““The self who is undone in the encounter with the abyss, that is, the preabyssal self, lives with a misguided consciousness. Without having faced or embraced the vertiginous depths beneath the precarious ground of its being, this self views itself as coherent and independent. I am here referring to the self who operates in clearly demarcated binaries and boundaries, the self who views God as distinct from the world, the other as separate from the "I," the spiritual as distinct from the physical. Conversely, the new self that emerges—if it does at all—from the abyss understands its nature not as an immutable substance but as multiple, fragmented, and always-in-becoming. In the abyss the old self is dissolved, emptied, abandoned, annihilated, lost, crushed, dismembered, shattered, and drowned.””
