[Exploring Life] On a Dark Night… Darkness means an absence or deficiency of light. From a spiritual perspective, darkness creates an intuitive space in which the fragility of our beliefs about the meaning and purpose of our lives becomes uncomfortably apparent. To enter into a spiritual darkness is to begin an excruciating journey into of the essence of our own impermanence. A dark night is not an absence of spirit; it is a pervasive and unavoidable calling into the realm of the soul. The dark night of the soul is a spiritual endeavour that places us firmly in the midst of our own inadequacies and frailties. It is a spiritual point of no return.
Darkness is a vast interior landscape of loneliness and abandonment. Our guide and most trusted advisor throughout a dark night of the soul is Solitude. Even in the midst of our loved ones and friends we persist in feeling desperately alone. Darkness invokes extreme contrasts between solitude and belonging, and in doing so invokes a suffering that defines our presence in the world. It is this pervasive sense of abandonment in the midst of belonging that is, for me, the essence of the dark night of the soul. A dark night amputates our existing sense of identity as if removing a mask we forget we were wearing. The soul poignantly whispers to us that we can no longer be who we were and we do not yet know who we will be. A dark night of the soul is not merely an identity crisis, it is the sudden absence of identity and an absolute loss of self. A dark night of the soul is the medium in which we learn about our own suffering, and to learn about suffering is to pursue the essence of presence.
The Spirituality of Modern Society: We live in a world in which the quality and capacity our minds seem to be steadily deteriorating. Anxiety is now a lifestyle. Distraction is a default thinking style. New age hope and promise is largely nonsense masquerading as insight. In our world, knowledge building does not serve to clarify; it fosters increasingly deeper levels of confusion and contradiction. The bland and arid surface of information overwhelms the higher ground of comprehension and understanding. Expertism’s incestuous relationship with business increasingly manufactures victims for its wares. We invent problems that don’t exist so that we can market and sell solutions to these imaginary problems. The acceleration and pervasiveness of human interaction erodes our powers of discernment and concentration; we obsessively communicate more and more yet have increasingly little to give. We have seduced ourselves into believing that this vast frenzied state of inertia we call progress actually matters. We are destroying ourselves and the very planet that is our only source of life.
Spirituality in the modern world has become a commodity. One of the most reprehensible aspects of human existence is our obsessive need to commodify seemingly everything we come into contact with. Spirituality has fallen victim as we see a plethora of new age buffs selling their wares under the pleasant and comforting guise of guru-ship. Our education, under the design of the prerequisite, has conditioned us to behave as if we were intellectual lemmings. Spirituality is a uniquely individual artistic endeavour in which we seek to discover how we can connect, interact, and preserve the essence of life and existence. The way to reclaim ourselves is only found through the way of the artist; to take back the artistry of living is to embrace spirituality.
The Artistry of the Dark Night: The dark night of the soul is an experience that permeates many religious, spiritual and artistic traditions throughout the world. It is commonly associated with mystics, or those people that dedicate their lives to the pursuit of higher levels of consciousness. However, the experience of the dark night is familiar to us all in various ways and means. Each of us experiences the dark night in a unique way, however, the underlying current is relentlessly concentrated on the solitary quest for meaning and purpose in the midst of the destruction of our present beliefs.
On a dark night,
Inflamed by love-longing–
O exquisite risk!–
Undetected I slipped away.
My house, at last, grown still.
- St. John of the Cross in Dark Night of the Soul
All creativity embraces destruction. Destruction is not the opposite of creativity; destruction is an aspect of and companion to creativity. The human soul is a potent creative and therefore destructive force, one that can with a mere whisper bring us to our knees begging for relief. But the destruction of belief is necessary and though our suffering may take us to our most extreme limits of resilience, the soul is creating space for gestation and bringing forth.
There is no meaningful creativity without destroying the things that serve to confine us.
In a dark night we experience the destruction of that which is familiar and brings us comfort, of that which gives a reason to do the things that we do. Once removed we go through the motions of life with a overwhelming feeling of paralysis, of being unable to move through life even though we sense it moving all around us.
When Our Interior World Fails: When our interior world begins to fail and a sense of desolation begins to overwhelm our experience, society is quick to provide the label of depression. Of course, depression as a disease is virulent and does infect our thought patterns, emotional states, and biological functioning. To relieve ourselves from depression we often seek to change our thought processes and/or use chemical intervention to relieve the symptoms. A dark night of the soul may invite depression, however, it is something far more expansive and primal. There is no pharmaceutical relief from the sense of desolation brought on by the dark night. The calling of the soul cannot be medicated. Nor can we merely “think” our way out of the dark night as if it were some kind of exercise in cognitive therapy.
He [God] leads them into the dark night. Here is where he weans them from the breasts of personal pleasure, through pure aridity and inner darkness. He removes all the gratuities and childish attachments and helps them acquire the virtues by very different means.
- – St. John of the Cross in Dark Night of the Soul
Sometimes the solution to that which causes us the most intense levels of suffering lies within the realm of contemplation, or the long and careful observation of our experience. Suffering is something we tend to avoid; we fear pain. Although pain and suffering are unpleasant, there are situations and circumstances in life in which they are not only necessary but essential. Within the spiritual realm of the dark night of the soul our contemplation must attempt to allow, accept and embrace the suffering and pain that calls to us from the midst of our soul.
We have anesthetized ourselves to spirituality. Religion has become more of a question mark, perhaps even more of a roadblock, than a sanctuary for the contemplation of belief. Merely adopting a particular set of beliefs that have been defined by other people, whether they be religious or spiritual in origin, will not prevent a dark night of the soul from visiting. In essence, a dark night kidnaps us from the false security of our beliefs, traditions, and faith. It is the mercurial space in which we cannot find our identity, our purpose, or meaning. In a sense, a dark night is a physical, mental and spiritual abyss in which questions such as, “Why am I here?” find no solace. A dark night is the place of utter solitude and loneliness – there is no relief other than to journey through it.
Demons of Our Own Conjuring: Perhaps this kind of description sounds excessive. Is there not enough meaning and value in our ordinary lives to pursue? Is it not enough to educate ourselves, raise families, contribute to society, and retire well without adding in the angst generated by the soul? Isn’t religion enough – just choose one to believe in, follow its assumptions blindly, and all will work out in the end? Is there really an internal world,a spiritual terrain, that we must traverse in order to relieve our burden and reach a calmer place? Is the angst of the soul really a delusion in itself, a source of suffering that we have in fact manufactured for ourselves in the pursuit of false assumptions and beliefs? Have we fallen victim to our imagination and false religious notions? Moreover, why willingly fall into what is described as an abyss of suffering, dislocation, and desolation?
Sometimes we see what’s not there. We see demons of our own conjuring.
- The Devil’s Mistress
The problem is that our imagination is just as real as something we suppose to be real “out there.” If we are seeing something, then it is there. And perhaps demons have always been of our own conjuring, and our interior world of the spirit is where they reside. There is nothing “out there” that isn’t “in here;” in this sense, demons can only be of our own conjuring. To ignore the messages that seem to originate in that untraceable location we call our intuition, is to ignore our higher and more artistic sensibilities. We should be more willing to inhabit those places of our being that lie beyond immediate sensory perception and spaces that do not conform to our collective compendium of knowledge and belief. And are we so confined in our presence that we deny the possibly of other modes of perception and comprehension?
A dark night of the soul is an artistic journey into that which may destroy us, but also that which may serve to renew us. We are placed within a learning environment that serves as a medium of transformation, but in which we are utterly lost, alone, and riddled with anxiety. Once inside a dark night, they is no way or means to reverse our way out of it, to return to that which was. In this sense, a dark night of the soul is a threshold into a primal form of suffering in which our mentors and companions are loneliness, solitude, despair, confinement, disillusionment, isolation, uncertainty, angst, fear, panic, and desolation. And there is no promise or guarantee within a dark night, that is to say, there is no certainty that we will ever emerge from it in this life.
A dark night embraces the essence of art, artistry, and creativity. By this I mean that a dark night is deeply authentic in nature and our journey through it draws upon every spiritual, intuitive, intellectual, and emotional resource we have available to us. This is not to say that a dark night is a prerequisite for art, but it is a compelling example of artistry that is authentic, pure and true.
[Revised March 2011]
Thank you Brian – for taking the time to articulate this for readers.