Tag Archives: life

The Dark Night

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Real Freedom

Posted on by
Reply

The real freedom is within. Nothing….no thing….in the apparent external world has to change for you to be utterly, completely free right this moment. But something internal has to. The internal reality most of us experience is “apparent” too, but not to me…not yet.

Recently I was talking with a friend about ascension. There are aspects I probably cannot articulate yet, but I have known for a long time that part of the process is that the soul releases its identification with form. That does not means we die. We are so trained to equate form with physical life, but that’s part of the problem. The spiritual release and dropping the identification of form (which is so much more than the physical body) is an act of soul and consciousness. It sounds airy-fairy and unrelated to the nuts and bolts of life, but it is neither. It IS profoundly practical and just profound overall.

I longed for this state for most of my life. I studied it. If anyone who experienced it wrote about it, I read it their accounts. I used to be a walking encyclopedia of written spiritual accounts of humans who had awakened to non-duality, soul freedom, ascension. After decades of inquiry, I concluded the shift is an act of grace. If fervor, longing, sincere desire, intuitive knowing, etc., could cause this state, I would have experienced it many times over. I can’t say that none of that matters, because maybe it does and it doesn’t matter anyway because once you have a taste for it, you cannot let it go and you long for that freedom. We long for it because we know it is our true state. But what pulls the final lever of awakening? It seems to be the soul. The human cannot cause it.

I do Zoom calls with Byron Katie almost every week and have done so for over four year. BK is an awakened human. She does not describe herself that way, which is all the more telling of her authenticity, so these are my words and my experience of her. She too has said that her “experience on the floor” (see any of her books to know how she woke up on the floor one morning and nothing was the same) was an act of grace.