I while ago, when I had a different account, I wrote in despair about my situation and asked for help. One member answered, and suggested that I could be experiencing a "Dark night of the soul"-episode. At the time, it didn't make any sense (as nothing did), but as things are somewhat coming together (even though my mind at the least can be labeled as fragmented) I think he had a point, and possible was right.
Found an article that described it pretty good over here:
https://www.eckharttolle.com/newsletter/october-2011
Basically, it's when your concept of life breaks down. The way you perceive things, the way things make sense and purpose to you, it breaks down and goes to hell. He's explaining it pretty good so I'll post it further down. Anyway, it can be scary as hell, being empty and confusing, but on the other side you can enjoy life without having to compulsory interpret things. Combining this, being an mental wreck, with being an emotional wreck as I was (I know i banter about how shitty things have been but what the hell, sometimes that have to be OK), the experience was not a walk in the park. As with everything, things happen to people on a scale. What Ekhart describes is the full concept in full-blown mode, and I can relate to some of it, and can sometimes see the effects from it, it's not like I'm going around as some kind of "divine spirit"
The dark night of the soul (text from Ekhart Tolle)
Found an article that described it pretty good over here:
https://www.eckharttolle.com/newsletter/october-2011
Basically, it's when your concept of life breaks down. The way you perceive things, the way things make sense and purpose to you, it breaks down and goes to hell. He's explaining it pretty good so I'll post it further down. Anyway, it can be scary as hell, being empty and confusing, but on the other side you can enjoy life without having to compulsory interpret things. Combining this, being an mental wreck, with being an emotional wreck as I was (I know i banter about how shitty things have been but what the hell, sometimes that have to be OK), the experience was not a walk in the park. As with everything, things happen to people on a scale. What Ekhart describes is the full concept in full-blown mode, and I can relate to some of it, and can sometimes see the effects from it, it's not like I'm going around as some kind of "divine spirit"
The dark night of the soul (text from Ekhart Tolle)
Quote: 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, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and 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 then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that 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, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized 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.
The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”. What is the purpose of a lesson like that? It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”. With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”. You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it collapses.
You are meant to 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 – to 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. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.
