Bonnie Piesse Abyss Story
Bonnie Piesse tells an intriguing story of her spiritual awakening in her podcast “I Am The Sky.”
Listen to her full account here.
She says while she was in NXIVM, she realized that “the Kundalini that had been activated in my system was getting stuck in areas of my body because I was in a state of stress and trauma.”
One interesting part concerns Bonnie’s belief that Keith Raniere borrowed some of her spiritual awakening story for himself.
Bonnie said:
I joined NXIVM. That turned out to be a cult. But there were things in the beginning of NXIVM, that also felt profound in unlocking certain programming and belief systems limiting beliefs…
So even though there was all this dark stuff going on… there was something that drew me to it…
Then, in 2016, I was journaling, and I started to realize that I could ask questions and get a response in the journaling, like a wise response that was seeming to come from a higher place, my highest self or something, some kind of spirit guide. …
I was doing this process where I’d ask questions and get these answers that felt really true and wise… I had started meditating again, I started going within, and in my meditations, I had found that there was this abyss, there was like a void.
And every time I would… put my baby toe into it or kind of sink a little bit into it, there’d be these explosions. I guess they were along the lines of… joy explosions. But it felt even more than that. Like real energetic like. And so obviously, it was like a little too much to go into that abyss to let myself go in. But it was calling me; it was pulling me. There was kind of like a gravitational force to it. But it was scary. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh, what is this?”; like so intense…
So I was slowly starting to go in, slowly dropping a little more, relaxing a little bit more, into that abyss, not letting that energy happen, just sinking into it. And I became really aware of all these pockets, or areas in my body that were grasping that we’re holding on. So literally like a muscular tension, just all these different areas in my torso holding on.
And I started to try to relax them, using the breath… even putting my hand on some of those areas, and breathing into them and encouraging them to relax, bit by bit….
And on the 10th day of this process… everything relaxed. Every single thing that I had felt that was holding on, relaxed and released. And there was this stillness, this emptiness, this stillness, no fear. I never experienced, at least not that I could remember, ever experiencing no fear, not having any stress or fear in my body, in my system…
It was like, beautiful. So I went to sleep. And I woke up… bolt upright, at like 2am or 3am. Just like, wow, what, what just happened. And suddenly, my whole system was filled with like that joy… flooding through every single cell of my being like light, light and love, this divine energy in my entire body. And I could feel everything rewiring. It was like I knew at that moment that my DNA was being rewired. And I held up my arm in front of me, and I literally could see these mathematical equations… quantum physics stuff of like these equations going like from number 10, like the numbers dialing or something. And yeah, numbers of light, mathematics, rewiring in my cells…
And I was having all these different kind of mystical experiences, you know, of past lives coming to me. And all these faces of people, which I didn’t know… maybe I was tapping into people around the world. Or they were my past lives, these moments of death actually…. but it wasn’t scary. It was like I was present and I was with all these faces as they flashed before my eyes. They were faces pleading for love, pleading to be OK, pleading to know they were okay. And so from this space, I would just kind of be in love. And they would flash through, and they felt like they were unraveling and somehow resolving… It felt like something big was being processed and released and healed. And every day, there was some new experience.
I was noticing that my intuition just had burst open. Suddenly, I had access to all of this intuitive information… I started to tell people… “I found this joy. We can all have this.” And there were a few people around me who were really inspired… It was inspiring them to start meditating and start looking for that in themselves.
But then some people… thought that I was crazy. And I was telling more and more people in NXIVM… And they didn’t know what to do with me. They literally thought I was nuts. And word was starting to spread within NXIVM that “Bonnie had gone crazy…”
So I shared this experience with Keith… Because I assumed that he’d experienced this and had an understanding of it all and could help me navigate it… And I… shared with him about this experience and the abyss that I found….
[Keith would do these forums where he’d get up and… lecture and answer people’s questions.] And he was in this forum. He started talking about his awakening, like years and years ago or whatever. And he started saying that he found this abyss.
And I had a moment of like, ‘you never mentioned that abyss before. But are you stealing my story’ kind of thing. But I didn’t think anything of it until later. And then I was looking back going, “oh, yeah, he totally stole my story.”…
So I was planning my my exit at that point…. It took me a number of months to make that decision to leave.
Did Keith Crib From Bonnie?
Bonnie had her awakening in 2016/2017. Did Keith steal her concept of “the abyss” to use for his own self-aggrandizing? Possibly even to diminish Bonnie’s experience on a subtle level? While Keith is known to lift concepts and ideas from others without attribution, it’s not likely that this was the case here.
According to former students, Keith had talked about “the abyss” in numerous forums, particularly when referring to his own journey of self-transformation.
He has also used the term in unpublished articles written years before Bonnie’s awakening. For example, in one article discussing human motivation, he states, “Other people are seduced by questions and to varying degrees led to explore them. Some just peer ever so timidly and infrequently towards the unknown, others literally live their lives hanging on the edge of the abyss.”
It’s certainly likely that Bonnie was not aware of these things. Many were known to fall asleep during “Vanguard Forums.”
Keith had also mentioned the abyss – even if it was total bullshit – in a Text message to Camila, which was part of discovery at his trial.
The abyss is mentioned in a text dated August 27, 2014 – about two years before Bonnie told Keith about her vision of an abyss.
Text Between Camila and Keith
8:14pm – Keith: Tonight I am going to CP [Clifton Park]… I will be back around 6:30 am… Maybe we can meet then although I don’t know… Our normal looks good…
8:23pm – Camila: Ok
8:15 pm – Keith: How was the module?
8:22 pm – Camila: The module was amazing
8:24 pm – Camila: Is that what you meant by jumping into the abyss?
While I personally am not eager to jump into an abyss or even put my toe there for fear of catching cold – I appreciate there are higher mystical realms than I or Horatio may ever know. An abyss reserved for Vanguards where regardless of the external abode the abyss looks not unlike the SHU after nearly a year at USP Tucson.
