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"crossing the abyss"- is the same like having "the Dark Night of the Soul" a metaphor used by St John of the Cross..?
there is a also a metaphor used by Carlos Castaneda: " the dark sea of awarenss".. I have experienced that when I had a NDE... words are absolutely useless to describe that.
well you know..the experience itself is beyond words...personal experiences and emotions can not be conveyed through words.. The finger pointing to the Moon is is Not the Moon!
I might be wrong here, specially since my opinion on the topic doesn't exactly align with the popular kids. I believe that the idea of crossing the abbys has that name exactly because it represents failure manifested. There's no crossing the abbys, there's only falling into it, your ego "dies" because once you start searching knowledge, eventually and inevitably you'll realise that nothing makes sense, and nothing means anything. There's no transcendental truth and the metaphysics of it all it's simply far too great for your head.
So to sum it up, everyone on the path is eternally crossing the abbys, from time to time we end up stumbling on something we shouldn't and that provokes agony. After the suffering, life goes on, you "crossed" the problem, but you can't help but noticed that every time it happens reality seems a little more out of place.
You're early in the Work, most of it is probably incomprehensible to you. You can't see any type of finish-line, and so you claim there isn't one just so you can feel like you're at it already. Justifying your own ignorance by saying "there is nothing that can be known to us mere humans!" is pure cope. You change the written definition of it to something mundane and typical that everyone does, you can even do it in your office cubicle, because who hasn't "crossing a problem" in life? That way you can claim to have done it, several times in fact!
This type of mundane perspective is dangerous, it nullifies mystery, it cancels out any desire to explore or grow because it assumes there's nothing comprehensible or even attainable out there, that everything that can be known is known. Most egregious of all is that it turns something momentously difficult to reach and dangerous to accomplish into something everyone is doing eternally without even knowing it.
Might be, but funnily enough, everyone that claims to have crossed the abbys end up doing exactly what you would expect from someone who didn't. So really, I don't believe it's that big of a deal
Might be, but funnily enough, everyone that claims to have crossed the abbys end up doing exactly what you would expect from someone who didn't. So really, I don't believe it's that big of a deal
Might be, but funnily enough, everyone that claims to have crossed the abbys end up doing exactly what you would expect from someone who didn't. So really, I don't believe it's that big of a deal
Is not that hard, we are talking about a subjective and complex rite of passage that among other things kills your ego.
Ironically everyone that claims to succeed is basically the incarnation of a popstar, full of themselves and incapable of having an normal argument without calling the other part childish, see what I meant?
We end with 3 options:
1- The process is not that deep and don't kill shit, you pass through it and that's it
2- 90% of the population that claimed to succeed are lying.
3- The process itself is a lie
I personally am inclined to believe options 2 or 3
Is not that hard, we are talking about a subjective and complex rite of passage that among other things kills your ego.
Ironically everyone that claims to succeed is basically the incarnation of a popstar, full of themselves and incapable of having an normal argument without calling the other part childish, see what I meant?
We end with 3 options:
1- The process is not that deep and don't kill shit, you pass through it and that's it
2- 90% of the population that claimed to succeed are lying.
3- The process itself is a lie
I personally am inclined to believe options 2 or 3
Usually people who speak about work, don't do the work. So the 2 is probably correct. Also if they don't do much of work and they do the work, then 1 is true about them.
Crowley said he crossed the abyss in 1909. Regardie was his secretary roughly 2 decades after that. What he left out of his bio of Crowley was his propensity to have histrionic fits (telling his close associate Miller/Hyatt). So, there's the value of this great mystical attainment- you still have histrionic fits. lol
Crowley didn't know shit. He had no idea about how to transmute into a higher immortal subtle body. But clueless people keep fellating him. Sorry to be so blunt, but if you want to get anywhere you need to put on your thinking cap.
Crowley said he crossed the abyss in 1909. Regardie was his secretary roughly 2 decades after that. What he left out of his bio of Crowley was his propensity to have histrionic fits (telling his close associate Miller/Hyatt). So, there's the value of this great mystical attainment- you still have histrionic fits. lol
Crowley didn't know shit. He had no idea about how to transmute into a higher immortal subtle body. But clueless people keep fellating him. Sorry to be so blunt, but if you want to get anywhere you need to put on your thinking cap.
"how to transmute into a higher immortal subtle body" that's exactly the goal in taoist alchemy... !! by the way, Mantak Chia and also Michael Winn are teaching these methods.
For those of you who have had the experience of crossing the abyss, how did that experience manifest for you?
I'm thinking of this in Crowleyan/OTO terms, where to reach a certain point of the path of knowledge/initiation/growth/development, it is necessary to "cross the abyss". It has been described as a melting of personality into the "All", but I'm curious what that really looks like physically/mentally for a person.
I won’t speak for Crowley’s map, but I can speak from experience with ordeals that rhyme with what people call “crossing the Abyss.” And the first thing I’ll say is this: it’s not fireworks, visions, or some dramatic ego‑death fantasy. It’s quieter and stranger than that.
For me, it showed up as a kind of unmaking. Not in a harmful way, not in a “losing yourself” way, but in the sense that the scaffolding you’ve been using to define yourself suddenly doesn’t hold weight anymore. The stories you’ve been telling about who you are, what you want, what you fear… they stop feeling like the truth. They feel like clothes you grew out of without noticing.
Physically, it wasn’t dramatic. More like a pressure shift. A sense of standing on the edge of something vast and realizing you can’t take your old identity with you. Mentally, it was a moment of clarity so sharp it felt like silence. Not bliss, not terror... just the realization that the “you” you’ve been protecting isn’t the whole story.
People talk about “melting into the All,” but that’s poetic shorthand. What it felt like in practice was this: the boundary between “me” and “everything else” got thin for a moment, and I saw how much of my personality was just habit, fear, and momentum. Not gone. Just transparent.
And then, after that moment, you rebuild. Not as a new person, not as a blank slate, but as someone who’s no longer clinging to the old frame. You carry forward what’s real and leave the rest behind.
It’s not a one‑time event. It’s not a badge. It’s not a level‑up. It’s a threshold you cross when you’re ready, and half the time you don’t even realize you crossed it until you look back and notice the old version of you isn’t steering anymore.
That’s the closest I can get to describing it without turning it into mystique or melodrama. It’s a shift in stance, not a special effect.
I won’t speak for Crowley’s map, but I can speak from experience with ordeals that rhyme with what people call “crossing the Abyss.” And the first thing I’ll say is this: it’s not fireworks, visions, or some dramatic ego‑death fantasy. It’s quieter and stranger than that.
For me, it showed up as a kind of unmaking. Not in a harmful way, not in a “losing yourself” way, but in the sense that the scaffolding you’ve been using to define yourself suddenly doesn’t hold weight anymore. The stories you’ve been telling about who you are, what you want, what you fear… they stop feeling like the truth. They feel like clothes you grew out of without noticing.
Physically, it wasn’t dramatic. More like a pressure shift. A sense of standing on the edge of something vast and realizing you can’t take your old identity with you. Mentally, it was a moment of clarity so sharp it felt like silence. Not bliss, not terror... just the realization that the “you” you’ve been protecting isn’t the whole story.
People talk about “melting into the All,” but that’s poetic shorthand. What it felt like in practice was this: the boundary between “me” and “everything else” got thin for a moment, and I saw how much of my personality was just habit, fear, and momentum. Not gone. Just transparent.
And then, after that moment, you rebuild. Not as a new person, not as a blank slate, but as someone who’s no longer clinging to the old frame. You carry forward what’s real and leave the rest behind.
It’s not a one‑time event. It’s not a badge. It’s not a level‑up. It’s a threshold you cross when you’re ready, and half the time you don’t even realize you crossed it until you l
ook back and notice the old version of you isn’t steering anymore.
That’s the closest I can get to describing it without turning it into mystique or melodrama. It’s a shift in stance, not a special effect.
I’ll add one more piece of context, because it shaped how the whole thing unfolded for me. My first brush with what people call “the Abyss” actually happened while I was an Initiate in Crowley’s Order. I was doing the work, following the map, and I hit something that didn’t fit neatly into the grades or the diagrams. It wasn’t dramatic or visionary. It was that same quiet unmaking I described above. A moment where the identity I’d been carrying, including the one the system had given me, suddenly felt too small.
And here’s the part that mattered: instead of pulling me deeper into the OTO, it pushed me outward. Not in anger, not in rebellion, just in the sense that the frame I was in couldn’t hold what I’d just stepped into. The experience didn’t validate the system. It showed me the edges of it.
That’s when I started drifting toward the path I’m on now. More sovereign, more liminal, more aligned with the road itself than with any particular order or hierarchy. The “Abyss” moment wasn’t a badge or a grade. It was the point where I realized I didn’t need someone else’s map anymore.
So for me, crossing the Abyss wasn’t about becoming a Master of the Temple or melting into the All. It was the moment I stopped clinging to the identity I’d been handed, including the magical one, and started walking my own road. Looking back, that was the real initiation.
Crowley said he crossed the abyss in 1909. Regardie was his secretary roughly 2 decades after that. What he left out of his bio of Crowley was his propensity to have histrionic fits (telling his close associate Miller/Hyatt). So, there's the value of this great mystical attainment- you still have histrionic fits. lol
Crowley didn't know shit. He had no idea about how to transmute into a higher immortal subtle body. But clueless people keep fellating him. Sorry to be so blunt, but if you want to get anywhere you need to put on your thinking cap.
Ease up.
Critiquing Crowley is fair game, but this little performance isn’t adding much.
The OP asked about lived experience of the Abyss, not for someone to drag out their personal vendetta and wave it around like a trophy.
Crowley was flawed. Everyone knows that, but pretending he ‘knew nothing’ is just posturing. The man reshaped a century of Western esotericism. You don’t have to like him, but brushing him off with a drive‑by rant doesn’t make you look discerning. It just makes it look like you’re trying very hard to sound above the material you’re not actually engaging with.
If you’ve walked the Abyss, speak to that.
If you’re just here to swing at Crowley, take it to another thread.
Let’s keep this where the OP set the bar, not where your outburst tried to drag it.
Crossing the Abyss and ‘transmuting into a higher immortal subtle body’ aren’t the same operation, and they’re not even from the same map. Crowley’s Abyss is about the collapse of the constructed self; the stories, identities, and scaffolding you’ve been carrying. It’s a threshold of unmaking.
What you’re talking about belongs to a completely different lineage: systems that focus on energetic refinement, subtle‑body architecture, and immortalization. That’s not Crowley’s territory, and it’s not what the Abyss is for.
So trying to tie the two together is like asking what learning to swim has to do with building a cathedral. Both can be meaningful, but they’re not the same craft, not the same goal, and not the same road.
If you want to talk about the Abyss, talk about the Abyss. If you want to talk about subtle‑body transmutation, that’s a different conversation entirely.
lol There's plenty of esotericism going on outside of Crowleyian conceits. He was influential, but so what? It doesn't mean his work is the best, merely that he could bamboozle people well.
I think it's relevant, since 'crossing the abyss' is straight outta crowley's work, to point out the delusory aspect to it in the very person who coined the phrase. IE, he didn't 'annihilate the ego' (not even getting into the fact no one can even define what an ego is but the word is just thrown around), he had some energetic changes and then imputed a totalizing mystical significance to them. Lots of other energetic factors remained untransformed (or unannihilated if you like) in his person, hence all his addiction problems, his histrionic fits, etc. I guess hard facts are more convenient to ignore.
Everyone is talking about different things here anyway, and putting them under a crowleyan slogan. Guess what, any sort of development is going to change and alter your sense of identity.
Personally, I've radically changed since I began my practices. But I wouldn't call it annihilating the ego, as I think the ego itself is an amorphous context. Immortalization does relate quite a bit to the transformation of what prevously made up one's identity, so you got that completely wrong.
For those of you who have had the experience of crossing the abyss, how did that experience manifest for you?
I'm thinking of this in Crowleyan/OTO terms, where to reach a certain point of the path of knowledge/initiation/growth/development, it is necessary to "cross the abyss". It has been described as a melting of personality into the "All", but I'm curious what that really looks like physically/mentally for a person.
I would STRONGLY recommend the Anatomy of the Abyss series by Dusan Trajkovic. There are 3, and they are available on Kindle for a reasonable price. Go with someone who is verified to have had the experience. There are way too many charlatans and poseurs in this field - and the stakes are too high.
Ludwig, you seem to have some decent natural insight, but it is being dragged through some pitiful self-reflectivity~ ouch!!
It's the here and now which is one big mistake— one of the original Chan (Chinese) buddhist patriarchs described his life as such in epitaph. No mystery there. One glimpse of one's absolute nature doesn't change anything. The person is utterly left behind as if it has never been (and rightly so). Even the Absolute (the voidless void) is another word representing the real nature of nonorigination. What is that if not ever having been?
Even so, that is exactly the limit of such experience of what human potential brims with~ it's called open, selfless awareness; and it is not just the nature of human being. All beings are thus. Reality is not created. There is no creator. It is us; we are not it.
There is no way to comprehend inconceivability. If there were, it wouldn't be beyond the ken of the conditional endowment fulfilling the limited parameters of the human psychological apparatus. But I assure you, reality most definitely constitutes the totality of inconceivability itself.
Through an instantaneous crossing, witnessing the abyss offers a chance at glimpsing our true inconceivable nature, but that's not enough. For those who see Essence, it is paramount to get to work, without rushing ahead or tarrying behind.
And another thing, getting to work on the monumental issue of birth and death does not even depend on a chance glimpse of the abyss. Why? Mind is one. Your mind is not some other mind, and Mind is not some other time. Just this Mind, your own mind, is already the means by which your very own eyes look past your own pointed nose to read these words. Seeing is Mind.
As for eternally crossing the abyss, eternity is what constitutes the Creative. NO ONE knows the extent of the abyss. Why? It's not created.
Like all things in magick, it is 100% experiential. Go experience it for yourself. Maps are boring and cheat you out of the raw experience.
Scared? Good, it means you take it serious. Is it dangerous? Hell yes. If that scares you away form it, its meant to, it means you arent ready. This isnt about your feelings. It isn't an intellectual exercise, but an experiential one.
At some point we all stand alone in the dark. This is no different.
You cant eat a chicken sandwich, then tell everyone it tastes like ham and expect those who are eating a ham sandwich to take you seriously. You can lie to yourself, but thats all it is.
