When Joe talks about “going into the abyss,” he’s pointing at the place where what you think you are changes dramatically — or ceases to exist. Death rips a hole through what we think is reality and reveals a “big nothingness” behind it. Most people don’t want to look at it, but going into it creates a tremendous amount of relief and freedom.
This abyss is present in every moment, not just at physical death. Every moment, some part of us will never exist again. We organize entire lives around avoiding the death of aspects of ourselves that are already “toast on a long enough timeline.” We defend ideals of relationships rather than discovering reality. We swim upstream against a tide that’s already moving.
“First you jump off and you’re like ‘I’m falling,’ then you realize there’s no bottom, then you’re like ‘I’m flying — this is fantastic.‘”
The key insight is that what we’re scared of is not some external catastrophe — it’s the place where we don’t exist, where our identity dissolves. And that dissolution, when entered willingly, becomes not terror but peace and freedom. Brett describes anticipating terror during a near-death freefall and instead experiencing profound peace — suggesting that peace was already there, simply revealed by the stripping away of the self’s constructs.
Related Concepts
- The abyss you avoid is your freedom
- Sense of self expands then dissolves
- Embracing fear versus avoiding fear
- Near-death experiences reveal peace that was already there
- Stuckness is resistance to the abyss, not the abyss itself
- Acknowledging death compresses and intensifies life
- The sense of self transforms through facing the abyss you’ve been avoiding