You can look on the world without imposing a mind made framework of meaning.
Eckhart Tolle
Eckhart Tolle, in the video below, tells us that the proverbial, "dark night of the soul", is the period in our lives where we lose teh ability to apply a sense of conceptual meaning or belief to our experiences. It is a period where we, for what ever reason, can no longer use the mind to explain and describe who we are or how we are experiencing the world . It is a time of darkness, emptiness and meaninglessness. I seem to be going through that now. It is challenging. Some would call it depression and a very negative unnecessary experience but other wiser individuals may refer to as a wonderful and necessary step toward enlightenment. I see it as a blessing that has the potential to accelerate my journey.
Please note, I am not discounting the biological and situational causes of depression...I am just saying, in my case, at least, I know that what I am experiencing is taking me somewhere. I, am by no means, "enjoying" the experience of this dark night full of confusion and chaos, but I am doing my best not to judge it. I am allowing Life to do what she must do to get me where I need to be. Things don't make a lot of sense to me right now. Things I once found important just don't seem that important anymore. "My" life seems a little empty and meaningless. But I am going to trust Life. And I am standing back observing this period of conceptual meaninglessness.
Conceptual meaninglessness is not a bad thing. Getting beyond the attachment we place on concepts and beliefs can take us to where we really want to be. We have created a veil between who we think we are, and who we really are, by using the mind and then listening to the mind, following every direction it gives us. The veil is all the stuff the mind created about who "little me" is and what is important and what we must do to feel good inside etc. Breaking down this veil , that really has no value, isn't a whole lot of fun but it is necessary if we want to wake up..
You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self made veil that hides him from you.
Yogananda
In A Course in Miracles, the first six lessons help to dismantle this veil and to induce a sort of voluntary dark night. In lesson one we look about our room at random items, removing conceptual meaning from them, as we say, "This_____does not mean anything". In Lesson Two, we remind ourselves that we have given each of these items all the meaning they have for us. There really is or was no meaning there before teh mind did its thing. Then we admit to our confusion in Lesson Three. We admit that we do not understand anything that we see. (Think about it! We really do not understand anything, do we?) We take this confusion and this dismantling of meaning to our thoughts in Lesson 4. In lesson five and six we remind ourselves that we are not upset for the reasons we think we are. We are seeing something that isn't there in every upset. It is an illusion created by the veil in which we see through. We then need to equalize all upsets, not judging some as big and some as small. All upset is due not to what has happened inside or outside of us but to the meaning the mind placed on it.
Wow! I have done these lessons a few time but just thinking about it now...I see teh wisdom in them even more! This wisdom is echoed in so many traditions in various ways. Hmm! I love when I can connect the dots between different things I read and studied.
Anyway, I must continue shuffling along through this glorious dark night.
All is well.
ACIM (2011) Workbook For Students. Foundations for Inner Peace
Eckhart Tolle ( January, 2023) Going Through A Dark Night of the Soul. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DrR6rSJhN0
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