The Dark Night of the Soul
Dr Richard Moss
Speaks about the Dark Night of the Soul
Excerpt from The Dance of Stillness
Let me ask about the Dark Night of the Soul. Specifically, as it has arisen as part of your own process and then perhaps beyond that, what your understanding is of that process in others, considering that you’ve had such an intimate awareness of so many people’s spiritual journeys.
I often joke that, maybe my life would be different if it had been the white butterfly that landed on my forehead, instead of the black one. Form requires formlessness. Formlessness is terrifying to our egos, to our sense of personal identity. I truly believe that deeper consciousness is a continuous process of descending into the dark, which is that which is beyond our ability to understand and often seems threatening to us. And as we’re being called toward a new consciousness, the ego perceives that as darkness. I mean, I would say that, if God got near us, and we were still in ego awareness, that would be terrifying, and our perception then of God would be as Demonic. If we weren’t in ego awareness, and we were able to relax and just rest into being, and God got near us, it would be an honor, bliss, nirvana.
But, I think you don’t stay there. People don’t stay there and aren’t meant to stay there because their next cycle would be to go back into the world and try to reorganize matters, so to speak, in a more coherent, more integral, integrated process. So the dark night for me was the loss of meaning, the loss of wanting to live, the loss of anything in life that seemed fulfilling. And it was hard to trust, very hard to trust, and there was an enormous amount of fear. The more my mind tried to understand what was happening, the more fear there was. I had to make my peace with not knowing. I would wake up each day and I would say, 'OK, if life gives me nothing but this, I will say “thank you.” I’ll be grateful.' So for awhile after the extraordinary period of wholeness there was a period of fear, nothing but this incredible raw vulnerability. And like St. John of the Cross, I came to call it the Dark Night of the Soul.
I don’t think it's one thing. There’s a kind of turning inward that’s almost contrary to everything that life had been about, that I experienced. I felt that I had been brought to the experience of union, and then afterwards sort of cast down into darkness and had to find my way again, slowly. It's so far in my past now, yet when I talk about myself I say, 'One hand reaches out beyond this world into another dimension, which we can call transcendence,' -- so I sometimes just use the image of holding an angel. And the other hand reaches down into something so dark and disfigured, anguished and agonized that I call it almost demonic.
And I really believe that when people get too high, something tries to pull them down into the earth, into the body, which is what we often talk about when we mean demonic. And when people get too locked into the rigidity of ordinary life, then something comes to break that and lift us out of it. And so that the Dark Night of the Soul is a kind of descent into a kind of “no man’s land” until you develop the ability to be present in it. Once you can, you are operating an wholly new consciousness.
There’s a Sumerian myth, -- it’s a woman’s myth called 'The Myth of Innana' and it describes the descent of the outer or superficial woman to her dark, inner sister that awakens the goddess energy. It's in a very important myth for women, but for men as well. This myth is beautifully discussed in a book called Descent to the Goddess by Sylvia Brinton Perrera. It describes what it's like to be stripped of adornment, stripped of vanity, stripped of purpose, stripped of motivation, stripped of self-image and self-worth until there’s nothing left but the function of awareness itself. And that’s what I mean by the dark night, being stripped of all that formerly provided one with a sense of self until only awareness remains and it is an awareness that has is no longer referent to “me”.
And the more unconditional we are, the more non-reactive we are, the more quickly that descent happens, and then we’re lifted back up. And so rather than seeing it as a constant cycling, from the one polarity to another, I see it as an enlarging sphere of consciousness, and the Dark Night of the Soul as the first truly major descent into unknown territory, and the loss of sense of self.
In my teaching, I say that the fundamental fear that we have as individuals, is of non-existence. And we fear the dark night, to whatever depth it's experienced, whether it is provoked because of loss of a loved one, loss of a child, serious illness, the approach of death, loss of career, or an experience like what I have just been describing. The Dark Night is born of the soul's urge to go beyond its present dynamic, its present form in life, either in search of God, or to escape unbearable suffering. Whatever occasions the descent, we are presented with feelings we don’t know what to do with. Presented with thoughts that we don’t know how to hold. We’re presented with states of being through which we don’t know how to see as a face of God. And, see as a benevolent face of God. They’re terrifying faces, they’re threatening faces.
So I believe that a human being's deepest work is to learn to hold these things, and that people who have descended deeply are the ones who help us hold it all. They’re the ones who, when you’re with them, offer permission to be with your fear, in a new way. And that is, to enter into what has been judged and reviled and rejected in the human experience. And to find in it something like God in disguise. In Descent to the Goddess, when Inana gets all the way down she meets her dark sister, the antithesis of her outer world consciousness. And it isn’t until the reality of the dark sister is honored that Inana is allowed to come back to the surface, come back to ordinary consciousness, but changed forever. So that’s a story of the Dark Night of the Soul. It existed prior to the dark night that St. John of the Cross wrote about.
But the process of despair, which is another way that I speak about it, is a necessary part of life that is very difficult in our culture, because there is no permission for it. A person who is, let's say, really creative and goes through university and then takes a few years off to discover themselves in the world doesn't necessarily enter a dark night, but adolescence can be quite a difficult rite of passage. Then there are the people that I know who are retiring from work, or have succeeded in their work and are ready to leave it behind after many years of it. They’re immediately thinking of their next project. I say to them, 'Well, why don’t you give your soul a time of emptiness, a time of not doing?' And for them, it’s so threatening. They don’t know who they are without a direction, a purpose -- and our culture advocates that, all the time. So less and less vacation time, more and more speed, more and more to do, less and less time. If you can't find the solace in ordinary life, if you can’t find the Shakti in everyday activity, then you’re still in “ascending” spirituality. So, when I was – unconsciously – in an ascending spirituality, I needed to be pulled down. Living anything that happens, just being with what Is, is the truest part of my life.
So we talked about it yesterday as desolation, consolation. But despair means literally to be without hope. Yet how can we face death, or fear, or suffering without hope? How can we let go of hope? What would that be like? What would it be like to say, “This state that I’m in now is just what it is. If I fight it, I will make myself incredibly unhappy. It's not unlike what I think you were saying when you quoted Master Charles: 'When I try to understand -- when I want to know what it's all about -- that’s when I suffer.' But some part of us always wants to know what it's all about, even though we can’t. And so, most of the pearls of my life have come out of darkness. Most of who I am. And I’ve learned a certain mastery in darkness. A certain kind of keeping my own counsel and learning to be generous when I feel very vulnerable.
So, standing very close to the light or the fire is also standing close to annihilation, not simply standing close to heaven. And then, in some periods, it resolves into ahhhh bliss. I don’t see bliss as the goal; I see it almost as the relaxation that was brought about by the darkness -- or the transparency that was brought about by the darkness. Transparency to me is, really, the heart of what happens. You know, you don’t know who you really are. You don’t know how much you’re identified with your body, and how much you’re identified with your thinking. You don't know how much you’re identified with your world, your actions -- until you feel like you’re losing those things. And then, I mean, you knew Alia. You watched her being stripped of everything slowly but surely, and yet, she was still offering you a message.
The reason Alia was so close to me is because I’ve spent so much time in the darkness. And, I didn’t have to tell her that. She knew it. Everybody that’s been in the darkness knows it when they meet it in another. I often feel people who have been challenged in this way to be more real than the people who seem to know where they’re going in life.
It's not a popular message. It's not one you can sell well. You’ll find that if you read my books, or you listen to my talks, you’ll meet it there. I’m basically always pointing people toward the fear that they don’t want to face. And my life is about facing that in my life. Facing that in my marriage. Facing that in my work. Transparency is just that place where you are 'in the world but not of the world,' and you have to cling to your sense of identity, your sense of self, just enough to remain in the world. And yet you’re being dissolved beyond the world and in that state between form and formlessness. I think there’s a chapter about this in The I That Is We called ‘Living at the Edge of Formlessness.’ I don’t think I’m saying anything new. I think I’ve been saying the same things right along -- that, you know, it hasn’t been an easy life, yet it has been a remarkable life. And that’s just how it is, whether it's my nature, or whether it's in my genes.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, an American mystic philosopher who I knew, felt at one point in his awakening process that he was going to leave the world, but that he was quite happy to do so. Then as he began to write, he started embodying himself. But he didn’t suffer that process very much. We talked about that a little bit. It’s always been important for me to talk about suffering because I meet so many people who suffer. Whether they suffer from illness or, more usually, from what their own minds create. I just called some people today because they’d called me last week and I spent an hour and a half or so on the phone with them -- just to check in with a 44- year-old-woman who has metastatic lung cancer. She never smoked in her life. It's in her brain now and she has grand mal seizures. And she’s got two children, 14 years old and 10 years old, and she’s going to die. She’s got no spiritual foundation, no training whatsoever -- none. And, she doesn’t know how to meditate. Very few people can meditate at a time like this.
Can you imagine? They’ve not been given the tools to face suffering. What they want is hope. Medicine can provide no more hope and they’ve already gone through the ordeals of losing hair and chemotherapy, and yet they’re still asking questions. What do I do? I say to them, 'Listen. Be quiet and listen. You don’t have to do something to save your life. You can let yourself die, and maybe you won’t. If you keep listening, I think something will lead you. There's no promise it will be able to protect you from death.' Some of them then say, 'How do I listen?' And I say, 'You have to get quiet and observe what it is that you’re running from, or what it is that you’re running to. Just take the running to, and put it aside for a while. And take the running from, and try to put that aside for a while also. And then listen.'
I said to this woman, 'What you really, really might want to do, is not do anything. And then you might just feel like Ahhh, this seems like giving up. And you could, in fact, be giving up. On the other hand, you could be opening up.' It’s just talking to that in people and knowing what a difficult place it is. What a difficult place it is for her husband. And as I was talking to them her 14-year-old son came in, so I could hear his voice for a minute and speak to him a little. So, I think what comes through me for that kind of person, is not answers, but somehow a space that makes it easier for them to be in the unknowing and the dark night of their lives. This is part of what I do. It’s that part of what I’m journeying through.
I see a lot of people who are seeking to be free of it. And I’m saying, as Jesus said, “Those who seek to save their lives will lose it.” It is one of the greatest paradoxes that the survival impulse in human beings is what’s leading us to extinction. You have to not insist upon surviving in the face of annihilation. You must know when to lay yourself down in the darkness, in the abyss, lay yourself down with poise and dignity. If people say they feel like they’ve fallen into an abyss, I say 'OK then, be sure to point your toes.' Have you ever seen the people dive in Acapulco, off those 100-foot cliffs, into the ocean?
Yes.
What’s the difference between someone falling off a diving board and a well executed dive? Well, the difference is, precision in the air, or form, and relationship to body and relationship to you who are in all of that. So if you’re falling, and you’re falling into an abyss, pointing your toes means keeping your eyes wide open, trying not to protect yourself from what you feel. Listening to what other people are saying. Fighting against the self-involvement that comes from fear -- and is also the root of fear. So when self-involvement goes, fear goes too. Many people go through the dark night.
And it's not always the mystical dark night that leads to union with God, you know, but what’s union with God anyway? – That’s just an idea, an idea that people talk about after they've had an experience they don’t understand -- and, which they've had nothing to do with. And unless that experience of union leads you to turn that into some new patterns in your life – it’s hard to argue that it does much for us. Not much, that is, unless you really put your life into the new life. It is the injunction that new wine needs new wine skeins. I love how the old teachings keep coming back again and again.
Very beautiful. Thank you.
Dr Richard Moss
Speaks about the Dark Night of the Soul
Excerpt from The Dance of Stillness
Let me ask about the Dark Night of the Soul. Specifically, as it has arisen as part of your own process and then perhaps beyond that, what your understanding is of that process in others, considering that you’ve had such an intimate awareness of so many people’s spiritual journeys.
I often joke that, maybe my life would be different if it had been the white butterfly that landed on my forehead, instead of the black one. Form requires formlessness. Formlessness is terrifying to our egos, to our sense of personal identity. I truly believe that deeper consciousness is a continuous process of descending into the dark, which is that which is beyond our ability to understand and often seems threatening to us. And as we’re being called toward a new consciousness, the ego perceives that as darkness. I mean, I would say that, if God got near us, and we were still in ego awareness, that would be terrifying, and our perception then of God would be as Demonic. If we weren’t in ego awareness, and we were able to relax and just rest into being, and God got near us, it would be an honor, bliss, nirvana.
But, I think you don’t stay there. People don’t stay there and aren’t meant to stay there because their next cycle would be to go back into the world and try to reorganize matters, so to speak, in a more coherent, more integral, integrated process. So the dark night for me was the loss of meaning, the loss of wanting to live, the loss of anything in life that seemed fulfilling. And it was hard to trust, very hard to trust, and there was an enormous amount of fear. The more my mind tried to understand what was happening, the more fear there was. I had to make my peace with not knowing. I would wake up each day and I would say, 'OK, if life gives me nothing but this, I will say “thank you.” I’ll be grateful.' So for awhile after the extraordinary period of wholeness there was a period of fear, nothing but this incredible raw vulnerability. And like St. John of the Cross, I came to call it the Dark Night of the Soul.
I don’t think it's one thing. There’s a kind of turning inward that’s almost contrary to everything that life had been about, that I experienced. I felt that I had been brought to the experience of union, and then afterwards sort of cast down into darkness and had to find my way again, slowly. It's so far in my past now, yet when I talk about myself I say, 'One hand reaches out beyond this world into another dimension, which we can call transcendence,' -- so I sometimes just use the image of holding an angel. And the other hand reaches down into something so dark and disfigured, anguished and agonized that I call it almost demonic.
And I really believe that when people get too high, something tries to pull them down into the earth, into the body, which is what we often talk about when we mean demonic. And when people get too locked into the rigidity of ordinary life, then something comes to break that and lift us out of it. And so that the Dark Night of the Soul is a kind of descent into a kind of “no man’s land” until you develop the ability to be present in it. Once you can, you are operating an wholly new consciousness.
There’s a Sumerian myth, -- it’s a woman’s myth called 'The Myth of Innana' and it describes the descent of the outer or superficial woman to her dark, inner sister that awakens the goddess energy. It's in a very important myth for women, but for men as well. This myth is beautifully discussed in a book called Descent to the Goddess by Sylvia Brinton Perrera. It describes what it's like to be stripped of adornment, stripped of vanity, stripped of purpose, stripped of motivation, stripped of self-image and self-worth until there’s nothing left but the function of awareness itself. And that’s what I mean by the dark night, being stripped of all that formerly provided one with a sense of self until only awareness remains and it is an awareness that has is no longer referent to “me”.
And the more unconditional we are, the more non-reactive we are, the more quickly that descent happens, and then we’re lifted back up. And so rather than seeing it as a constant cycling, from the one polarity to another, I see it as an enlarging sphere of consciousness, and the Dark Night of the Soul as the first truly major descent into unknown territory, and the loss of sense of self.
In my teaching, I say that the fundamental fear that we have as individuals, is of non-existence. And we fear the dark night, to whatever depth it's experienced, whether it is provoked because of loss of a loved one, loss of a child, serious illness, the approach of death, loss of career, or an experience like what I have just been describing. The Dark Night is born of the soul's urge to go beyond its present dynamic, its present form in life, either in search of God, or to escape unbearable suffering. Whatever occasions the descent, we are presented with feelings we don’t know what to do with. Presented with thoughts that we don’t know how to hold. We’re presented with states of being through which we don’t know how to see as a face of God. And, see as a benevolent face of God. They’re terrifying faces, they’re threatening faces.
So I believe that a human being's deepest work is to learn to hold these things, and that people who have descended deeply are the ones who help us hold it all. They’re the ones who, when you’re with them, offer permission to be with your fear, in a new way. And that is, to enter into what has been judged and reviled and rejected in the human experience. And to find in it something like God in disguise. In Descent to the Goddess, when Inana gets all the way down she meets her dark sister, the antithesis of her outer world consciousness. And it isn’t until the reality of the dark sister is honored that Inana is allowed to come back to the surface, come back to ordinary consciousness, but changed forever. So that’s a story of the Dark Night of the Soul. It existed prior to the dark night that St. John of the Cross wrote about.
But the process of despair, which is another way that I speak about it, is a necessary part of life that is very difficult in our culture, because there is no permission for it. A person who is, let's say, really creative and goes through university and then takes a few years off to discover themselves in the world doesn't necessarily enter a dark night, but adolescence can be quite a difficult rite of passage. Then there are the people that I know who are retiring from work, or have succeeded in their work and are ready to leave it behind after many years of it. They’re immediately thinking of their next project. I say to them, 'Well, why don’t you give your soul a time of emptiness, a time of not doing?' And for them, it’s so threatening. They don’t know who they are without a direction, a purpose -- and our culture advocates that, all the time. So less and less vacation time, more and more speed, more and more to do, less and less time. If you can't find the solace in ordinary life, if you can’t find the Shakti in everyday activity, then you’re still in “ascending” spirituality. So, when I was – unconsciously – in an ascending spirituality, I needed to be pulled down. Living anything that happens, just being with what Is, is the truest part of my life.
So we talked about it yesterday as desolation, consolation. But despair means literally to be without hope. Yet how can we face death, or fear, or suffering without hope? How can we let go of hope? What would that be like? What would it be like to say, “This state that I’m in now is just what it is. If I fight it, I will make myself incredibly unhappy. It's not unlike what I think you were saying when you quoted Master Charles: 'When I try to understand -- when I want to know what it's all about -- that’s when I suffer.' But some part of us always wants to know what it's all about, even though we can’t. And so, most of the pearls of my life have come out of darkness. Most of who I am. And I’ve learned a certain mastery in darkness. A certain kind of keeping my own counsel and learning to be generous when I feel very vulnerable.
So, standing very close to the light or the fire is also standing close to annihilation, not simply standing close to heaven. And then, in some periods, it resolves into ahhhh bliss. I don’t see bliss as the goal; I see it almost as the relaxation that was brought about by the darkness -- or the transparency that was brought about by the darkness. Transparency to me is, really, the heart of what happens. You know, you don’t know who you really are. You don’t know how much you’re identified with your body, and how much you’re identified with your thinking. You don't know how much you’re identified with your world, your actions -- until you feel like you’re losing those things. And then, I mean, you knew Alia. You watched her being stripped of everything slowly but surely, and yet, she was still offering you a message.
The reason Alia was so close to me is because I’ve spent so much time in the darkness. And, I didn’t have to tell her that. She knew it. Everybody that’s been in the darkness knows it when they meet it in another. I often feel people who have been challenged in this way to be more real than the people who seem to know where they’re going in life.
It's not a popular message. It's not one you can sell well. You’ll find that if you read my books, or you listen to my talks, you’ll meet it there. I’m basically always pointing people toward the fear that they don’t want to face. And my life is about facing that in my life. Facing that in my marriage. Facing that in my work. Transparency is just that place where you are 'in the world but not of the world,' and you have to cling to your sense of identity, your sense of self, just enough to remain in the world. And yet you’re being dissolved beyond the world and in that state between form and formlessness. I think there’s a chapter about this in The I That Is We called ‘Living at the Edge of Formlessness.’ I don’t think I’m saying anything new. I think I’ve been saying the same things right along -- that, you know, it hasn’t been an easy life, yet it has been a remarkable life. And that’s just how it is, whether it's my nature, or whether it's in my genes.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, an American mystic philosopher who I knew, felt at one point in his awakening process that he was going to leave the world, but that he was quite happy to do so. Then as he began to write, he started embodying himself. But he didn’t suffer that process very much. We talked about that a little bit. It’s always been important for me to talk about suffering because I meet so many people who suffer. Whether they suffer from illness or, more usually, from what their own minds create. I just called some people today because they’d called me last week and I spent an hour and a half or so on the phone with them -- just to check in with a 44- year-old-woman who has metastatic lung cancer. She never smoked in her life. It's in her brain now and she has grand mal seizures. And she’s got two children, 14 years old and 10 years old, and she’s going to die. She’s got no spiritual foundation, no training whatsoever -- none. And, she doesn’t know how to meditate. Very few people can meditate at a time like this.
Can you imagine? They’ve not been given the tools to face suffering. What they want is hope. Medicine can provide no more hope and they’ve already gone through the ordeals of losing hair and chemotherapy, and yet they’re still asking questions. What do I do? I say to them, 'Listen. Be quiet and listen. You don’t have to do something to save your life. You can let yourself die, and maybe you won’t. If you keep listening, I think something will lead you. There's no promise it will be able to protect you from death.' Some of them then say, 'How do I listen?' And I say, 'You have to get quiet and observe what it is that you’re running from, or what it is that you’re running to. Just take the running to, and put it aside for a while. And take the running from, and try to put that aside for a while also. And then listen.'
I said to this woman, 'What you really, really might want to do, is not do anything. And then you might just feel like Ahhh, this seems like giving up. And you could, in fact, be giving up. On the other hand, you could be opening up.' It’s just talking to that in people and knowing what a difficult place it is. What a difficult place it is for her husband. And as I was talking to them her 14-year-old son came in, so I could hear his voice for a minute and speak to him a little. So, I think what comes through me for that kind of person, is not answers, but somehow a space that makes it easier for them to be in the unknowing and the dark night of their lives. This is part of what I do. It’s that part of what I’m journeying through.
I see a lot of people who are seeking to be free of it. And I’m saying, as Jesus said, “Those who seek to save their lives will lose it.” It is one of the greatest paradoxes that the survival impulse in human beings is what’s leading us to extinction. You have to not insist upon surviving in the face of annihilation. You must know when to lay yourself down in the darkness, in the abyss, lay yourself down with poise and dignity. If people say they feel like they’ve fallen into an abyss, I say 'OK then, be sure to point your toes.' Have you ever seen the people dive in Acapulco, off those 100-foot cliffs, into the ocean?
Yes.
What’s the difference between someone falling off a diving board and a well executed dive? Well, the difference is, precision in the air, or form, and relationship to body and relationship to you who are in all of that. So if you’re falling, and you’re falling into an abyss, pointing your toes means keeping your eyes wide open, trying not to protect yourself from what you feel. Listening to what other people are saying. Fighting against the self-involvement that comes from fear -- and is also the root of fear. So when self-involvement goes, fear goes too. Many people go through the dark night.
And it's not always the mystical dark night that leads to union with God, you know, but what’s union with God anyway? – That’s just an idea, an idea that people talk about after they've had an experience they don’t understand -- and, which they've had nothing to do with. And unless that experience of union leads you to turn that into some new patterns in your life – it’s hard to argue that it does much for us. Not much, that is, unless you really put your life into the new life. It is the injunction that new wine needs new wine skeins. I love how the old teachings keep coming back again and again.
Very beautiful. Thank you.
