Going Through a Dark Night of the Soul? Eckhart Tolle Explains

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 the awakening. Not for everyone, it doesn't have to be. But often it is part of the awakening process. The dark night of the soul is a term from. 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 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 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 inner state, in some cases, is very close to depression. Maybe some dark night of the soul. Often to do with what is conventionally called depression. But it is basically a sense of emptiness or meaninglessness. Nothing makes sense anymore. There is 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. Your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important. And 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, 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 night 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 night 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 emerged that was a non conceptual self, but a deeper being, the awakened consciousness. And 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 try to recreate the experience of the dark night 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, coffin 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 a kind of artificial, more artificial way of actually experiencing that utter darkness where things break down. To what extent that works, when it's 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 whether it truly worked for many people, but it must have worked to some extent because the tradition went on for a very long time. They are 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 descent 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 is part of 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 that you 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 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 and whatever you look at happen to be looking at. You say, this 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 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. I don't know what this means. This doesn't mean anything. 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 things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all condition and cultural and so on. And you can then look upon the world without imposing a mind made framework of meaning.