The Dark Night of the Soul – Of Doubt and the Fear of Despair! – Zen Meditation and Mysticism
The Dark Night of the Soul - Of Doubt and the Fear of Despair!
The dark night of the soul is long and lonely. Aimless and senseless, we cannot move forward or backward, and certainly cannot endure the present. Doubt leads us into darkness and the terror of despair grips us bitterly. When a person reaches enlightenment on the path within and then walks alone through the dark night of the soul, all the lower powers within him rise up for the last time against the higher ones, until their insubstantiality is recognized. Then, out of loneliness, communion with God blossoms, perfection through becoming one.
What appears outwardly as distress and need, ultimately turns out to be redemption and liberation.
The Dark Night of the Soul - Lonely and Aimless
Jesus said: "Often you have wished to hear these words that I am now telling you, and you have no one else from whom you could hear them. Days will come when you will seek and will not find me." How often we long to hear advice, to receive his consolation, to hear the words of light, to be certain of his presence. For we know that we "have no one else to hear them from him," that no one else can advise, free and redeem us.
But those who take the path inward also know that there are hours and days when the inner voice is silent. The mystics speak of the dark night of the soul, which follows the first illuminations and precedes the attainment of oneness. It is a time of spiritual dryness in which we listen in vain. But this time of testing our faith and proving our trust passes, and finally our longing is fulfilled, and the voice of silence sounds more blissful than ever.
The Awakening of the Inner Light - I wake
As the lightning flashes out of heaven above and lights up everything under heaven, so the Son of Man will be in his day, appearing in the flash of the inner light.
To experience this, we must become aware of the truth in the inward turning, which is expressed in another apocryphal saying of Christ, reproduced by the Church Father Epiphany:
Man sleeps - and I wake.
That means: You sleep and do not recognize me, although I am in you, while I am awake and guide you from within. Turn inward - from the sleep-enveloped ego of the outer man to the eternally awake self in the inner man, and become aware of me, so that you can pass from the realm of the dead into that of the living! There are such "dead" on both sides, and likewise there are those in both worlds who have awakened to life, who hear the inner word and follow it.