they all point to the same experience which is not ultimately negative it just seems negative when you are in it but it is part of a larger purpose it's part of a The Awakening not for everyone it doesn't have to be but often it is part of the Awakening process The Dark Knight of the soul is a term from it goes back a long time maybe goes back to the Spanish Mystic Saint John of the Cross I'm not sure if it does but it goes back a long time it describes something well the questioner seems
to imply that he is he or she is going through something like this at the moment the Dark Night of the Soul which yes I have also experienced that's a term then used to describe a what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness and the the inner state in some cases it's very close to depression maybe some Dark Night of the Soul often to do with we'll just conventionally called depression but it is basically a sense of emptiness or meaninglessness nothing
makes sense anymore there's no purpose to anything and sometimes it's triggered by some external event some disasters perhaps on an external level external rather than Within the death of someone close to you could trigger it especially premature death for example if your child dies or you had built up your life and given it meaning and the meaning that you had given your life this is what my life is about the activities your achievements where you're going what is considered important and the so the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses so
as I said it can happen if something happens that you can't explain away anymore some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before and really was that what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life the meaning that your mind had given it and so that results in a sense of Darkness a dark place but people have gone into that you're in that dark place for a while and then you emerge out of that there is the possibility that you emerge out of that you can emerge out of
that into a transformed state of consciousness where life has meaning again but it is no longer a conceptual meaning that you couldn't necessarily explain it is often from The Dark Knight of the Soul not necessarily but quite often it's from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality which has collapsed they awaken into something deeper which is no longer based on Concepts in your mind a deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer it's a kind of rebirth and The
Dark Knight of the soul is a kind of death that you die what dies in The Dark Night of the soul is the egoic sense of self and of course yes death is always painful but nothing real has actually died there only an illusory identity now it is probably the case that some people who have gone through this transformation they have been through the Dark Night of the soul and they discovered that out of that a new self-emerge that was a non-conceptual self but it a deeper being the awakened consciousness and this they somehow looking
back they realized that they had to go through that not everybody does of course have to go through that but some people do and they've even in some spiritual Traditions they recruit they try to recreate the experience of The Dark Knight of the Soul in order to bring about a spiritual awakening and that was probably part of the so-called mystery schools of ancient Greece and Egypt which were designed they even survived into Roman times mystery schools and with rituals and so on not much we don't know much about it because they were kept secret not
much was written about it and in one tradition you spend a prolonged period of time in darkness sometimes even in a coffin coughing like place in complete isolation and darkness that is an attempt I would say on the part of someone who has gone through the natural Dark Night of the Soul to recreate the experience of it in the kind of artificial more artificial way of actual experience that the that utter Darkness where things break down and whether to what extent that works when it's uh not a natural experience but a created experience for how
many people that worked and actually did bring about an Awakening and a collapse of the mind-made self I don't know how it whether it truly worked for many people but it must have worked to some extent because it's in the tradition went on for a very long time they are other in other forms of in mythological forms also they speak of similar things sometimes described as the the night Journey in mythological tradition or also the descend to the underworld they all point to the same experience which is not ultimately negative it just seems negative when
you are in it but it is part of a larger purpose it's part of a The Awakening not for everyone it doesn't have to be but often it is part of the Awakening process the death of the old self the birth of the true self so once you know that if it should come or if you should even be in the middle of it now you can just the more you surrender the more quickly you go through it surrender means don't judge it anymore you accept whatever it is your experience at this moment but as
I said not everybody has to go through that for many people The Awakening process starts and begins without that sometimes even after the Awakening process begins it might still happen and then finally you will break through but that's fine allow life to do what it does you don't need to seek that and we don't need to recreate it in some artificial way so don't you shut yourself in a dark room for days on end it's unlikely to work it's unnecessary the first lesson in the Course in Miracles says nothing I see in this room means
anything and you're supposed to look around the room at whatever you look I happen to be looking at you say this that doesn't mean anything that doesn't mean anything this table doesn't mean anything this hand doesn't mean anything what's the purpose of a lesson like that well that's a little bit like recreating the what can happen during The Dark Night of the Soul which is the collapse of a mind-made meaning conceptual meaning of life believing that you understand what's it all about so with the Course in Miracles in lesson one it's a voluntary relinquishment of
the human mind made meaning that is projected and you go voluntarily into saying I don't know what this means this doesn't mean anything you see you wipe the board clean in the Dark Night of the Soul it collapses and in some spiritual Traditions then you can actually you're encouraged to relinquish your conceptual reality and so you're then meant to arrive at a place of conceptual one could say meaninglessness or one could say a state of ignorance where you don't think things lose their the meaning that you had given them which was all conditioned and cultural
and so on and you can then look upon the world without imposing a mind made framework of meaning
