Our lives are built upon an abyss (literally) of terror, which we are largely unconscious of.
It is not just human fear, but an Earthly one – as if, suspended in space itself, hanging there, planet Earth itself feels afraid.
The trapdoor to the basement of terror lies, in my experience, at the base of the body torso. When attention unravels all the way down to that place, it’s as if you hit a bedrock of Fear. Fear Itself. As real as the field of gravity, nothing abstract, I have experienced this Fear as a self-existing energetic field.
This field of Fear Itself is absolutely terrifying to encounter. On top of this “Basement of Terror” is built virtually all the conditioning and strategies of the bodymind. When that chamber is closed off, sealed (as with most of us) attention goes upwards and tries to stay there, either in the heart or usually in the head. When you allow yourself to unravel all the way down to the basement of Terror, however, (or are plunged into it more likely – I didn’t exactly volunteer to go there!) all bodymind strategies are undone.
Because it is so terrifying, however, sooner or later you find you reach out for something to make it go away/get yourself out of there. What you then reach for is revealed to you as your conditioning and your strategies. From there you can begin to understand all the things you’ve reached for in your life – all of which have ultimately failed you.
I fall into this place semi-frequently. Each time is terrifying and I couldn’t “hold” the place if I hadn’t Realised my fundamental identity in Consciousness. Even then, I can only “hold” it for so long and reach out for my props (no shame). However, I’m beginning to be able to go there longer and longer without doing so.
The “benefits” of being able to do this is to learn to really hold oneself there, even in the depths of terror, and not go seeking unnecessarily in reaction to it.
(c) 2004 Gill Smith