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    Dark Night Soul

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    Castorp Z.
    The document discusses the "dark night of the soul", which is a state of deep meaninglessness, depression, and collapse of one's perceived meaning in life. It can be triggered by external events like loss or disasters. While painful, it represents the death of the ego and illusory identity. Some emerge from this transformed with a deeper sense of purpose not dependent on explanations. The dark night can be part of the spiritual awakening process, replacing old conceptual meanings with an open, innocent presence and deep sense of aliveness in the world.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Dark Night Soul

    Uploaded by

    Castorp Z.
    30 views3 pages
    The document discusses the "dark night of the soul", which is a state of deep meaninglessness, depression, and collapse of one's perceived meaning in life. It can be triggered by external events like loss or disasters. While painful, it represents the death of the ego and illusory identity. Some emerge from this transformed with a deeper sense of purpose not dependent on explanations. The dark night can be part of the spiritual awakening process, replacing old conceptual meanings with an open, innocent presence and deep sense of aliveness in the world.

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    The document discusses the "dark night of the soul", which is a state of deep meaninglessness, depression, and collapse of one's perceived meaning in life. It can be triggered by external events like loss or disasters. While painful, it represents the death of the ego and illusory identity. Some emerge from this transformed with a deeper sense of purpose not dependent on explanations. The dark night can be part of the spiritual awakening process, replacing old conceptual meanings with an open, innocent presence and deep sense of aliveness in the world.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    30 views3 pages

    Dark Night Soul

    Uploaded by

    Castorp Z.
    The document discusses the "dark night of the soul", which is a state of deep meaninglessness, depression, and collapse of one's perceived meaning in life. It can be triggered by external events like loss or disasters. While painful, it represents the death of the ego and illusory identity. Some emerge from this transformed with a deeper sense of purpose not dependent on explanations. The dark night can be part of the spiritual awakening process, replacing old conceptual meanings with an open, innocent presence and deep sense of aliveness in the world.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    of 3

    The Return of Aliveness: The Dark

    Night of the Soul


    By Eckhart Tolle

    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. The death of someone close to you could

    trigger it, especially premature death—for example, if your child dies. Or 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 is the whole conceptual framework

    for your life. That results in a dark place.

    There is the possibility that you emerge out of it 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. A deeper sense of purpose or

    connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or

    anything conceptual. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a

    kind of death. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always

    painful, but nothing real has actually died—only an illusory identity. Now, it is

    probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation

    realize 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.

    You 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. You now 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. You sense the aliveness through your own

    sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a

    conceptual framework anymore.

    Another important strategy is to avoid making the dark night too

    personal, too focused on yourself. Yes, you feel it intimately and alone. But it

    could still have more to do with the suffering of the world than with yourself.

    Maybe dark nights are generally less personal than they feel. At any one
    time, beings on the planet are suffering. The planet itself is suffering; it is

    going through a dark night constantly. If you live in a place where children

    are hungry and dying in wars and in domestic violence, you are within the

    realm of the world’s dark night. Listen to political leaders deny climate

    change and you worry about the future, not of the planet on which you live

    but the planetary being of which you are a living part. If you can stretch your

    moral imagination to perceive this suffering, then you will have the energy

    and focus to work toward a transformation.

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