Dark night of soul

I  remembered when a shaman, Katherine Skaggs, did a channelled soul portrait for me a few years ago; she looked deeply into my eyes, her breath quieted and she said, “You’re a healer and teacher; you’re going to come back and teach us.” I didn’t understand it or believe it much at the time, but one thing I have realized maybe that’s why my path has been the way it is even to this day. It may sound romantic, but as you very well know yourself, sometimes the greatest suffering is the greatest teacher of wisdom. This recent path of seemingly aimless wandering and seeking, also seemingly without purpose, has been a sort of purgatory for me… Like the sage who exiled himself to the desert. But this purgatory has been more of a hell.

I’m starting to see and realize that there is a method to this madness, even if I’m not aware of the intricacies of it: Sometimes just being so lost to the point of seriously questioning your life, even to wanting to take it a few times, is the only way you can truly find yourself. I’ve always had such a strong mind with powerful thoughts and the paradox is it was getting in the way of where I needed to go. This isn’t the kind of path you can will yourself to or “mind” yourself to, it’s just not possible because the mind itself is the problem and the illusion. So this path, which has truly been bewilderingly involuntary and without rhyme or reason to my mind (or my Self), was a way of imploding it through awakening.

Some of the New Age stuff out there makes awakening out to be a lovely choral angelic thing but it’s not. True awakening can be brutal. It rips you up and spits you out in a million pieces, all your layers peeled away and exposed, gaping sores to be healed. It’s so destructive that you seriously wonder if you’ll ever be able to be put back together, then the horror dawns that you can’t because you can’t go back to the way you were — you don’t even have that choice anymore because you’re past the point of no return. It’s literally do or die time, except there is nothing you can do but figuratively die and “reborn” yourself. Going back would just be returning to a living death. It might be why some people who go through this end up in insane asylums or with serious mental illnesses or remain lost souls because they tried to abort the process and ended up fracking their minds up.

This is what the ancient mystics pointed to when they spoke of the dark night of soul. You really don’t hear much about it anymore because people (and the industry) want to fast food their way to so called “enlightenment”, which is another word that’s been hijacked by the New Age Machine so it’s nearly worthless. Like religions hijacking the word “God” to the point where it’s a loaded word today that makes people flinch. That ain’t God. And nor is enlightenment.