Soul Spelunking – A Journey Into the Dark Night Of The Soul
I’m taking a class “Practical Mysticism” at The Center for Spiritual Living here in San Jose. The class is based on two books, “The Foundation of Mysticism” by Joel S. Goldsmith and “Enter the Castle” by Caroline Myss. “Enter the Castle” is based on the work and writings of Teresa of Avlia.
Both these books blend very nicely with one of my favorite soul sojourn books, “Soul Craft” by Bill Plotkin
All these books help a person with soul work and have been a big influence in my work with The Warriors Quest Intensive.
When we start out doing soul work, ether soul retrieval, Enter the Castle or any other form of consciousness awareness and elevation, there will come a time, for most of us, that we will enter what is called the “Dark Night of the Soul.”
The dark night of the soul is like soul spelunking. You have to go into a dark and strange place, unfamiliar and scary. But what you find are the treasures you have buried deep away and when you return with them you will be entering a “new dawn.”
You are then a mystic warrior!
Dark Night of the Soul
“Dark night of the soul” sounds like a threatening and much to be avoided experience. Yet perhaps a quarter of the seekers on the road to higher consciousness will pass through the dark night. In fact, they may pass through several until they experience the profound joy of their true nature.
Many mystic warriors would encourage the dark night experience if they knew what it was. However, to one engaged in the dark night, suffering seems unending.
The dark night occurs after considerable advancement toward higher consciousness. Indeed, the dark night usually occurs like an initiation before one of these special mystic warriors is admitted into regular relationship with higher consciousness.
The dark night also occurs to those who do not seek relationship but immersion or unity in the higher consciousness. While the term dark night of the soul is used broadly, its general meaning — in the field of higher consciousness — is a lengthy and profound absence of light and hope. In the dark night you feel profoundly alone.
You Can’t Fit In
The dark night usually develops this way:
You, as a genuine seeker to become a mystic warrior, have gone through many significant phases as you progress toward higher consciousness. Your faith is strong. You have kept loyal companionship with fellow seekers and perhaps you have already found a special teacher.
You’ve experienced indications of the reality of higher consciousness and yearn to be more deeply in communion with it. You see the principles of a higher power at work in your life. Yet, all in all, you find yourself somehow painfully on the outside. You feel caught between your old way of living, your old tendencies and associations, and this nebulous, unreachable realm of higher consciousness.
You feel an exile in both places. You don’t belong in the old pastimes, in the old empty or numbing way of life, yet you somehow can’t fit in or feel at home in the fellowship of those who talk naturally of the higher consciousness and its reality.
They are experienced, they are absorbed in it. They are loving, giving people. But you are unable to live, with full heart and mind, the way they do. They’re able to apply the principles of higher consciousness easily, yet it’s so hard for you.
They have manifestations and proofs on a regular basis. You only stretch like a human mule after a receding corncob while pulling the heavy weight of your old tendencies behind you.
You try to be good, and often you can’t. You try to be a loving and find at times your heart is hard like stone. Sometimes your projects fall down around your ears. You keep struggling and still you don’t break through. You understand the path is one of joy and yet your life seems to have been barren for a month or two, perhaps longer. Where did that early joy and zest go?
Hanging On
Up to this particular time there was joy, there was delight. But now there is only a hanging on, a dogged hanging on. You persist because you can’t conceive of going back to your old way of life. That seems impossible now. That would be like going to prison, living as if you had a transorbital lobotomy.
You deeply want to have joy and fulfillment, easily manifest prosperity, but something’s not working. You don’t know what it is but something’s awry, and your meditations have lost their luster. Sometimes, during rare meditations, you do experience brief moments of peace.
Your agonizing mind and heart rest from their turbulence and even these fleeting times of calm are so deeply appreciated. Your light dance of life, which had gone on for some time, is now a trudging in what seems a devastated and alien land.
Your fellow seekers look at you and show their concern. Their words of kindness are valued but you feel you’re somehow incapable of responding well. Your heart is numb. At these times your friends try to cheer you up.
They invite you to dinner. You seem to perform fairly well, despite the emptiness you feel inside.
What else is there to do?
You wonder if you have any right to be in their fellowship at all. You think of leaving town, but where would you go?
What good would diversion be?
A number of your friends in the fellowship of this great path know what you are going through for they have been through it themselves. They feel the main thing to do is encourage you to go on. They know if you keep it up and do not quit you will succeed.
They know if you quit you will be a self-reject and will return to the old life, forever a foreigner, being neither at home with it nor at home anywhere else. They recognize that your own higher self, out of love, is lifting you up into its embrace. They see you are being drawn into your dark night because:
- Your inner potential has great stature.
- Your crusty, old ego requires you go through the dark night in order to be transformed.
You Feel Totally Alone
Other mystic warriors, for various reasons, do not have to pass through the dark night. However, the dark night is your way.
Your night is a very difficult time. While others may one day envy you for the marvelous growth you experienced in such a short, intensified period, you will, because of the pain of your experience, always feel profound compassion for those whom you one day see going through a similar night.
Being caught between the old way of life and the new possibilities, your sense of alienation intensifies. Your sense of inadequacy and not knowing what to do next becomes gnawingly constant. You feel you would do anything to get out of this state, yet it is only your ego which is keeping you in it. However, this insight is impossible for you to grasp while going through your long night.
And you feel so totally alone. Sure, you have friends and you appreciate them, but you are keenly aware they are not capable of feeling what you are feeling or knowing what you are going through. Sometimes they seem like clowns; sometimes they seem empty-headed, caught up in meaningless pursuits.
They do not understand, you think, how much you are suffering or how you cry out and pray deep into each midnight. You try their advice but it doesn’t seem to touch the heart of the matter.
You begin to enter the dark night in earnest when you feel completely stranded. In the fullness of the dark night you don’t know where you are spiritually. You’re separate from Spirit and man. You do not know where to turn. Your friends love you and wish you well but your condition does not improve.
The dark night is a very private matter. The person in the dark night is generally able to function quite well despite inner suffering. Often your acquaintances never suspect that you are going through the dark night — they probably do not even know what it is. Only people close to you — especially friends along the path — can recognize your pain.
You feel like a hollow person doing the activities of life with no motivation except expediency. Your eyes seem deeper in your head. You are profoundly aware of the suffering of humanity and the cruelty of one person to another. You feel that cruelty and negativity far outweigh love and constructive action.
You Enter Midnight
Alone, and not wishing to be, unable even to express yourself to others, you enter midnight and the greatest intensity of the dark night. Here you have finally come to the time of sovereign solitude. In this precious time, which has no apparent prospects of love or happiness, you clearly perceive that nothing in the outer world has proven adequate to heal your condition.
Nobody, not even your dearest friends and loved ones, can make you whole. Even if they have tried, and love you enough to try loving you forever, they can’t give you peace.
You eye your books, DVD’s and audio’s and consider all the benefit you have gained from these extremely wise vessels of truth. Yet not one book, not one thought, goes deep enough inside you to where the affliction abides.
You look at your possessions, your money container. No material thing has been able to help you. No material means have worked. Nothing, no one, in the outer world has enabled you to come out of this dark night.
In your loneliness, you next — in a seemingly random process — notice that none of your thoughts have proven adequate to your suffering. Not one — even repeated fifty thousand times — breaks the inner storm and lets in light.
Spirit and higher consciousness seem so far away that perhaps they are unreal. Neither one has, despite your protracted exposure of yourself, done anything to ease or remove your agony. Nothing appears efficacious.
Nothing works.
Clearly, there is nowhere to turn. There is nothing to be done. All actions you considered have been tried. There is nothing to think, nothing to feel, nothing to do, nowhere to go. It seems you have to accept this defeat — or, you can persist in struggling against it.
For awhile longer, you go about thinking, feeling, and doing other options that occur to you. But you realize in the midnight of your soul that you have tried every option you know of.
This is such a powerful state that I just can’t deliver all the information at once. Please read this over again. If you feel like you are on the path of the mystic warrior then pick up copies of the books mentioned. Or better yet, come out here for you own private and personal Warriors Quest. I’ll be your guide as we go together on your soul spelunking adventure.
