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Dark night of the soul" sounds like a threatening and much to be
avoided experience. Yet perhaps a quarter of the seekers on the road
to higher consciousness will pass through the dark night. In fact,
they may pass through several until they experience the profound joy
of their true nature.
Many seekers would encourage the dark night experience if they knew
what it was. However, to one engaged in the dark night, suffering
seems unending.
The dark night occurs after considerable advancement toward higher
consciousness. Indeed, the dark night usually occurs like an
initiation before one of these special seekers is admitted into
regular relationship with higher consciousness. The dark night also
occurs to those who do not seek relationship but immersion or unity in
the higher consciousness. While the term dark night of the soul is
used broadly, its general meaning — in the field of higher
consciousness — is a lengthy and profound absence of light and hope.
In the dark night you feel profoundly alone.
You Can’t Fit In
The dark night usually develops this way:
You, as a genuine seeker, have gone through many significant phases as
you progress toward higher consciousness. Your faith is strong. You
have kept loyal companionship with fellow seekers and perhaps you have
already found a special teacher. You’ve experienced indications of the
reality of higher consciousness and yearn to be more deeply in
communion with it. You see the principles of a higher power at work in
your life. Yet, all in all, you find yourself somehow painfully on the
outside. You feel caught between your old way of living, your old
tendencies and associations, and this nebulous, unreachable realm of
higher consciousness.
You feel an exile in both places. You don’t belong in the old
pastimes. in the old empty or numbing way of life, yet you somehow
can’t fit in or feel at home in the fellowship of those who talk
naturally of the higher consciousness and its reality. They are
experienced, they are absorbed in it. They are loving, giving people.
But you are unable to live, with full heart and mind, the way they do.
They’re able to apply the principles of higher consciousness easily,
yet it’s so hard for you. They have manifestations and proofs on a
regular basis. You only stretch like a human mule after a receding
corncob while pulling the heavy weight of your old tendencies behind
you.
You try to be good, and often you can’t. You try to be loving and find
at times your heart is hard like stone. Sometimes your projects fall
down around your ears. You keep struggling and still you don’t break
through. You understand the path is one of joy and yet your life seems
to have been barren for a month or two, perhaps longer. Where did that
early joy and zest go?
Hanging On
Up to this particular time there was joy, there was delight. But now
there is only a hanging on, a dogged hanging on. You persist because
you can’t conceive of going back to your old way of life. That seems
impossible now. That would be like going to prison, living as if with
a Trans- orbital lobotomy.
You deeply want to have joy and fulfilment, easily manifest
prosperity, but something’s not working. You don’t know what it is but
something’s awry, and your meditations have lost their lustre.
Sometimes, during rare meditations, you do experience brief moments of
peace. Your agonizing mind and heart rest from their turbulence and
even these fleeting times of calm are so deeply appreciated. Your
light dance of life, which had gone on for some time, is now a
trudging in what seems a devastated and alien land.
Your fellow seekers look at you and show their concern. Their words of
kindness are valued but you feel you’re somehow incapable of
responding well. Your heart is numb. At these times your friends try
to cheer you up. They invite you to dinner. You seem to perform fairly
well, despite the emptiness you feel inside. What else is there to do?
You wonder if you have any right to be in their fellowship at all. You
think of leaving town, but where would you go? What good would
diversion be?
A number of your friends in the fellowship of this great path know
what you are going through for they have been through it themselves.
They feel the main thing to do is encourage you to go on. They know if
you keep it up and do not quit you will succeed. They know if you quit
you will be a self-reject and will return to the old life, forever a
foreigner, being neither at home with it nor at home anywhere else.
They recognize that your own higher self, out of love, is lifting you
up into its embrace. They see you are being drawn into your dark night
because:
your inner potential has great stature
your crusty, old ego requires you go through the dark night in order
to be transformed.
You Feel Totally Alone
Other seekers, for various reasons, do not have to pass through the
dark night. However, the dark night is your way.
Your night is a very difficult time. While others may one day envy you
for the marvellous growth you experienced in such a short, intensified
period, you will, because of the pain of your experience, always feel
profound compassion for those whom you one day see going through a
similar night.
Being caught between the old way of life and the new possibilities,
your sense of alienation intensifies. Your sense of inadequacy and not
knowing what to do next becomes gnawingly constant. You feel you would
do anything to get out of this state, yet it is only your ego which is
keeping you in it. However, this insight is impossible for you to
grasp while going through your long night.
And you feel so totally alone. Sure, you have friends and you
appreciate them, but you are keenly aware they are not capable of
feeling what you are feeling or knowing what you are going through.
Sometimes they seem like clowns, sometimes they seem empty-headed,
caught up in meaningless pursuits. They do not understand, you think,
how much you are suffering or how you cry out and pray deep into each
midnight. You try their advice but it doesn’t seem to touch the heart
of the matter.
You begin to enter the dark night in earnest when you feel completely
stranded. In the fullness of the dark night you don’t know where you
are spiritually. You’re separate from God and man. You do not know
where to turn. Your friends love you and wish you well but your
condition does not improve.
The dark night is a very private matter. The person in the dark night
is generally able to function quite well despite inner suffering.
Often your acquaintances never suspect that you are going through the
dark night — they probably do not even know what it is. Only people
close to you — especially friends along the path — can recognize your
pain.
You feel like a hollow person doing the activities of life with no
motivation except expediency. Your eyes seem deeper in your head. You
are profoundly aware of the suffering of humanity and the cruelty of
one person to another. You feel that cruelty and negativity far
outweigh love and constructive action.
You Enter Midnight
Alone, and not wishing to be, unable even to express yourself to
others, you enter midnight and the greatest intensity of the dark
night. Here you have finally come to the time of sovereign solitude.
In this precious time, which has no apparent prospects of love or
happiness, you clearly perceive that nothing in the outer world has
proven adequate to heal your condition. Nobody, not even your dearest
friends and loved ones, can make you whole. Even if they have tried,
and love you enough to try loving you forever, they can’t give you
peace.
You eye your books and consider all the benefit you have gained from
these extremely wise vessels of truth. Yet not one book, not one
thought, goes deep enough inside you to where the affliction abides.
You look at your possessions, your money container. No material thing
has been able to help you. No material means have worked. Nothing, no
one, in the outer world has enabled you to come out of this dark
night.
In your loneliness, you next — in a seemingly random process — notice
that none of your thoughts have proven adequate to your suffering. Not
one — even repeated fifty thousand times — breaks the inner storm and
lets in light. God and higher consciousness seem so far away that
perhaps they are unreal. Neither one has, despite your protracted
exposure of yourself, done anything to ease or remove your agony.
Nothing appears efficacious. Nothing works.
Clearly, there is nowhere to turn. There is nothing to be done. All
actions you considered have been tried. There is nothing to think,
nothing to feel, nothing to do, nowhere to go. It seems you have to
accept this defeat — or, you can persist in struggling against it. For
awhile longer, you go about thinking, feeling, and doing other options
that occur to you. But you realize in the midnight of your soul that
you have tried every option you know of.
The Peace Comes
Helpless, totally helpless, as well as ever so alone, you abide in
this condition. And you accept your predicament. You accept that there
is really, except for a murmured prayer to a remote Lord and a remnant
of a shredded faith, nothing else left.
Suicide would be absurd. Suicide would be an act of arrogance and
vanity. You have grown far beyond such primitive responses to your
private agony. No, nothing to do. Nothing remains in this lonely
helplessness. There is, without question, nothing you can do.
You abide. You accept your state. How have you gotten to this place?
That’s insignificant. Musings and feelings aside, you wait. You feel
you may have to stay this way forever, doing the regular day-to-day
things, but in this mood of emptiness. Nothing. Nothing.
Then, it happens. A holy presence comes into your room — sweetly,
softly. You feel it filling you. Your mind is filled with mellow or
bright light. Your heart, your still heart, is permeated with peace.
This peace moves through your body like a cold spring of mountain
water. It flows in your spine, your brain, and under your skin.
Everywhere.
Also, this presence, this comforter, moves like a breeze across your
arid mind and numb heart. Then, or a few days later, the fire of joy
begins to smoulder. Here, abiding with nothing more to do, your ego
drops away! Your ignorant, arrogant, fearful sense of self falls away
from you. You stand in light — a new being, a free being —
transformed.
Your Ego Sense
Believe it or not, that’s what the dark night is all about:
transformation. Your ego, your limited sense of self, your inadequate
complex of ideas about who you are had to be dissolved. Your ego was,
you begin to see, eclipsing higher consciousness and your true nature.
Your old sense of self was inadequate to your new hopes and proper
state. Your suffering intensified because of a major misapprehension.
You were too used to thinking of yourself based on inputs from your
previous experiences in life. On and on through life, you gathered
information and responses from the world which indicated to you what
kind of person you were and are. These superficial units of related
inputs became integrated in what is called the ego — your sense of
self, your sense of who you are. As long as you allowed this
inaccurate or only partial sense of who you are to dominate, you could
not know or abide in your true nature.
Your ego sense is so powerful — you invest it with so much of your
thought and feeling — that your attitudes of life become based on an
egocentric perspective. The ego gains a progressively greater foothold
on your entire life because your basic attitudes about your existence
and essential nature are strongly linked with ego.
Then, your ego sense, due to your suffering or your limitations in
life, wants to have more power over circumstances and a more pleasant
life. The ego sense often becomes motivated to seek higher
consciousness and, thus, greater ability to dominate in life. Not
always, but often, it is the ego sense which most eagerly pursues
higher consciousness. It wants to be in charge; it wants to manipulate
events and make life come out more to its satisfaction. But, as long
as your ego dominates, it is on a collision course with your true
nature and your higher consciousness. There’s going to be a showdown.
There has to be a confrontation sometime if your higher consciousness
is ever to emerge, if you are ever to know truly who you are and what
your human capabilities are.
Furthermore — and this is extremely important, especially in
understanding the dark night of the soul — your ego, as it develops
from childhood onward, has the conviction that it is the doer.
Generally, your ego assumes that it chooses what your mind will think,
and chooses what your heart will feel. It feels it selects the various
actions and activities you are going to undertake. Your sense of self,
being convinced it is the doer, feels it accomplishes anything and
everything in your life. Do you see, then, how the dark night
develops? A false sense of self has been ignorantly and manipulatively
standing in the way of enlightenment.
Additionally, until you are consolidated in higher consciousness, your
ego can return and re-establish control if you let it. Sometimes when
you’re fatigued or when you have special, new opportunities in life,
you are vulnerable to the reestablishment of your ego and its opinion
that it is in charge of doing everything. It will again eclipse the
higher consciousness until you recognize what has happened. Then you
must courageously and consciously reaffirm your true nature, and deal
with the upstart, old ego. Otherwise, another dark night phase will
again develop.
Attempts of the Ego
A person seeking higher consciousness is, in effect, and with
intensity, seeking the transformation of his own ego. He is seeking to
end the tyranny of the ego and abide in his true nature, instead of a
false nature concocted through experiences and emotional inputs during
the process of life. While it is true these inputs have a value in
subjecting you to new experiences and so offer unique learning
situations, they often give you a delusory sense of self. You are not
your mistake. Even a murderer can change and become a new being.
Still, as you progress toward higher consciousness, your ego may not
be humbling and daily transforming itself. You may, instead, have a
highly developed ego which is sure that it is causing the events of
higher consciousness to unfold bit by bit. Your ego, after all, can be
very interested in the attributes of higher consciousness, in
meditation and association with enlightened beings. Your ego feels
gratification and satisfaction in moving on down the road toward
higher consciousness.
Your ego may also have the opinion that, because of its grasp of
matters, it will one day establish or — by its thought process and
feelings —bring about enlightenment and awakening. It is convinced
that it will achieve higher consciousness. This is ironic because by
the time of the dark night, the ego is the main obstacle; it is the
obstruction of the light of consciousness. It stands between you and
your fulfilment. In fact, the length of your dark night is based on
the truculence and cunning of your ego. It can fight a very lengthy
battle if it fears it’s going to be destroyed or will have to give in
to something so much greater than it knows itself to be.
Incredibly, your ego wants to be in on the act of enlightenment. Ego
wants to bring about higher consciousness by its own dramatic means.
Certainly, it doesn’t want to be granted fulfilment by a power outside
of itself. Convinced that it is the doer, your ego holds on for dear
life — until that event called the dark night of the soul, when your
ego awakens to the profound fact it cannot cause or bring about higher
consciousness.
Ego cannot, by its will or any other skills whatever, create the
wholeness of heart which will end your deep suffering. In a sense your
ego recognizes itself — in the dark night — to be the disease. It
recognizes that its foothold on your mind and heart has, at an
advanced stage on your path, proven a great numbing agent and a high
stone wall against the light. Ego stands against the fulfilment of
your faith and the realization of your profoundest yearnings. Finally
your ego has found something it cannot do and, in the dark night of
the soul, it becomes totally convinced it is inadequate. It cannot
deal with your suffering or the fulfilment of the heart’s yearning.
Nothing it can do, think, say, buy, or travel to, will in any way
suffice.
Dawn of a New Life
Here in this dark night, the lifelong ego sense dies: impotent. Having
fulfilled its part, now weak and incompetent, it is dissolved —
transmuted. From a higher sense now awakening within you, you slough
off your false sense of self. You now know yourself to be a different
person than you thought you were. Your ego was merely experiencing
some of the attributes, some of the qualities, of your true nature,
while at the same time obstructing others.
You, in passing successfully through the dark night, enter the realms
of higher consciousness. You’ve been cleansed of the most deep-rooted
sickness: your ignorance of your true nature and your inadequate,
often totally wrong opinion of who you are. You now cease your inner
conflict and abide serenely in your true nature. The night is over.
The dawn of a new life in higher consciousness transforms your bleak
life of the past few months into one with a heavenly nature. You have
been delivered of the intolerable bondage to ego.
Henceforth, you will walk the earth seeing others afresh, living a new
life, and abiding in your true nature. You have become a son or
daughter of higher consciousness. Now your words and actions will be
attuned with your true self. Now you express inspiration and comfort.
The dark night has passed. It is over.
REFLECTION
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