Stay and forget me, my face rested on the Beloved; ceased everything and leave me, leaving my care among the forgotten lilies 'Dark Nights of the Soul', San Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591)
In the personal and spiritual development of every human being there is a process called 'The Dark Night of the Soul'. Many have been the disciplines that have dealt with this 'phase' in which possibly each of us have met or will meet, at least once in a lifetime. Technically we could define it as 'a cyclic constant'. The motives?
From grief, saved and lived by a personal loss, a loved one, or a job; going through a crisis of values or existential, separations, a change of life and direction, or a break in the structures that until that day worked and now no longer ... These experiences give rise to a crisis of greater or lesser magnitude, which results in To find oneself lost and without a response from life, without mechanisms to generate anything.
It seems that everything suddenly went out, a feeling of being alone is born, without personal or transcendent guidance, values fall, one feels that no one believes in him anymore. Like everything in life, it's put there for a reason. And these crises, with their magnitude, also have their reason for being. The important thing is to know what is in them and know how you can sustain yourself in the storm, beyond thinking about what you will find when calm comes.
In Transpersonal Psychology we define 'The Soul' as that set of accumulated experiences that are personal, non-transferable, and that define us as unique and independent beings to our environment . We would say that the soul gives us innate qualities that only we possess and are the result of our learning. Also in it lies our concept of ethics, universal operating standards (not understood by human laws), empathy, compassion, justice ...
Archetype of the Soul empowering the Personality Do you now understand why someone without ethics - even if they have morals - is called a 'heartless'? Popular language is wise in many of its expressions. The soul gives us a connection to our inner world, to our individuality as beings. That individuality allows us to connect inward with ourselves, with our purpose in life, our direction, will ... who we are and what we came to do resides in the soul of each man and woman, so it is a purely personal matter because no one else can know him more accurately than oneself.
The 'dark night' phase happens when that 'apparently' connection is lost. This disconnection may come from a personal, conscious decision to turn your life around and thus enter this phase of darkness, or by an event that completely changes your reality and forces you to redefine yourself. Imagine that for a moment that structure on which you stand in your day to day and that is formed by beliefs, ways of working, ways of relating, your own ethics, the place where you draw your scale of values, your address in life, his motive for living ... disappears. And with that, every action on the outside world stops working as it did. Naturally, you try to make it work again ... but it doesn't.
The process of 'dark night', with that disconnection, is describing the following: a confrontation with our own shadow occurs in us. Places of our psyche that, by simple evolution, must be discarded as unusable. You often need to be aware first, then get rid of them. Although rather it is not a 'get rid' but a 'bring to light'. Areas that acted without knowing it are illuminated and replaced or patched by new ones that will be more useful for their future. How many examples we have in popular characters that emerged in his career right after such a process ...
at that time, they were asked to face a situation in their life and they dropped the entire structure in which they were held. In the transition to the new stage, everything gets dark. A feeling of loneliness emerges, of not being supported, not being heard, or being sustained. Life offers no answers as before. If you meditated, no information arrives. If you prayed, nobody listens to you. The material does not offer any feedback. The personal seems disengaged because his peers do not understand him. It is really a unique and personal process, a transit through the desert and no one can imagine the thirst you have. They can see you like a madman, like an off-center, 'you abandoned us', 'you did it wrong', 'what are you doing with your life?'… They are phrases that you will hear. And here we enter into matter: a process of 'dark night' inevitably calls for an 'Act of Faith'.
Trust that this process is necessary, and we must inevitably surrender to your circumstances. 'Surrender' as long as one must live the transition with their times and wait for the storm to subside. Meanwhile, survive ... In all archetypal cases of 'dark night' the possibility of falling on the other side appears, the easy way, which can solve our lives but move away from our original and genuine purpose. The Theosophists described these processes as moments when all connection with the spiritual world disappears, and our only guide must be our faith in the process. The guides disappear, and we must trust our own soul as a pilot. Archetypally, Job's character in the Bible epitomizes a 'dark night' episode.
Satan agrees with God to take away everything and he ceases all communication with him, while the first inflicts many misfortunes. He never ceases to trust the resolution of his problems. Jesus also, in his 40 days of crossing the desert, personifies that crisis without response or apparent objective or horizons, and full of temptations to leave it, which is the 'dark night of the soul'.
The Holy Job Jesus and his 40-day journey through the desert Literarily
San Juan De La Cruz wrote his poem 'Dark Nights of the Soul' poetically telling the experience of The Soul purging his passions and sins, rising to God in the middle of the night and receiving a Light that facilitates the path to the union of what archetypically is called The Christ, an energy that unites you to the whole . In The Lord Of The Rings (film version), dark forces attack the luminous forces in the Battle of Pelennor Fields. The dark ones multiply by ten the forces of the whites.
There is no alternative of victory and as soon as everything indicates that darkness is going to take over the land of men, in an unexpected turn Aragorn, heir to the Kingdom of Men appears with an army of wraiths (The Dead of the Tabernacle) that fight the evil troops. These examples tell us how the person who lives in that momentary darkness feels abandoned by everyone, by life and by circumstances. It is a destruction of its structure, a journey towards a greater consciousness passing through a tunnel without lights and without the appearance of leading anywhere.
The key is to resist and remain. However, let's point out the end of each one (always in an archetypal context, as a model): Job, after innumerable misfortunes, received twice what he had before. Jesus ascended to heaven and stood to the right of his father's throne. Aragorn took advantage of the curse that his ancestor Isildur threw against the wraiths so that they would fight at his side, and thus he freed them from it. That is to say, from the traffic through the maximum darkness the light is accessed. Using what in our darkness is an obstacle, we access a better phase in our existence. In nature, the metamorphosis of the butterfly caterpillar always caught my attention. The caterpillar precedes the butterfly. It is a state prior to it.
In his caterpillar consciousness, he is not able to imagine a life like a butterfly and, for example, how it should be to leave the ground to move through the air or stop gnawing leaves to feed on nectar. In a moment of its existence, by vital trajectory and in Transpersonal Psychology we would say that by program, it is wrapped in a chrylid and, as an act of faith, let its Internal information itself the transformation. That phase is the Dark Night of the Soul.
The result of that crisis, of that temporary death, is a rebirth in very different conditions, a new consciousness, a new life, a new dawn. If you are traveling through a dark night, do not decay. Cry, suffer, let yourself be carried away by the storm, try to rule your ship and survive. Who knows what awaits them?
Authors: CARLES PEREZ and PAULA ALONSO Therapists and Consultants
at www.beingtheone.org
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The Dark Night of the Soul: The Metamorphosis of the Butterfly Caterpillar
