What power have I named darkness so that I would not have to own it?

Navigating the Underworld

The Underworld has always been a strangely familiar landscape to me. Not because I understand it as a place of darkness, but because I recognize the kind of perception it asks for.

In Finnish mythology, reality was imagined through different worlds: Ylinen- the upper, Keskinen- middle and Alinen- lower realms. I find this old map useful because it makes room for dimensions of experience that modern language often compresses into psychology. The Underworld can certainly include what is unconscious in us, but reducing it to the subconscious makes the landscape much smaller than the myths suggest.

The Underworld is the realm of what cannot yet be clearly seen.

This immediately creates a problem. How do we navigate something we cannot see?

In the Middleworld we orient ourselves through information. We look at the road signs, check the timetable, measure the distance, make a plan and move toward a destination. Much of ordinary life depends on this capacity to establish where we are and where we are going.

There are periods of life when none of this works.

The map disappears before the new landscape has revealed itself. Something can be sensed without being understood. An image begins returning. A particular animal keeps appearing. A sentence arrives in a dream with an inexplicable weight. A direction feels finished even though there is no rational reason to leave it. Another direction begins pulling before there is anything concrete to move toward.

This is where the Underworld asks for another kind of intelligence.

Dreaming gives us direct experience of it every night. Dreams rarely organize themselves according to the logic we use during the day. A person becomes another person without ceasing to be the first. A house is familiar although we have never seen it. The dead return without explanation. Time collapses. A single object can carry more meaning than an entire conversation.

We wake and immediately want to translate it.

What does the snake mean? What does the house mean? Why was the moon there?

Yet the urge to translate may reveal how uncomfortable we are with a language that does not give us a single answer.

Symbols do something ordinary language cannot. They hold several meanings without forcing them to resolve. A river does not have to mean one thing. Neither does a gate, a wolf, a wound, a descent or a second moon. The image can remain alive while its meaning continues to unfold.

This may be one of the oldest functions of myth.

Myths give form to realities that resist literal description. They allow the invisible to enter language without demanding that it become entirely explainable. Instead of defining an experience, the story creates a landscape in which the experience can move.

A person crosses a river. A goddess removes her garments at seven gates. Someone enters the land of the dead. A creature guards a threshold. A name is forgotten and another must be discovered.

These images do not behave like instructions. They behave more like coordinates.

Learning to navigate the Underworld may therefore have less to do with becoming skilled at interpreting symbols and more to do with developing a tolerance for not knowing too quickly.

There is a particular kind of attention required when the meaning of something has not arrived yet. It listens before naming. It notices repetition. It allows an image to remain strange. It recognizes that understanding can come months after the first encounter, and that forcing meaning onto something too early can close exactly the opening through which something new was trying to emerge.

I have started to think that this is one reason different landscapes become important at changing periods of our lives. We are learning new forms of perception. Widening the scope, unlocking new levels of the Game.

At the beginning of this year, the image that began following me was a bridge. I did not receive an explanation with it. The image came first. Its meaning has been revealing itself through living.

This is how the Underworld often seems to speak.

Not through conclusions, but through signals, strange coincidences, impulses that cannot be followed by logic.

Not everything needs to be understood at the moment it appears. Some things need to be carried before they can be named. And actually, naming it prematurely might make it dissapear from your field, giving it a form that was not yet fully ”It”. So patience is one of the most important companions on these journeys to mythical aspects of Life.

And that changes the question of navigation entirely.

Instead of asking only, What does this mean?, I find myself increasingly interested in other kinds of questions:

What kind of attention does this ask of me?

Am I able to let the invisible forces to guide me deeper into the realm where actual change happens?

Can I trust the darkness?