When the pavement dissolves: the terror of groundlessness
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I've been lurking on here for a good six months, mostly reading the DreamSanctum threads to quiet my head, but tonight the wind's howling off the plains and I can't sleep. I spent thirty-five years walking mail routes in Lubbock. My life was pavement, curbs, and the heavy thud of a mailbag. Ground was something literal you could measure. Retirement hit me hard because suddenly there was no route to walk, no schedule to hit. The silence was deafening.
Then I started messing with this non-dual practice.
You read all the stuff about there being no self, how the observer and the observed are the same thing. Sounds cool in theory. Then it actually happens for a split second, and the panic hits. It's not a gentle awakening. It feels like falling. Non-duality is just the metaphysical version of that retirement silence, but it strips away the mental schedule too.
Alan Watts always talked about the ego as a trap, but he made it sound so playful, like a game we're just pretending to play. He had this easy, witty way of shrugging it off. But my nervous system doesn't feel like it's playing. When the conceptual ground gives out, I don't feel liberation. I feel like I'm suffocating.
It reminds me of what Carl Jung described as the nigredo phase in the alchemical work. That black darkening where everything falls apart and you're left in the void before the gold comes. I feel like I'm stuck in the mud of that phase. There's no structure left, but the new structure hasn't formed yet.
Tarot keeps showing me The Tower lately. Not the dramatic lightning bolt, just the rubble. You're standing there waiting for the foundation to return, but the practice insists there was never a foundation to begin with. It's just groundlessness.
I know some folks here love their rituals. Aleister Crowley would probably tell you to ritualize your way out of it, build a complex system of sigils and banishing squares to hold the anxiety at bay. Honestly, Crowley exhausts me. He just built a bigger, more ornate castle to replace the one that burned down.
Does anyone else hit this wall? Where the relief of 'no self' turns into the sheer existential terror of 'no ground'? I'm just trying to figure out how to walk without tripping over the nothing.
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