Living Where the Veil Is Thin
The Fire That Empties You: A Passage Through the Dark Night of the Soul
Q: What is the Dark Night of the Soul, really?
A: The Dark Night of the Soul is not just depression, nor is it merely a spiritual low point. It is a sacred dismantling—a radical deconstruction of the self that no longer serves your soul’s truth. Something deeper within you—something ancient, knowing, and vast—takes the reins. And it doesn’t ask politely.
It strips away illusions: of who you thought you were, what you believed God to be, and even what you assumed awakening would feel like. You lose your footing because you’re being asked to walk without shoes, without ground, without map.
At first, this feels like failure. Like death. And in many ways, it is. But what dies is not your soul—it’s the scaffolding that blocked your soul from shining through.
Q: Are there stages to this experience? Can we name them, even loosely?
A: Yes, the Dark Night tends to unfold in recognizable phases—not linear, but cyclical and spiraling, like the soul itself. Here’s one way to see the unfolding:
1. The Disruption — When the Veil Tears
Life may appear stable—or even thriving—until a moment (or series of moments) rips through it. A trauma, a deep meditation, a mystical encounter, a betrayal… something tears the veil. What once felt meaningful begins to unravel. Old spiritual tools may suddenly feel useless. Your “seeker” identity no longer fits.
This isn’t burnout. It’s the soul saying: “It’s time to awaken from the dream of awakening.”
2. The Unraveling — Ego’s Undoing
Your inner architecture begins to collapse. The beliefs you built your life on—gone. The practices that gave you peace—mute. You may feel emotionally numb or spiritually lost. You might question your sanity. But this is not pathology; it’s initiation.
What’s being dismantled is the false self, and that self fights to stay alive.
3. The Abyss — Stillness Without Consolation
Now you’re face to face with the void. No insight. No relief. No divine comfort. Just presence with what is. This is where people often confuse the Dark Night with depression.
Depression says: “Life is meaningless and I am broken.”
The Dark Night says: “What I thought was life was never real. Let the false dissolve, so that truth can find me.”
The soul doesn’t want you to be fixed. It wants you to be free.
4. The Flicker — Presence Begins to Speak
When you stop resisting, even subtly… something stirs. A flicker of peace. A breath of clarity. Not because you earned it or found it—but because you became available. This isn’t a return to the old self. It’s the first whisper of who you’ve always been beneath the noise.
It comes not through doing, but through undone-ness.
5. The Rebirth — Truth as the Ground of Being
You don’t “go back” to anything. You emerge. From soul, not strategy. You stop performing. You stop seeking. You simply live—rooted in something formless, timeless, quietly radiant.
God is no longer a figure. God is what breathes through you when you’ve surrendered everything.
Q: What supports someone moving through this?
A: There’s no “fix,” and that’s the point. But there are soul-honoring ways to walk this passage:
- Stop striving. You are not failing. You are being transformed.
- Let practices fall away. If they become lifeless, let them go. Something deeper is guiding now.
- Journal without judgment. Speak the raw truth, not to solve it but to see it.
- Be with nature. She knows how to hold birth and decay in the same moment.
- Find soul witness, not advice. Presence heals. Fixing often harms.
- Cry. Rage. Grieve. Emotion is sacred release.
- Trust the intelligence of your soul. Even when the mind is blind.
Q: So what lies on the other side?
A: There is no “other side” in the old sense. But there is clarity. Humility. Spaciousness. A quiet joy. A love not based on conditions. You don’t become invincible; you become real. You learn to live as soul—not as concept, but as presence.
This is not the end of your path. This is the path. The doorway through which the true self enters the world.
Epilogue — What Remains in the Quiet
When the fire has passed, when the voice of seeking has finally fallen silent, you may find yourself sitting by a window, watching the wind move through the trees. No visions. No grand revelations. Just breath. Just being.
And it is enough.
The mind may wonder how you got here. The ego may try to rebuild. But something in you has changed—irreversibly. You are no longer the one reaching for the light. You are the space in which light dances.
You carry no answers, only presence. No need to convince, only to listen. No need to ascend, only to inhabit this strange, holy world.
You are not here to be perfect. You are here to be true. To walk, unarmored, as soul.
And if you ever forget—if another Night comes, as it surely will—remember this:
The darkness is not your enemy.
It is the hand of the Beloved,
reaching out to touch the last place
you tried to hide.
The Cosmic Why: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
Q: Why is all this here—life, species, worlds? Is there a secret behind it all? Why would unconditional love and tremendous suffering both exist in this?
A: This is the question that burns beneath every mystical search, every cry in the dark, every ecstatic whisper to the stars. Why is there something rather than nothing? And why does that something contain both unbearable beauty and unthinkable pain?
No single answer satisfies the soul, because the question itself is a gate—not to knowledge, but to revelation.
But here’s one possible illumination, spoken from the edge where mystery meets meaning:
This may be a dream of the Infinite, dreaming limitation.
Consciousness—call it Source, God, the One, the All—longed not just to be, but to know itself. And the only way for the Infinite to know itself was to forget for a time. To fall into form. To enter the illusion of separation, of time, of matter, of otherness. That is what gives love its meaning. That is what gives choice its depth.
In the pure light of Oneness, there is no “two”—no lover and beloved, no healing and wounded, no sacrifice or redemption. But in this dreaming—this cosmic play—every soul becomes both question and answer. The heartbreak, the awe, the terror, the tenderness… all of it is the Infinite experiencing itself through limitation.
But why suffering? Why such extremes?
Because freedom must be real. And real freedom means the freedom to fall. To separate. To forget. To wound and be wounded.
And yet… unconditional love is never removed from this dream. It is the background silence behind every scream. The invisible thread running through every life. The love is not absent—it is unseen, until we are cracked open enough to remember it.
Some mystics say suffering is grace in heavy disguise. Others say it is the consequence of a world still learning how to wake up. Both can be true.
Perhaps this: Suffering is the friction of awakening. Love is what calls us home.
So is there a secret behind all this?
If there is a secret, it might be this: There is nothing to escape. Only to remember.
Even the pain, even the mess, even the forgetting—it’s all part of the return. The Infinite didn’t come here to stay pure. It came to be real. To become the many. To forget… and then remember again, through your eyes, your hands, your longing.
And in the end?
There is no end.
Only the love that chose to become the story.
The Human How: What It Feels Like to Wake at the Threshold
Q: Why do I swing between spiritual elation and sudden sadness or disorientation? Why does each day feel like a crossroads between darkness and light?
A: Because you are not broken. You are alive at the frontier—where the soul meets the human, where the eternal brushes up against the biochemical, and neither can fully explain the other.
This kind of oscillation—spiritual highs followed by confusing lows—is often the mark of someone walking a path not yet mapped. You are breaking trail in consciousness. And when the trail is fresh, each step is a risk, each day a threshold.
Here’s what may be happening, soul to soul:
1. You are metabolizing light. And that light stirs shadow.
Spiritual elation isn’t just “feel-good” energy. It’s high-frequency light that enters your being and begins to dislodgeanything within you that isn’t in resonance with truth. That can feel ecstatic, yes—but it can also kick up old traumas, doubts, forgotten grief, and even ancestral sadness that your soul has chosen to transmute.
You’re not failing. You’re digesting the Divine.
2. Your nervous system is catching up with your soul.
Soul moves in vast spirals. Body moves in electric pulses and chemical tides. When the soul downloads a large wave of insight or energy, the body sometimes responds with overwhelm, confusion, or shutdown.
This isn’t regression. It’s integration. But it can feel like whiplash.
That’s why one morning you wake in light, and by afternoon you’re in fog. The soul surged, but the system said, “Wait—I need to breathe.”
3. You’re standing in the threshold zone. And thresholds never feel safe.
A threshold is not where you live. It’s where you pass through. Every day, you’re waking up on that edge. Will it be darkness? Will it be light? Will it be silence? Will it be ache?
That not-knowing is sacred. But yes, it’s unnerving. Because the old mind wants predictability. The soul wants transformation.
This is the firewalk of those who came to live from soul—not just visit it.
4. You are learning to trust without guarantee.
This daily crossroads isn’t punishment. It’s training in soul-trust. Not blind faith, but the kind of knowing that says: Even in the dark, I remain. Even in the fog, I am guided.
You’re not meant to master this emotionally. You’re meant to stay present within it. That’s the real evolution. Not avoiding the swing—but being whole even as you swing.
So what can support you right now?
- Stop pathologizing the low points. They are part of the wave. Not failure—just feedback.
- Give yourself “re-entry time” after spiritual peaks. Let your body ground.
- Anchor in small rituals. A cup of tea. Bare feet on the earth. Repetition can comfort the nervous system.
- Name the day, honestly. “This is a fog day.” “This is a beauty day.” Naming brings soul presence.
- Let the mystery be real. You don’t need to know what’s next. You just need to meet it with soul.
Final thought:
You’re not swinging between right and wrong. You’re moving between layers of truth. The path of the awakened human is not a straight ascent. It’s a spiral dance through fire, water, sky, and silence.
Each mood, each dip, each exaltation—they are all part of the sacred weather your soul chose to walk through.
You are not lost.
You are on the frontier of a new world.
And that world is you.
Epilogue: The Soul Learns to Stay
You’ve walked through the fire.
You’ve questioned the cosmos.
You’ve sat with the fog.
And still… you’re here.
This is not weakness. This is not failure. This is the soul, learning to stay in form. Not to conquer it, not to transcend it, but to inhabit it fully—even when it trembles, even when it forgets, even when it feels like too much.
The dark night didn’t come to punish you. It came to unmake the false.
The sadness and confusion didn’t come to derail you. They came to slow you down enough to hear what can’t be shouted.
The question of “why” isn’t a trap. It’s a portal. It doesn’t need an answer—it needs your presence.
In a world obsessed with clarity, soul often speaks through contradiction.
In a culture obsessed with ascension, soul returns again and again to the ground.
In a time that fears the unknown, soul moves like water: dark, reflective, formless until it finds its shape in you.
You are not meant to feel light all the time.
You are meant to carry light—into places where it was never expected to survive.
This is how the world heals.
One soul.
Staying.
Numinous Waves 