The Descending Passageway

Mystery drives discovery. And in the Circling practice, as with every moment of life lived in presence, mystery is the endless frontier we move into.

The ability to welcome this mystery is one of the greatest fruits of the practice. We do not go hunting for the light switch, chasing clues and definitive answers. Instead, Circling teaches us to simply be in wonder as we encounter the unknown, rather than flee from it into models and worldviews and assumptions and stories that fully explain away everything before you.

It is when we hold open to the mystery that we “lie open unto wisdom as the pyramids lie open to the stars.”

But being with the mystery (without our weapons of quick explanation and satisfying conclusions) means being with fear. And this is the key to one of Circling’s most important liberations.

The Descent

Let’s imagine the movement into mystery as a descent. In the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the entrance leads to a long tunnel taking you down into the depths. Called the Descending Passageway, the corridor eventually delivers you into the Subterranean Chamber (lovingly referred to as “The Pit”). Unlike the other rooms, this exists in the bedrock, the heart of earth itself.

As with so much of the Pyramid of Cheops, we can’t be certain what the Pit was for. It is, then, a mystery. But it makes for a wonderful description of the process of circling into the present moment.

While the practice can lead to transcendence, humor, and general lightness, it is often a journey more akin to spelunking. We go slowly. And mostly, we go downward into the unknown.

It’s a promising direction to head in. Going down into the Pit, we know we could find gold beyond our wildest imagination. It is only by going into the earth that we will find our buried treasure. That association between treasure and the underworld led modern astrologers to attach the planet Pluto, named after the God of the Underworld, to our hidden wealth and power.

And so, perhaps the first step of romancing the mystery is to go down into it.

The Fear

The idea of going down into the Pit can evoke resistance. How many of us have dreamed of getting stuck in a cave or being buried alive? These are some of the most visceral fears in our imagination.

These core connections to the descent are worth holding onto and using as primary maps for the practice. Otherwise, we risk over psychologizing the why’s and how’s of our circling. It might be tempting to try and find some reason in your personality that circling into the depths is scary—but couldn’t it simply be because it is scary? Couldn’t it be that something deep in our blood is terrified of the dark mysteries at the heart of being, just as repelled as it is captivated? Aren’t we all haunted by the terrors that wait there, though we burn with desire to explore those depths?

This is so much so that maybe a total lack of fear is a sign that we lack mystery also. So then being with mystery must also always entail being with fear.

As with so many things in the practice, it comes back to Welcome Everything. When we simply embrace that we are afraid and allow it to be the case, we court the mystery. We can stand still in the Descending Passage and take a deep breath and feel our tingling fingers and toes and say in grinning amazement, “I am afraid.”

And here it is already, that greatest treasure: what really is.

You are afraid. That is true—much truer than a story that you are the kind of person who hates this sort of thing or can’t deal with intimacy or whatever else you can conjure up.

And as we let the fear be without having to justify or account for it, we realize that there are many potential realities that would make sense of what we are experiencing. By not stepping into any one, we find ourselves inside the belly of the Pyramid, torch aloft, looking at branching passageways that each lead to their own chambers.

A greater mystery opens up: that we can go to any chamber we want. We can choose why we are afraid. We can make whatever meaning we want out of it.

So then, what are these chambers for? Who built them? How did we get here? What is this all leading to?

The Ascent

We have so far only glimpsed the dimensions of the mystery in the practice. We have only briefly touched on the power of fear. But at every circle, we have the opportunity to return to the dark tunnels of the pyramid and discover what else lies hidden there.

Come explore with us at our next Circling event! You can also check it out on MeetUp. Remember, we are using a new space:

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Sigh and I talk about boundaries, both how they work and how they show up in circling.