person. He is not. One day he is in college, being fed and housed – often on someone else’s money – protected by brick walls men long dead have built, and the next day, he is homeless, walking the streets, looking for some way to get a meal and a bed.
~ Robert Bly

A switch gets flipped in katabasis. More than a life transition, the rug gets yanked, triggering a pivotal life change. Bly continues:

It’s as if life itself somehow ‘discharges’ him. There are many ways of being discharged: a serious accident, the loss of a job, the breaking of a long-standing friendship, a divorce, a ‘breakdown,’ an illness.

The way down seems… to require a fall from status, from a human being to a spider, from a middle-class person to a derelict. The emphasis is on the consciousness of the fall.

I’ve gone into soul-sucking katabasis many times in my life — when Karen and I raised $30,000 for a film project with Giovanni Mazza, a con-man replica of Donald Trump, and when Karen announced, “I’m moving out of the house,” and when my business partner killed our design firm on the same afternoon that Karen collapsed in my arms from a brain tumor. Did I mention I had four mortgages?

(Read Giovanni’s Gift)

Intergenerational trauma describes the transmission of traumatic experiences across multiple generations within a family

My intergenerational trauma revolves around money. I seem to be the one who plucked that straw, as my two brothers are wildly successful, despite my being the golden child, overflowing with talent and promise — or that’s how my mom would describe it.

I was reflecting the other day on how my father pioneered the high-fidelity industry in his thirties and developed a line of industry-leading amplifiers, receivers, tuners, and speakers, including the first solid-state receiver and the technology for the first FM stereo broadcast.

According to my mom, Avery Fisher (aka the Avery Fisher Hall guy) stole my dad’s designs. Avery has a monument in his name — NYC’s Lincoln Center — and my dad died penniless. That’s what happens when you're vision-driven instead of fighting to protect your cut.

My heart goes out to all the folks who are feeling “that sinking feeling” right now.

Our neighborhood in Atlanta is populated by CDC professionals who live in expensive homes and raise young families. I can imagine their gnawing fear, confusion, and heartache.

I didn’t get laid off, but my finances suck. I spent the last ten years keeping Karen alive, paying for private schooling, and trying to resurrect a collapsed career. I have been around the block enough times to understand that life is a soul-building project — a movie script we were enlisted into without our consent.

Like clockwork, with each foray into Katabasis, I would engage my clever mind, determined to be a loyal, problem-solving, responsible spouse only to discover that the saving grace always comes in through the back door.

My forays into Katabasis created a keen interest in sinkholes.

How do these geologic “kata-basins” suddenly emerge from the Earth? One moment, kids are riding bikes in the cul-de-sac, and the next, an angry chasm swallows the neighborhood.

Take this metaphor on any level you wish: The ground beneath our feet is not as solid as we think. Solid ground is made from dirt, rocks, and minerals. Our “solid selves” are woven from thoughts, patterns, and memories. Water, like spirit, seeps into the underground structure, eroding the limestone and sediment— and continuing the analogy, spirit dissolves our hopes, needs, and expectations.

When the flow of water reaches a tipping point, the subterranean structure collapses into a hole. Katabasis!

The power of katabasis is not in the descent but in facing the bottom. It comes from realizing the nothingness at the heart of every charade. Robert Bly called this ashes. Ashes play a significant role in every culture. On Ash Wednesday, the ashen spot symbolizes death and repentance. Human remains become ashes. And after a raging forest fire, we witness heartbreaking scenes of homeowners sifting through the ashes of their lives. In alchemy, nigredo, or blackness, describes the stage of putrefaction or decomposition that forms the philosopher’s stone — the immortal soul.

Bhagwan changed my understanding of what is sinking.

Bhagwan Awatramani, my teacher of many years, passed away a few days before Trump’s inauguration. Strangely, he left me holding the roadmap — the key to navigating life. As I stared into the abyss this morning, greeting my old friend and nemesis, Katabasis, I was reminded of a phone call Bhagwan and I shared a few years ago:

Bruce: Perhaps this is the place to share my story of woe, about how I discovered that every misfortune carries the seed of fortune, making the two seem inseparable.

Bhagwan: Let me tell you a story. A client of mine moved from India to Dubai to start a business importing electronics. The business was successful at first, but then after a few years, it completely failed. He was forced to go back home to India and start over. I told him, "Look, in misfortune, there's always something fortunate in it. Even if you can't see it now, you'll see it later. Be in trust." He went back to India and his business started booming again. He realized that in Dubai, he had been wasting his time. It was a place without a soul, without culture, just a desert with buildings. But, he couldn't make the decision to go back to India on his own. He had to fail first. Destiny had to push and take him out of Dubai, bring misfortune to him, so that he could proceed to India and find fortune.

Bruce: I think about my dad, who left Chicago and the high-fidelity industry to move to California, only to fail — and how we all flourished. So what made the difference? How did your client find the path of fortune again?

Bhagwan: It wasn’t easy for him to get unstuck from the situation. When you’re identified, it’s hard to get unstuck. The mind can’t get you unstuck; the mind is what put you there. But when you access your Self, this releases you from identification. The business problem may still be there, but you’re not identified with it, so things start flowing. A new situation, a new opinion comes, and things get resolved. It may not be in the way you think. Whether or not you’re able to pay your bills ceases to be the problem. Something else may happen, in which case that problem becomes irrelevant.

Bruce: And this is what it means to let go and be yourself.

Bhagwan: Yes. When you let go, there’s flow. Things start moving. In clarity there’s creativity, there’s flow, there’s abundance. Whether it’s new opportunities or new situations arising, it’s all taken care of. In this awareness, there’s a trust. Not a trust that things will go according to how you think, but trust in whichever way they go. That trust itself is an energy — an energy that prevents you from going into the situation that is causing the suffering.

Bhagwan made this sound easy, but there is great suffering involved. Carl Jung understood this:

This need to fiddle (interfering, helping, correcting, and negating) is inescapable. This morning, as I sat in a funk amid the Worldwide Trumpian Katabasis, I felt the need to “figure it out” and save my little patch of human narrative. Eventually, I decided, “Instead of moping, maybe I can help someone with a post.”

Bhagwan made a distinction between reacting from the mind and a deeper place:

Bruce: I see myself as a creative person. Creative people act from inspiration. I might be meditating and think, "Oh, I should do this. I should try that." When these inspiring ideas arise, are they from the mind, or do they reflect the creative force seeking to manifest?

Bhagwan: Inspiration is not of the mind. Inspiration comes from a deeper place. If you can remain in a state of inspiration and work from there, rather than from your mind, that would produce a different quality of creation.

Bruce: When we talk about thinking, could it be that what’s coming through our thoughts is actually communication from a deeper place?

Bhagwan: The challenge is to not lose that deeper place and get lost in your thoughts. Silence is the creative space. You want your creative actions to come from that place.

It helps to delineate two places: 1) All this chaos in the world right now — a product of the human mind, and 2) the place that is constant and unchanging, like snorkeling beneath the chop of the sea. Bhagwan called this the Silence. He spoke eloquently during a meditation:

Do you see the larger picture of yourself? Not imagining it, not visualizing it. But actually being the larger picture. Is your being the larger picture? An infinite being.

So, why all this complication? Is it great fun? Is it drama? In Sanskrit, we call the theater of the universe, layla — the play of creative energy that manifests in a mysterious way.

Why does it happen? Can you find out? Is it a playfulness? Is it beautiful? Is it out of love? Can you witness the whole phenomenon? Silence is the unmanifest — a creative energy with infinite intelligence, infinite power, and infinite love — a creative energy that manifests.

When do the problems begin? They begin when you start identifying yourself as a form. Is that the start of all problems? All people think they are separate forms. This inevitably creates conflicts, born out of comparison and competitiveness and confusion.

Today the world is experiencing great problems. There is no way out. These problems recur endlessly for thousands of years.

So, is this a cruel joke? Why should we be tormented this way?

It is because the Infinite Being loves to be discovered. The Infinite creates these problems for you so that you find yourself, by freeing yourself from identification to discover your infinite state and being.

Can you see this whole phenomenon? It is a most wonderful movie. Millions of characters, playing their parts perfectly. A movie directed perfectly where everything happens as written in the script.

Are you enjoying the movie? This is only possible when you realize that it’s a movie, only when you can witness the mind. Only then, will you realize that it is a movie. Only then, can you enjoy it as a most magnificent movie.

But if you are not the witness and you are identified with body and mind, even if you call it a movie, you can’t enjoy it. It’s the most horrible movie. A movie full of torment, torture, suffering, heartbreak, and despair.

Why get entangled in this? Why not witness it?

Only silence can witness it. Only in silence can you see it as a movie. In silence, you can see that it’s a movie? A most perfect movie. Nothing has to be changed. With the most perfectly written script and you as one of the actors, you can play your role perfectly, with awareness, and enjoy your role.

This is the wonderful secret in you — waiting to be discovered and longing to be discovered — just as you long to discover it.

Karen and I described this place as buoyancy, and she managed to keep me tethered. In her absence, reading Bhagwan’s words has restored that the deep trust that “everything is going to be okay.”

Love you, Bruce