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. 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”. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self. 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. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind.
Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. 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. 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. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything.
The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. 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. Can you address this subject?ĮCKHART: The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. QUESTION: Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul? Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period.
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