My life has been rough the last couple years. When I tell people about it – I don’t often – they usually don’t understand. “Why don’t you change it?” they ask. They don’t understand. That makes my life feel rougher.

Last weekend, I was talking to a friend about it. I said, “Sometimes the soul calls shots the ego does not like. The freedoms we normally experience aren’t there. We try, but things don’t happen, like as a way of life.”

My friend said the same thing another friend said in a similar conversation in November. “Maybe most people don’t experience that.”

It got me thinking a bit differently. First, I think some people do understand this subject, they are just not the ones crossing my path. There is a phenomena on the spiritual journey called “the dark night of the soul.” I can tell you for sure that the overwhelming majority of people do not accurately understand that process. Part of the reason for that is there is NO and I mean no societal reference point for it. When you experience it you are in the dark in more ways than one, including having no culture that understands it. Literally.

Thing is, everyone goes through it at some point as they complete their spiritual journey. Because of that, I have come to expect that people know what it is, that they have some kind of real-life reference point.

If they have experienced it maybe they regarded it “just” as a very difficult time? What I’m going through now is not the Dark Night. It has similarities, but it is not the same, though it sucks pretty much the same.
The Dark Night had distinct features. The inner life I had known to that point was gone. The “light” phenomena of consciousness – the way guidance occurred; the love exchange I had with what I then called God – was gone. In a way there was an energy that did present itself, but it was dark. Compared to the energy that was no longer there, it was blind.

Maybe I understand the Dark Night process more than others, but I think everyone should understand it to some degree. Am I wrong? They don’t seem to.