by Martin Anton Smith martinantonsmith@gmail.com
The Journey Of The Master’s Apprentice Part 2: Personalized Abysses & The Start of the Journey
This is a continuation of the prior link https://antonmartinsmith.com/2026/02/21/the-journey-of-the-masters-apprentice-an-essay/
…..On that, if I was to speak as a English person from the 20th century I might say that “just because the ‘working classes’ & the ‘middle classes’ hate each other, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t just on different sides of the same coin”. I once said to a long term childhood friend of mine, who I talk of sociological matters to, “the working classes take their profits in sex, & the wealthy forgo sex to get the cash”. A little crude but it was a good analogy. We like to think talking of upper & lower classes as a old fashioned – but I ask if you – is the world we see really more egalitarian? Or is that just a polite and weathered façade?
But back to the story of ‘climbing out of the abyss’ – which from the last paragraph’s explanation – really is a task for everyone (Yes – even though the ‘trust fund baby’s life’ seems a total lark). It is a task for the child of the ‘crack addict parents’ and the child of the ‘CEO dad & Lawyer mother’, and all the children (who then of course grew into adults) in between. If you are born of a human being, you will have to face a personalized ‘abyss’ at some point and quantum science also implies it will also look back at you.
In short we are all tasked with crawling out of our own ‘personalized abyss’ (for the ‘modern organized world’ designs so many traps casually) the child given everything by wealthy highly networked but emotionally distant parents has to crawl out of their own ‘personalized abyss’ too. This experience of life’s casual pathology is something that the ‘boarding school syndrome’ sufferer is acutely aware of. We all need to create our own healthy and true ‘meaning’ in our lives – a cliché but a true cliché.
So as you as an adult (emerging from the standard & various childhood traumas already mentioned) start to ‘crawl out of the abyss’, you see the light is getting stronger. You continue walking towards the light. It is like a ‘near death experience’ if things are good the light should increase – if things are bad the light will diminish. But real life is complex in that something ‘eventually Good’ can have this iterative journey:
Bad, bad, bad, no so bad bad better, bad, better, not so bad, better, good, bad, GOOD.
Anton Martin Smith Writer 