When St. John of the Cross first used the phrase “dark night of the soul,” he was referring to the state immediately before a certain stage of enlightenment. (1) Whether the stage he was pointing to was Brahmajnana or Sahaja Samadhi, I don’t know. (2) And it isn’t important to what I think he was saying.
What he was saying, in my view, was that we need to pass through a time on our path to enlightenment which will be like a dark night to the soul. We’re bereft of our senses. We seem to be suspended in nothingness, deprived of every foothold. We feel abandoned which makes it doubly dark.
We’ve taken his phrase and widened its application to mean a very hard time. I had one of these minor dark nights of the soul recently and a description of what came of it belongs in an Ascension ethnography, I think.
I was wrestling with vasanas that were exploding all over the place. One vasana was going off called “I want to be left alone.” Another vasana was going off called ” I don’t suffer fools gladly.” All the while, in the background, what was really going on was I was feeling bereft of something – I didn’t know what. I felt myself to be sinking into … what? Not failure. That didn’t fit. So what was I bereft of? I didn’t know.
Then it came to me in an “Aha!” moment. I’m unwilling to wait any longer. I want to be set free from the group that is waiting. I want to start a group called we’re getting on with things. (No, don’t write me!)
I was feeling bereft of myself. My sense of myself was seeping away from so much … waiting.
I’m unwilling to situate the cause of my happiness in something or someone outside myself any longer.
I saw at the moment of insight that I was anchoring everything nurturing, everything satisfying to forces outside myself. And I was dying on the vine from a lack of … well, anything happening, really. Any of the talked-about events occurring. This has been a recurring theme for me since the mothership failed to appear in Oct. 2008.
This situation, I said to myself, is not nurturing me (OK, I screamed). I need to assume leadership here too and begin to nurture myself.
I don’t say that with blame. It’s simply an insight I came to and the feeling of having had enough that went with it.
It doesn’t mean a rupture in anything. I’ll still take my lead from the Company of Heaven’s teachings. It’s simply another phase of something necessary: Me taking control of my life.
Waiting carries no sustenance for me any more and so I begin the search for whatever it is that replaces it.
I don’t know what that might be. Shall I establish a beachhead of understanding?
Everyone is different, right? And I have to be careful with myself because I have both the monk and the warrior inside me (past-life aspects). What I replace the happiness with that I got from serving by waiting will have to pass muster with both of them.
Well, the world is my oyster. Like everyone else, I can choose whatever it is I’ll give my attention to until events start to unfold. I can follow my bliss.
And then in a second flash of insight, the answer becomes obvious.
Building Nova Earth. What could be more important than building a world that works?
This seems to be a circle I keep going round and ending up at the very same place.
Have we ever had a better chance at something like that? Think about it for a second. When have we ever had even a conceptual crack at it, before now?
Why, even having this conversation – have we ever had the opportunity to do that? Why would I want to trade this opportunity for anything else? There’s no better game in town, viewed from any perspective.
Knock yourself out designing the New World. That doesn’t have to wait for something to happen. Create the new philosophy. Design the new economy. Plan the new medicine. Open up the education of children after decades of government (Illuminati) neglect.
You who have that new curriculum tucked away in your desk, get it out and dust it off. You who have the drawings for nuclear communities drawing on railway container cars, get them out. All the new ideas that have been awaiting their time? It’s time. We’re building Nova Earth. What better time could there possibly be?
So that’s enough of dates and rates for me, my friends. That’s enough of waiting. There’s so much of Nova Earth that can be built – even with just the pen.
This doesn’t represent a change of anything for me. But what it does represent is seeing that I’ve reached this very same point again by another circuitous route. That validates for me the feeling of rightness and desirability in what we’re doing, in building Nova Earth.
Footnotes
(1) Bernadette Roberts offers a succinct description of the dark night of the soul, here:
“In experience, the onset of this process [of God-realization] is the descent of the cloud of unknowing, which, because his former light has gone out and left him in darkness, the contemplative initially interprets as the divine gone into hiding. In modern terms, the descent of the cloud is actually the falling away of the ego-center, which leaves us looking into a dark hole, a void or empty space in ourselves. Without the veil of the ego-center, we do not recognize the divine; it is not as we thought it should be. …
“From here on we must feel our way in the dark, and the special eye that allows us to see in the dark opens up at this time.” (Bernadette Roberts, “The Path to No-Self” in Stephan Bodian, ed. Timeless Visions, Healing Voices. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1991, 131.)
(2) Brahmajnana occurs when the kundalini reaches the seventh chakra. It results in the experience of transcendence and the bliss of a temporary heart opening. It is not moksha or liberation and hence not Ascension. Saying “being liberated from physical birth and death” is the same as saying “ascending to the Fifth Dimension.”
Ascension occurs at Sahaja Samadhi, which is a permanent heart opening. It is moksha or liberation. It occurs further into the Fifth than the first subplane.