[Exploring Life] The Artistry of the Night: In the previous article I suggested that a dark night of the soul is one of the most profound and authentic, yet grievous, creative experiences we might have in life. When we are touched by the night we are compelled to retrieve our innate sense of artistry as a creative response of hope and survival. A dark night is a place we may or may not emerge from. What is the nature of creativity in the context of a dark night? Why is artistry at the core of this experience?

When we think of art we commonly recall aesthetically stimulating objects that have been crafted by an artist. A physical work of art of the end result of artistry, the outcome of a creative perception given form through skill and craftsmanship. The capacities and abilities that are the source of the artist’s creativity that bring a work of art to life include intuition, perceptual acuity, imagination, vision, attention, awareness, discernment, comprehension, apprehension, concentration, contemplation. The mental landscape of an artist is rich in variation and texture; they interpret the world around us in unique and often exciting ways and imbue the things they create with new perspectives. The artist’s home is the realm of thresholds, perceptual spaces that bring us to the very edges of consciousness. The artist’s way embraces all forms of authentic experience, beautiful and ugly, peaceful and distressing, safe and dangerous, life and death. The artist is, in this sense, a perceptual warrior who explores the thresholds of experience and embraces their skill and craftsmanship to communicate aspects of their exploration with us.
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[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.
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[Exploring Life] From what experience have you suffered most? Suffering can inspire change and transformation in us; suffering can also confine and torment us. What is most essential is how we choose to embrace the suffering that we feel. I have shared my journey into grief and suffering with you via the series Points of No Return: On the Loss of My Parents. I have also recently discovered a A Network for Grateful Living, an organization created by Brother David Steindl-Rast that is dedicated to providing education and support for the practice of grateful living as a global ethic. He believes that gratefulness is a self-evident truth that underlies the very essence of the spiritual experience.

Of particular interest to me in this article is how he crafts specific kinds of learning practices that are designed to increase our awareness and infuse our daily experience with the quality of gratefulness. More to the point, I am specifically interested in how his approach to gratefulness can influence the grief associated with the loss of my parents. It seems to me that if we are able to consciously bring an eternal spiritual quality such a gratitude to the experiences of intense suffering then we encourage movement toward healing and arriving at an equilibrium. Grief and suffering demand our respect and attention, and they will command that attention whether we are willing or not. Contemplating our grief in the midst of gratitude, it seems to me, is a means to begin transforming our suffering through healing.
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Religious belief is often characterized as being inflexible and closed. The source of the beliefs that give rise to a religious system lies within the interpretation of “sacred” doctrine that in some manner originates in an all powerful being, or God. The doctrine is considered to be an untouchable, while the interpretation of it may be widely varied. The notion behind many religions is to implant a specific set of beliefs into the minds of followers in order to elicit specific kinds of behaviours. If the follower is successful, they are granted some kind of reward in the afterlife; if unsuccessful they are condemned in the afterlife. In this sense, religion is a form of fear-based confinement and mindless conditioning. In Unformed Future Tom Roberts describes the emergence of a third-way, which is focused on changing some of the assumptions behind the construction of a religious system that fundamentally changes how people learn and interact within it.
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[Exploring Life] The subtleties of suffering and loss that now seem pervasive in modern life is intimately connected with a loss of beauty. While the world remains rich in beauty, it is our ability to sense and appreciate it has fallen victim to the vagaries of culture and progress. There is no vibrant culture in the absence of beauty; nor is there any real progress in the absence of beauty.
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