Descent to the Underworld

One of the greatest teachers in my life has been the island of Hawaii, the largest of the seven in the archipelago, and the only one with a volcano that is still active. Right now as I write new land is being created near Kalapana where liquid fire from the earth’s core is flowing into the ocean whose cool touch soothes and sculpts it into a landscape that mirrors the chop and heave of a stormy sea. Though this land looks like water, anyone who has walked into a lava field knows that, unlike water, which gives way when we fall into it, here there is no mercy. This is raw land, razor-sharp, not yet worn down by wind and wave erosion, and the mind, if one is open to this land, becomes equally sharp, manifesting its intentions with the same focused flow as that lava who will not be stopped from reaching the ocean.

And so I find myself again here on Hawaii after fifteen years, not expecting to be on this particular island, since I swore to myself that I would stay on Maui this time--but Maui—who could complain about Maui? Maui--was too soft and mellow and a little moldy from all the rain that made the flowers grow, as well as covered in a far more substantial swathe of concrete than when I was last there. So my abhorrence of Walmart and Costco combined with my fear I would molder, caused me to flee Maui within a week of arriving, flying over to the Big Island, secretly acknowledging that it was the reason I came here. It had been calling me back, and I had answered. I was afraid, but I had to go.

Fifteen years ago I wandered around this island as a hitchhiker taking rides from random strangers and ending up wherever there cars wanted to go. I had a vague and secret intention of finding a story—something I could write about, not believing that my suburban Connecticut upbringing, a fairly tame sojourn in Paris as an au pair (although the hedonistic month in Greece I tacked on at the end of that sojourn was certainly fertile territory), and four years of college where I read so many books I ended up with a major and a minor in English Literature before abandoning my one attempt at a real job (college professor) by dropping out of grad school before the semester even started because I realized I wanted to be a poet, was enough to write about, or at least nothing special. I had no concept of my inner landscape because I had no feeling for it. Without going back to the source of it here, I can only say, in short, that I was completely numb, though I had a flare for drama that made me seem I felt more than everyone else.

This numbness, an inability to feel, is a spiritual disease that has become a cultural epidemic manifesting in the form of addictions of all kinds, physical, mental and emotional. In my mind, addiction is a substitute for ritual. The soul must be fed and the spirits must be acknowledged, maintaining our connection to the earth’s cycles as our own. Since the Industrial Age, these connections have been severed, although the desecration of the feminine aspect of ourselves occurred long before that, somewhere around the time that written civilization arose around 5,000 years ago. If we don’t feed it, the starved soul, craving sustenance in the form of reverence for the gift of life in a human body, and devotion to our own inner growth, begins to devour us in a desperate attempt to make us notice it. Addiction becomes a substitute for ritual. Instead of feeding our souls and the unseen with prayers or offerings of tobacco, we are driven compulsively to alcohol and a host of other mind-numbing drugs: to sex, food, violence, television; and the mental addictions that keep us trapped in cycles of thinking that manifest in an endless feedback of negative experiences which convince us we are not in control of our lives. Addictions are emotional as well, such as addiction to romance/love, which keeps us seeking over and over for someone to fill the holes in our sad and tired bodies that we can only satisfy with acceptance, gratitude, and self-love.

My journey to these realizations began on Hawaii. Fifteen years ago, thumbing my way towards a story, however passively I was going about it, I encountered a force in this land that was far more powerful than anything I had ever experienced before. One of my rides brought me in a circuitous manner to Waipi’o Valley, the mystical home of many Hawaiian kings and warriors, where people still talked of beings like the Night Marchers and the menehune as if they were real. I was enchanted by this place where people talked about mythical beings in their everyday conversation and resolved to go live down in the valley, which was only inhabited by a few taro farmers who mostly drove the mile back up the one-lane road after work. I would have the whole place to myself.

In about two days I had a Hawaiian boyfriend through whom I slipped into local culture, an invitation not readily extended to many haoles (white-skinned people with no breath, no mana, or spiritual force). I have written about our story at length other places, and continue to do so as I am more able, year after year, to express what I went through in that valley, so I will not elaborate on it too much here. Through him, I witnessed firsthand the degradation of spirit and culture that has occurred to the Hawaiians as a result of the loss of sovereignty experienced when they were annexed by a cabal of businessmen backed by the U. S. Congress who turned the guns of their warships on Queen Liliuokalani’s palace. The Queen, rather than seeing her people die, surrendered, though the loss of spirit had been well under way for the century before as the whalers and missionaries streamed toward the island with their different, but equally exploitive visions.

However, this is not a tirade about victims or a call for political sovereignty for the Hawaiian people. It is a call for anyone reading these words to accept that each one of us is responsible for the reality we create as individuals and as a collective force. What mystics have always said has now been proven by scientists, providing us with the proof necessary to convince a materialist world that we are creatures of spirit first. Our physical realities are created by our thoughts, and most importantly our feelings. If this seems impossible to accept consider that many--maybe most of these feelings are unconscious and that we are unaware of them--all the more reason to focus our attention on them so as to create from a place of clarity in order to receive our heart’s desire and reveal our path of service in this lifetime.

But there is also something else at work here—the soul’s desire, which is often at odds with what the ego wants. The soul, our link to the divine, must annihilate the ego, the part of us that has forgotten it is divine. In our materialist paradigm, it is logical that this annihilation will occur at the material level—that we will be stripped of our possessions, beaten or abused, struck with cancer, or by lightning, lose our loved ones in mindless, wasted deaths through war.

These are difficult ideas to accept if one is in an abusive situation, but in my case, it was just this that led me to an awareness—through many years of suffering after the actual experiences occurred—that I wrote myself into a story where I was physically, sexually, emotionally and mentally abused; in which I allowed myself to be degraded and violated my own belief in the sanctity and goodness of life in ways I never would have thought were possible, or that I was capable of.

In a culture stripped of ritual, the most important one being that of initiation, my soul guided me to do it on my own. Viewed from my current perspective, I think I couldn’t have chosen any wiser. Waipi’o Valley is literally known as the gateway to the Underworld in Hawaiian tradition. In the safe container of conscious community, facilitated by elders who have been through the process, the descent into the underworld, while dangerous, and very often painful, is one from which most initiates return. In our time, many do not. They are lost, like many I have known, to heroin or alcohol, dying on bus station floors or alone in apartments with the shades drawn on closed windows. I, too, came close.

Our parents usher into this world, but it is up to us to rebirth ourselves as fully embodied souls who take on the role of maintaining the links between the spirit and material world that create healthy communities of people who abide by the Hawaiian principle of pono, of integrity; who want to live in balance with all of creation and make decisions based on the greater good of all our relations: animal, mineral, plant, here on earth, and with our star families beyond it.

In this time of massive transition on our planet, as the old paradigms of control collapse, we each have the opportunity to become sovereign, in control of our own boundaries, conscious co-creators of a collective vision founded on reverence for life, and devotion to the soul’s path growth toward full realization of its divine origin. To this day I am amazed I survived my unconscious descent into the underworld, and that I made it through the many years after where I numbed the pain of that time with alcohol, food, drugs, and many other mental and emotional addictions like depression, vacating from the present moment, and co-dependency. Over time, as I became aware that I was going through a process of initiation on my own, I was able to let go of my addictions, which, is far easier than these simple words sound. The years of self-abuse, then recovery and healing after my descent in Waipi’o were in many ways more difficult than the original trauma I experienced in the depths of the valley.

It is my hope that those of us who went and survived these traumatic self-initiations will speak out now and share their experience and wisdom with those on the brink of descent into their own underworlds. Not to stop anyone from descending, for this terrifying descent is a necessary part of the journey to becoming a fully embodied human, but to provide markers, breadcrumbs on the path, say, for little lost birds in need of a sustenance so they can keep flying.