Eckhart Tolle explores the dark night of the soul, a collapse of meaning often triggered by loss or catastrophe. What feels like depression or emptiness is actually the death of the false self, he says, and can lead to awakened consciousness and genuine purpose beyond thought.
The dark night of the soul is a term from— goes back a long time. Maybe goes back to the Spanish mystic St. 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 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'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, your 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, 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 could 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.
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