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.
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.
The Dark Night of the Soul
