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Whenever a word is overused, it is most likely being misused, and over time,
it begins to lose its meaningfulness. For example, we often refer to a
fleeting feeling of depression or a period of confusion, as a dark night of
the soul, but neither of these things qualifies as such. A dark night of the
soul is a very specific experience that some people encounter on their
spiritual journeys. There are people who never encounter a dark night of the
soul, but others must endure this as part of the process of breaking through
to the dawn of higher consciousness.
The dark night of the soul invites us to fully recognize the confines of our
egos' identity. We may feel as if we are trapped in a prison that affords us
no access to light or the outside. We are coming from a place of higher
knowing, and we may have spent a lot of time and energy reaching toward the
light of higher consciousness. This is why the dark night has such a quality
of despair: We are suddenly shut off from what we thought we had realized and
the emotional pain is very real. We may even begin to feel that it was all an
illusion and that we are lost forever in this darkness. The more we struggle,
the darker things get, until finally we surrender to our not knowing what to
do, how to think, where to turn. It is from this place of losing our sense of
ourselves as in control that the ego begins to crack or soften and the
possibility of light entering becomes real.
Some of us will have to endure this process only once in our lives, while
others may have to go through it many times. The great revelation of the dark
night is the releasing of our old, false identity. We finally give up
believing in this false self and thus become capable of owning and embracing
the light.
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