The Dark Night of the Soul: Path to Liberation

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.

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.

Ego Death - The Holy Grail

Ego death is what happens when someone who loves you cheats on you (spouse, parent). Imagine the world is incredibly complicated and you only see a small part of it. Your understanding is based on making assumptions about things and simplifying those assumptions. So when you trust someone, you massively reduce their complexity. Let's say we were married, then there are a whole range of ways you will behave that are more simplistic. So in a way I can tolerate being around you because you are not everything at once. These simplifying structures are hierarchical and some of them are far more important than others.

Breach of Trust

Trust is one of them, especially trust in loved ones and family members. That's why betrayal by a family member is really catastrophic. Because it destabilizes your past, all your memories, it destabilizes your present and it destabilizes your future. It shakes your faith in humanity, including yourself, and everything collapses and that is the death of the ego. Underneath the ego for Jung was another structure that he called the self. And the self is what remains constant across the death of the ego, but it is deeper and less personal, it is archetypal. It is what the ego collapses into when it collapses and then what the ego rebuilds over time.

Voluntary - Involuntary

There are two types of it because you can have a voluntary or involuntary ego death. A voluntary ego death is when you have learned a lot and are ready to let go, so that would be your own imitation. It's like lighting a phoenix and setting yourself on fire, that's a much better idea, even though it can still be very hard. Involuntary ego death is very hard on people. People will do almost anything to prevent that, which is partly why they fight to maintain their group-promoted axiomatic simplifications. This is not surprising, because you would lose yourself. Ego death is a trip to the underworld or a fall into chaos, and that is less bad if you do it intentionally.

Pinocchio

But in the Pinocchio story, for example, this is illustrated by Pinocchio descending into the depths to save his father from the whale. He does this voluntarily, but it almost kills him. He barely gets out of the whale, drowns and dies, but he comes back to life. So even if you do it voluntarily, it is still very hard, but it is better than doing it involuntarily, which is the other alternative.

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.

Rebirth - But first the Collapse

It is part of awakening. The dark night of the soul is a breakdown of perceived meaning in life. An eruption of a deep sense of meaninglessness into your life. And the internal state is very close to depression in some cases. Perhaps a dark night of the soul is often what is conventionally called depression. But fundamentally it is a feeling of emptiness or meaninglessness. Nothing makes sense anymore. Nothing has a purpose.

Sometimes it is triggered by an external event, a catastrophe perhaps on an external level rather than an internal one. The death of someone close to you or a divorce can be triggers. Or you have built your life and given it meaning, and the meaning you have given to your life, your activities, your achievements, your purpose, whatever you consider important, breaks down for some reason. When something happens you can no longer explain it, a catastrophe that seems to destroy the meaning your life had before.

Meaning of Life - The Dark Night of the Soul

And then what has really broken down is the whole conceptual framework of your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. And that leads to a sense of darkness, a dark place. But people have gone in there, they're in that dark place for a while and then they come out of there.

There's a possibility that you can come out of there. You can come out of that into a transformed state of consciousness where life has meaning again, but it's no longer a conceptual meaning that you could necessarily explain. Often people awaken from the dark night of the soul from their conceptual sense of reality that has broken down. They awaken to something deeper that is no longer based on the concepts of your mind.

The Death of the Old Self - Rebirth of the True Self

A deeper sense of purpose or connection to a larger life that is no longer dependent on explanations or anything conceptual. It's a kind of rebirth and the dark night of the soul is a kind of death. What dies in the dark night of the soul is the egoistic sense of self. And of course death is always painful but nothing real has actually died in it, just an illusory identity. Now it's likely that some people have gone through this transformation, they've lived through the dark night of the soul and discovered that out of it came a new self that was a non-conceptual self but a deeper being.

Awakened consciousness and they kind of looked back and realized that they had to go through that. And even in some spiritual traditions they try to recreate the experience of the dark night of the soul to bring about a spiritual awakening. It only seems negative when you're in it but it's part of a larger purpose. The death of the old self and the rebirth of the true self. So if you know it's going to happen, or you're even in the middle of it, the more you surrender, the faster you'll get through it. Surrendering means you stop judging it. You accept whatever you're experiencing in that moment.

Garden of Gethsemane - Jesus and the Agony of Death

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus of Nazareth spent his last night of freedom. Here, in agony, he prayed to God. Here, he was betrayed by Judas and captured by the Romans.

Then Jesus went with his disciples to a garden on the Mount of Olives called Gethsemane. There, he asked them, "Sit here and wait for me! I want to go a little farther and pray."

He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee—James and John—with him. Fear and deep sadness overcame Jesus, and he said to them, "I am about to burst under the weight of this burden. Stay here and watch with me!" Jesus went a few steps further, threw himself down, and prayed, "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me and spare me this suffering! But not what I will, but what you will, shall be done."

Then he returned to the three disciples and saw that they were asleep. He woke Peter and called out, "Could you not have stayed awake with me for a single hour? Stay awake and pray so that you may be able to resist temptation. I know you want the best, but you cannot do it on your own."

He went away a little further to pray: "My Father, if I cannot escape this bitter cup, I am ready to do your will!" When he returned, the disciples were already asleep again; their eyes had closed.

He left them asleep, returned, and prayed a third time, using the same words. Then he returned to his disciples and said, "Are you still sleeping and resting? Now the hour has come: the Son of Man is being betrayed into the hands of ungodly men. Rise up, and let us go." The traitor is already here."

Betrayal - Arrest

While Jesus was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve disciples, arrived with a large group of men armed with swords and clubs. The chief priests and the leaders of the people had sent them. Judas, the traitor, had arranged a signal with the armed men: "The man I kiss when I greet him, that's the man. You must arrest him!"

He went straight to Jesus. "Greetings, Rabbi!" he said and kissed him. Jesus looked at him and said, "Friend! Do what you have planned!" Immediately the men approached, grabbed Jesus, and arrested him.

But one of the disciples who were with Jesus wanted to prevent this. He drew his sword, struck the high priest's servant, and cut off his ear. But Jesus commanded him: "Put away your sword! Anyone who uses violence will die by violence."

Don't you realize that I could ask my Father for an entire army of angels? He would send them to me immediately. But how then could what is foretold in the Holy Scriptures be fulfilled? It must all happen this way!

Afterward, Jesus turned to the men who had arrested him: "Am I a criminal, then, that you have armed yourselves with swords and clubs to arrest me? I taught openly in the temple every day. Why didn't you arrest me there? But this too is happening so that the prophecies of the prophets might be fulfilled."

Then all his disciples deserted him and fled.

The Dark Night of the Soul – Of Doubt and the Fear of Despair! – Zen Meditation and Mysticism