The question

A young man in his late twenties, deeply engaged in his own spiritual practice, wrote in after watching our Abraxas ritual video. In his own words, reconstructed and anonymized here:

“I watched the Abraxas video without judgment — it was strange, genuinely strange, but I just let it be. That night I had a beautiful meditation. The feeling of Abraxas stayed with me afterward; I looked into the symbolism, the archetype, what it represents — this union of light and dark.

Then, about an hour after falling asleep, I was pulled out of a dream into a kind of vortex — an energy vortex. There was a very strong, dark presence, almost demonic, and I felt gridlocked, pinned in place. A sharp pain on my right side. And there was a voice — or rather my own thoughts, but overlaid with something that didn’t feel entirely mine.

It wasn’t pleasant, there was real fear in it, but I worked my way out and went to sit with people nearby until the fear passed. It wasn’t a purely negative experience — it gave me a chance to meet that fear inside myself.

I think at least part of what happened is that the Abraxas energy in the video activated something already present in me — something powerful, and yes, dark, though I don’t believe it’s malevolent exactly. I’m careful about which energetic spaces I open myself to, because I want to stay grounded and able to bring love into a space rather than being overwhelmed by its intensity.

There’s a real ambivalence in me about it. Part of me feels this shadow is simply part of the archetype’s wholeness — light and dark together — and that bringing awareness into that space is itself a form of integration. But another part of me reads the same shadow as a signal: maybe this isn’t a direction to move toward right now.

This isn’t a negative report. I just wanted to share the experience and the reflections that came out of it.”

The answer

This account sits at exactly the crossroads Abraxas was always meant to mark. Abraxas, in the Gnostic and Jungian sense, is not a symbol of light or darkness — it is the god who contains both, the figure who stands prior to that split. To engage with Abraxas seriously is to invite the unseparated material in oneself to surface. That it surfaced as something “gridlocked,” pinned, and momentarily frightening is not a malfunction of the practice. It is the practice working.

The most precise map for this territory isn’t found in any modern esoteric system, but in a much older story from Tibetan Buddhism: Milarepa and the demons of Red Rock Jewel Valley.

Milarepa returns to his cave after a journey and finds it occupied by demons — eyes like saucers, teeth like knives, voices that mock and threaten him. He tries everything a serious practitioner would try. He teaches them the dharma, offering them compassion. He recites mantras and invokes protective forces, trying to drive them out through spiritual force. Nothing works. If anything, the more he resists, the more menacing they become.

It is only when he remembers a core teaching — that everything perceived is the mind’s own display, and that mind itself is empty and luminous — that something shifts. He stops trying to expel them. Instead he turns to face them and says, in effect: you are welcome here. If you have come to destroy this body, take it — it is illusory in any case. I offer it to you freely.

At that, nearly all the demons dissolve. One remains: the largest, the fiercest, the leader. Milarepa does not run from this one either. He walks directly toward it, and places his own head inside its mouth. Only in that final act of surrender — total presence, zero resistance, no more negotiating from fear — does the last demon dissolve as well. What remains is Milarepa’s realization: this was never anything other than my own mind meeting itself.

What’s notable in the reader’s account is that he is standing precisely at Milarepa’s threshold, before the resolution. He names both halves of the teaching correctly, without yet fully choosing between them: on one hand, that bringing conscious awareness into the shadow space is itself a form of integration; on the other, that the shadow might be a signal to hold back rather than advance. Milarepa’s story suggests these aren’t actually opposed. The withdrawal he describes — grounding, waiting, staying sensitive rather than diving in impulsively — is not the opposite of Milarepa’s surrender. It’s the necessary groundwork for it. Milarepa did not walk into the demon’s mouth on his first night in the cave; he tried, failed, retreated into confusion, and only then arrived at the offering. Caution and eventual full presence belong to the same arc, not to two different paths.

The pain, the pinning, the sense of a voice overlaid on his own thoughts — these read less as an external attack and more as exactly what the story describes: the mind meeting its own unmet material, and mistaking it, in the moment, for something other than itself. That confusion is not a sign of doing something wrong. It’s the same confusion Milarepa lived through before the recognition landed. The invitation, when he’s ready, isn’t to seek the experience out again deliberately, but to trust that if it returns, the way through is not more resistance and not more analysis — it’s the same gesture Milarepa made: stop fighting, stop fleeing, and meet it as one’s own.