As a kid, I read obsessively about black holes. You’re floating in space, life is good, and then you start to slip. It’s subtle at first, but then it’s impossible to escape. You’ve become consumed by a mysterious and reality-ripping force. You’re destroyed, but to the outside world, it looks like you’re stuck falling into the hole.

We can find the abyss anywhere. There’s a monster under the bed and something in the closet. Nietschze gazed into it. The Egyptians and Babylonians named their Gods after it. People on psychedelics speak about a void that opens up at the most difficult part of their trip, often in the sky, a place they could enter and choose to be destroyed.

Fritz and Laura Perls, the originators of Gestalt therapy, called this place The Fertile Void, a state of emptiness that can lead to something new. This void has the power to destroy us and to transform us. Alice jumps into the rabbit hole to begin her hero’s journey. Gandalf falls down a hole and comes out transformed from grey to white. Harry finds a portal in the train station if he only has the courage to run into it. And so on.

At the extreme, jumping into the hole is often called ego death, or the release of an ego we think is “us.” Done without support, people can lose contact with reality and jump into an actual abyss, killing both the malfunctioning ego and the innocent self.

What is this void within us and why does it exist? From one perspective, the void is a forbidden area formed to protect us from real or imagined danger. This area can feel unbudging and timeless because it is encoded in the more primitive parts of your brain, such as the amygdala, which operate outside of narrative time. Researchers like RK Pitman, a professor of psychiatry, compare trauma to a black hole, noting the gravity and time-stopping effects of both.

Studies demonstrate how the void is connected to our unconscious. One 2013 study had participants free associate on words that were linked to past trauma. Participants’ reflexes and stress related sweating increased with no awareness of how what they were saying was linked to the trauma. The unconscious brain was ready to steer them away from the void at a moment’s notice.

At some point, when the conditions are right, we probably have to enter the void. Everything we want is on the other side of fear. As an adult, we can take our inner child to where we were afraid to go in the past. If we confront the horrifying beauty of the black hole within us, we can grow beyond where our conscious mind sits today.