The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, that period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours.
Ram Dass
Crazy
Hmm! This dark night I am experiencing is a crazy thing to observe. Some , I am sure, are observing "me" and saying that it is "me" that is crazy....and I would have to agree with that too. This "me", this "psyche", this part of my mind so busy focusing on "little me's" desires and aversions is absolutely nuts! Non stop chatter...with pressure of speech like I have never heard before...flight of ideas...obsessive and compulsive...disorganized thinking...dissociative fugue...delusions...paranoia...anxiety...over use of the defense mechanisms of suppression, repression, denial and avoidance...and having illusions and hallucinations non stop. These are things one would find in the DSM V under the most severe forms of mental illness.
Of course if these mind tendencies were what was being judged, it is no wonder why others would say I was crazy. But this is not what is being judged. is it? This is the part of me considered "normal" because it is what most of our minds are doing, isn't it? It is my wanting to step away from all that "normal" suffering- inducing madness. that others are observing in me, and thinking is "crazy." Sigh!
Knowing What I am Not...Not Knowing What I Am
I have realized that I am not my mind stuff. I am not this body and this role this body plays in this world. I am not what I own or don't own. I am not what I do or don't do. I left what I thought I was behind and stepped out into the dark night to make my way to something more. I am not the opinion others have of me. People around me see a big change in me and they see that as crazy. It is true, I am feeling so disconnected from what I once knew, unstable and off balance, confused, scared, excited, unsure, vulnerable, insecure, terrified etc as I go forward blindly, having no idea what is up ahead but feeling like I have no choice but to keep going. This is a very unsettling experience for me...to be between what I once thought I was but wasn't... and what I am, not yet knowing who that is. I don't feel like I belong anywhere...hovering between two poles...so "out of place". I don't fit in that other world I left anymore. None of it has much meaning and I find it hard to interact with others...I mean I love and feel compassion for all but I have this sense that I no longer belong becasue they see me as "crazy".
That feeling is far from pleasant but I would never go back to the way it was before. That life never felt right to me either. It never made sense to me. I do not want to return to a state of suffering with a few bouts of conditional okayness to help me get by...where I felt I had to struggle to grasp, cling, push away, fix, and manipulate everything out there so I could feel okay in here. How are any of us expected to be okay with a mind like that ( as described above), with a "me" that is never satisfied or settled? Hmm! So I left what I thought I was, the familiar, and am now on the journey to something more. It is dark and scary. People around me are asking, in not so many words, "What are you doing crazy lady?"
The Destination is Here
I am portraying it like a journey...as if there is something up ahead in the distance I am trying to get to. Michael Singer, in the below linked podcast, reminds us, however, that You are there already...You are sat chit ananda (eternal conscious ecstasy) .
There already? Ecstasy? First of all, I would settle for a feeling of "relief" from fear and this heavy weight of suffering that seems to be weighing me down. Ecstasy and bliss seem so far out of my wheel house right now lol. Peace of mind is another rung I want to reach on this ladder that takes us up to this proverbial Sat Chit Ananda in the sky. (Still have this image in my head of having to get somewhere...and it it is an arduous hike or an arduous climb in the dark. ) I am being told by so many others that I don't have to go anywhere, that I am already there. So if I am there already, why can I not at least feel a bit more relief, a bit more peace? I have been working so hard, practicing, going inward to the mess inside everyday...and this dark night seemed to have landed on me creating even more suffering...because I cannot see where I am going or tell if I am even progressing by looking backwards. And I am supposed to be feeling ecstasy? Wow! There must be really something wrong with me if I cannot even tap into a feeling of "relief"?
So why don't you go back to where you were, crazy lady?
(As you can tell, I am having a really hard time avoiding the idea of linear distance travel lol).
I don't think I could go back, even if I wanted to. I have a feeling, once we truly leave the house...like with both feet outside the door ( before then we likely played with a one foot out and one foot in type of experience)...I think the door locks behind us or maybe the house turns into a pile of sawdust because it was never real or sturdy in the beginning. I don't know...I can't see, remember? The night is too dark for me to look back to see what happened to the house. lol
Anyway, I think that when we get to where I am now in my understanding of things, we cannot go back to our old ways of seeing and perceiving. That is another reason why this Dark Night is so challenging. We are suddenly like timid guinea pigs getting the guts to explore the open, only to find when we hear a strange noise, that our shelter has been removed. There is no place to retreat back to. Did you know that guinea pigs can have sudden cardiac deaths because of that? Might be why my ticker is acting up lately, as well.
Back to the Question: If I am already there, why am I not feeling the ecstasy that is supposedly a part of my innate Shakti flow?
I get from the below podcast, that there is two reason why: 1. We are too busy staring at the lower and darker parts of us and 2. We have blocked the flow of Shakti with our samskaras.
1. We are too busy staring at "me"? Most of us spend our whole life in "me-me" focus...focusing on our wants and aversions...trying to figure out what we can do to feel better inside. We have a very narrow focus. It is such a narrow beam of this wonderful light of consciousness we shine on "me" that we cannot see anything around it. Our focus on me is so intent. The world appears to be there for "me" at the exclusion of anything else. This narrow focus does not bring realization of sat chit ananda because it is shining the light away from the light, into the darkest parts of ourselves where me grows. This brings suffering, right? That is why we leave the house we were in...a house that was lined with mirrors.
So we did remove most of our focus on "me" when we left the house for the dark night. We left the mirrors behind and even if we brought one along ...it is dark right, how are you going to stare at yourself in the dark?Anyway...some of our "me" focus is gone as we journey out...but not all of it. It now becomes about this "me" travelling on this hero's journey...suffering the dark night. Our beam of consciousness is now on this me going through the dark night. We focus on how dark and challenging it is and not on the reasons why we are here. We still focus on the darkness and the more we focus on the darkness, the darker it seems to get. If we are focusing on the darkness, we are not focusing on the light. You are a light shining on something that is dark and you say, "I am dark".
2. The other reason why we are not able to feel the ecstasy of Shakti is because we have blocked the flow with our samskaras. So much of Life we have resisted over the years. When we resist we stuff these things deep down inside us so we don't have to deal with them on the conscious level. We have created psychic blockages and damns over our Shakti...cutting us off from experiencing the flow. The Shakti is still there trying to flow but we do not feel it. Our samskara ridden psyches are in the way. Sigh. Now as we walk out into the dark night, leaving what we thought we knew behind, the Samskaras become unsettled from their knotted tangles and start to emerge on their own. What was stuffed in pain, is released in pain. So here we are travelling along in the dark, disconnected from all we once thought we knew...not knowing where we are going and what we will find there...and on top of that we have all this painful energy from emerging samskaras to deal with. Yuck! That is going to make it hard to connect to these wonderful feelings of Shakti, right?
So is there any good news in this sad and twisted tale , crazy lady?
Yes...as painful as it is we need to remember that "this too shall pass". This dark night will not last forever. We will eventually get to where we are going, to where we always were. We just need to have faith and trust that intuitive feeling that gets even stronger in the dark. As confused and challenged by this experience as I am right now...I know in my gut that I am going to where I need to go. I have no desire to turn back, and wouldn't, even if I could.
It helps, I find, to remind yourself that going forward is not crazy, what you left behind was the craziness. You were not truly happy and fulfilled back there. You were just compensating...trying to make the prison you were stuck in more comfortable....and even when you succeeded at doing so, it never lasted, right? It was always just a prison.
Accept the dark night forever long it lasts for you. Acceptance is key. If we resist the dark night...it becomes another samskara that blocks our energy flow. Know that it is there for your evolution and it will last as long as it needs to to get you there!
You can also take that light of consciousness you were shining on the dark parts of you and this night and shine it elsewhere. What would you need to possess inside you to endure this night if you discovered it was going to last forever? Peace, calm abiding, other focus, service, strength, courage....build those qualities and focus the light on them.
Don't push the samskaras back down as they emerge. Let it all come up. Sit with the pain and then let it go!
Trust that the light and the shakti is right there ready to flow. Trust that though the remaining surface you does not feel okay, the "I am' within is always okay and it is back to that you are heading.
And remember we don't go to God....we are just reaching a state of being, where we stop leaving.
All is well!
Michael A. Singer / Temple of the Universe. ( June 12, 2023) Let the deep Truths Set You Free. https://tou.org/talks/
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