Who experiences the Dark Night of the Soul?
by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment
Many people speak of the dark night of the soul. It is an integral part of the hero’s journey that is found in movies, plays, and novels. It is found in biographies and autobiographies. It defined as a period of spiritual desolation suffered by a mystic in which all sense of consolation is removed. And you are this mystic.
Screenwriter Naomi Beaty notes that in a movie, the dark night of the soul answers the question of how the main character feels about all that’s going on in the story. Specifically, it’s a reaction to the All Is Lost phase that came just before.
Each of us is the hero in our own myth, dream, movie, play, or whatever you want to call it. Quite often, the dark night of the soul is called depression. We can get so depressed and lost that we can’t see any way out of our predicament. Life becomes meaningless as we have known it. But what would happen if we were able to take a metaphorical step back, or rise above the enfolding scene?
Above all, the dark night of the soul is an experience. In order to have an experience there must be an experiencer. Thus, the dark night of the soul is like any other psychological event in that it appears to arise and then subside. But if a person is moved to do so, he/she will want to realize what it is that has never changed and what never changes during the entire cycle of any experience — who are you at the core that is unaffected by the dark night of the soul, or any other experience for that matter?
Psychologists and sages alike have outlined the two aspects that inform our lives — the egoic mind, which is the sense of a self or “I,” and consciousness, which the total movement of life, creation, action, destruction, and potentiality. We are this consciousness, but we rarely realize this. It usually takes a dark night of the soul to do so.
It is the egoic mind that is the perceived experiencer, not the core of what you are, which is consciousness. Everyone comes through an experience, and the thing that is changed by it is the egoic mind, because that which is the core of you never changes. Like waves, experiences appear to rise and fall, but like the great and expansive ocean beneath the waves, there is no change.
In a transformative myth — which could be your life — the dark night of the soul is followed by death. This is not the death of the physical, biological body, but of the egoic mind’s state of beingness. The death gives way to rebirth — a new way of seeing things. We have terms for this in our lexicon — a new lease on life, a second chance, coming to our senses, finding ourselves, being born again, and so on. The conditioned mind of the ego gives way to a reconditioned mind, but again, consciousness remains unaffected and unchanged. It is only rarely that the egoic mind itself falls away to the full realization that one is consciousness itself. In the East this is called enlightenment.
Like you, I too have had the dark night of the soul many times. I have reflected upon what had happened to cause the death of a certain aspect of the egoic mind to be reborn as something new; to see things in a new light. This is at the heart of all myth, and we are, as characters in a play called life, the heroes of our own myths. We always come out of experiences, regardless of the outcome, but when the attention is upon consciousness itself, what has really happened?
