Advice to the young...and old.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”.F.Nietzsche....Is this so in my experience? When faced with the abyss this Christmas yuletide there was not a whisper, a flicker, a pin drop, or reflection. It was I think the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me. The abyss brought on by efforts of reflection into my soul. To look with-in, to all the memories, the influences, the events, the hurts, the rationalizations, searching for why as a human being: that when watching another human being open their heart and give unselfishly, not be compelled to break my comfort zone and give in return selflessly. I met within my psyche the abyss. For either:  I/we don't give a fig about what other people feel, or do, or say, and I/we are happy to be the recipient (a parasite,or sponge) of  their giving.  Because self-indulgence is my/our law.  Or there is a fatal flaw somewhere beyond the memories and vale of darkness inside my/our mind which can not be fixed or banished that causes, "do that which I wish not to do, and not do that which I wish to do"( Paul the apostle).  And that flaw is a thing I/we can not come to terms with.  Accounting it to be only human seems weak and I/we should be stronger and able to do the thing we wish to do. That is give love unbridled. To accept the flaw as our frailty/weakness and the inability to rise to the task/duty of Giving rather than Receiving, because we do not possess the strength physical/or spiritual to move our being, is catastrophic to the person I/we think we have made of our-selves in our lifetime. The conclusion is that we succumb beneath the wheel of human frailty and insufficiency and perish. Unless there is and Alternative. Seek the divine power that does move our actions beyond our limitations, that fulfills the void/the abyss of the Need to give love and the Need to receive Love.
The abyss is impenetrable and unyielding; seemingly.  Giving the seer/the encountered the overwhelming feeling of being at once crushed by and spread thin upon the darkness with no center and no self remaining, cast adrift on the void to be forever lost as if the persons entire being and existence is snuffed out. At this moment I do/do not remember what called me back from this dark horizon, a mother's love, a wife's forgiveness, an exploding heart of fear of the thought of having never been. "When you gaze long into the abyss..."  deep though it may be there is another side of it, and it is,"The Light is shone in the Darkness, and the Darkness will never overcome it".  For if there is a me and an abyss then there is that which created me as well as that which created the abyss. And the fact is I am a creature of light. Within my mind and without my body. And the abyss is void or not will have to deal with that.