Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
Nonduality Highlights: Issue #4392, Saturday, October 8, 2011
Sometimes we find satisfaction in self-pity. The reason is that
it is our nature to find satisfaction in love; and when we are
confined to ourselves we begin to love ourselves, and then
self-pity arises because we feel our limitation. But the love of
self always brings dissatisfaction, for the self is not made to
be loved; the self is made to love. The first condition to love
is to forget oneself.
- Hazrat Inayat Khan, from Mastery Through Accomplishment,
posted to AlongTheWay
if you can disentangle
yourself from your selfish self
all heavenly spirits
will stand ready to serve you
if you can finally hunt down
your own beastly self
you have the right
to claim Solomon's kingdom
you are that blessed soul who
belongs to the garden of paradise
is it fair to let yourself
fall apart in a shattered house
you are the bird of happiness
in the magic of existence
what a pity when you let
yourself be chained and caged
but if you can break free
from this dark prison named body
soon you will see
you are the sage and the fountain of life
- Rumi, Ghazal 3291, translation by Nader Khalili, from Rumi,
Fountain of Fire, posted to Sunlight
Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul? Your
teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period. Can
you address this subject?
The "dark night of the soul" is a term that goes back a
long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to
describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in
life... an eruption into your life of a deep sense of
meaninglessness. The inner state in some cases is very close to
what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense
anymore, there's no purpose to anything. Sometimes it's triggered
by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external
level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it,
especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or
you had built up your life, and given it meaning - and the
meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your
achievements, where you are going, what is considered important,
and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason
collapses.
It can happen if something happens that you can't explain away
anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that
your life had before. Really what has collapsed then is the whole
conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind
had given it. So that results in a dark place. But people have
gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge
out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has
meaning again, but it's no longer a conceptual meaning that you
can necessarily explain. Quite often it's from there that people
awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has
collapsed.
They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on
concepts in your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness
with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or
anything conceptual any longer. It's a kind of re-birth. The dark
night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is
the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but
nothing real has actually died there - only an illusory identity.
Now it is probably the case that some people who've gone through
this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in
order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of
the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of
the true self.
The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says "Nothing I see
in this room means anything", and you're supposed to look
around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you
say "this doesn't mean anything", "that doesn't
mean anything". What is the purpose of a lesson like that?
It's a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the
dark night of the soul. It's the collapse of a mind-made meaning,
conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand
"what it's all about". With A Course in Miracles, it's
a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is
projected, and you go voluntary into saying "I don't know
what this means", "this doesn't mean anything".
You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it
collapses.
You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness.
Or one could say a state of ignorance - where things lose the
meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and
cultural and so on. Then you can look upon the world without
imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks of course as
if you no longer understand anything. That's why it's so scary
when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously
embracing it. It can bring about the dark night of the soul - to
go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it
compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events,
people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. Your sense the
aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not
trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework
anymore.
Eckhart Tolle, posted to The_Now2
It is impossible to describe the sense of magnificence that comes
out of the true apperception of the nature of the individual in
relation to the manifestation. The loss of personal individuality
is exchanged for the gain of Totality of the cosmos.
- Ramesh S. Balsekar, posted to Distillation