The Dark Night of the Soul

[Guest guest]

Dear Friends,

The following is an excerpt from an article about spiritual healing.

 

The Dark Night of the Soul

 

All too often I have heard the " Dark Night " mistakenly described as

a sort of terrifying and lonely doubt about the very existence of

God. But Saint John of the Cross meant nothing of the sort when he

described the Dark Night of the Soul.

Saint John spoke of the Dark Night as an experience of spiritual

purgation in which all physical and psychological satisfactions are

stripped away to leave the soul in the presence of nothing but the

physically invisible (and therefore, to human experience, dark) and

silent workings of divine grace. As unnerving as it is, it still is

a profound experience of spiritual healing, not a questioning of—or

loss of—faith.

Now, in so far as we may focus just on its ultimate psychological

effects, the Dark Night has some remarkable parallels to

psychotherapy.

It often happens that persons entering into psychotherapy truly want

to engage in the process of self-exploration, but they also attempt

to avoid certain embarrassing aspects of their private, inner lives.

They want the psychotherapist to like them, not be disgusted by the

ugliness lurking in the shadows of their personalities. And, above

all, they will do almost anything to hide their raw feelings of

anger and betrayal resulting from past emotional wounds. " I still

feel as if I am being selfish or should be ashamed for having such

intense negative feelings towards people who don't know how to love

me. Doesn't that solidify the fact that I am not worthy of real

love? " they ask.

And the answer, in full irony, is that unless they recognize and

verbalize those " intense negative feelings, " they will never get to

the place of experiencing real love.

Just as the Dark Night strips away all human illusion and

pretension, so psychotherapy must strip away everything that hides

the deepest ugliness in our hearts. For only by recognizing the

perversion in his or her own heart can the individual then recognize

the sin that stains all of humanity. And in that community of

universal sinfulness will grow the seed of compassion and true love.

Interestingly enough, this theme of descending into inner darkness

has shown up in myth and art through the ages. Whether in the myths

of the hero's journey into the underworld described psychologically

by Jung and his followers, or in Dante's poetic journey through hell

as the route to heaven in his Divine Comedy, or in Tolkien's story

of the journey through the mines of Moria in his Lord of the Rings,

the journey begins with an obstruction too difficult to climb over,

encounters the necessity to surrender control and certainty in the

passage through an abhorrent darkness, and culminates in a final

triumph over evil.

And so, if psychotherapy is to achieve any ultimate success, it must

lead you into your own psychological dark night. And then, if you so

will, you can pass into the real Dark Night of spiritual healing.

 

Spiritual Healing and True Love

 

Thus there is a deeper level of healing, a spiritual level. In fact,

this aspect of healing points directly to the fact that true

spirituality must have a psychological component. Unlike the pagan

worship offered by the ancient Greeks and Romans merely to appease

the vanity of the gods—gods who had no interest at all in the moral

behavior of humanity—genuine spirituality calls a person into a deep

psychological change.

This change comes from opening your heart to love.

This love, though, is not what we ordinarily think of as " love. "

Love does not come from another person—it's important to learn that

right away. Love is not about romantic sentiments. Love is not about

sexual activity. Mystics have known that for ages. True love is a

matter of seeking God more than anything else, more even than your

own life.

And to live in true love means to do God's will.

So what is God's will? Well, there are a lot of New Age " therapists "

out there who will tell you that it's all about connecting

with " divine energy " so you can accomplish anything you desire. But

for ages the mystics have been telling us something else: loving is

about giving, not getting. Love is a matter of giving yourself in

service to God through others. To do God's will, therefore, is to

give of yourself—to empty yourself of all personal desires—not to

receive. In fact, true love means to continue giving even if you

receive nothing but rejection and hatred in return.

 

To do God's will essentially means to turn completely away from sin—

that is, our functional narcissism. In psychological terms, this

necessitates several elements:

• Loving God more than anything, or anyone, in this world

• Treating others with mercy and forgiveness

• Putting aside all aggression and competitive behavior

• Renouncing your pride in order to live in spiritual humility (see

below)

• Conducting all of your interpersonal relationships with

psychological honesty

• Living in sexual purity by not making others into mere objects

for your personal pleasure

If you truly seek healing, then, and if you have the courage,

accept the active and passive purgation of the senses in The Dark

Night [2] and turn from everything in your mind and heart that

misses the point about true love.

This may sound a bit ascetic, and it is. But it is not a matter of

masochism or self-punishment. And there is no room in it for hatred.

Asceticism actually comes from opening your eyes to see the fraud of

the world around you. Asceticism is grounded in pure love for the

very truth that human vanity obscures and defiles. It simply means

that you willingly surrender all your worldly defenses against your

essential vulnerability in order to face that vulnerability with no

protection other than true love.

 

False Spirituality

 

 

True spirituality expressed in religion—that is, faithful service

to God through devout worship—requires complete denial of the

psychological " self " and a profound absorption in divine love. It's

not an easy process, and it doesn't work by magic—that is, simply by

claiming to believe in something.

Unfortunately, there are many persons who don't want to do the hard

work of self-denial. So, sad to say, they take up superficial

religious sentiments as an unconscious way to hide their own fears

of abandonment and loneliness. Terrified of their own psychological

darkness, they pervert religion into a desperate attempt to " feel

good " about themselves—to validate their pride and their

perversions, not to cleanse their hearts and souls of all that is

unholy.

They might act like pious members of their communities, but deep

inside some part of them holds a dark resentment that the world has

not given them the recognition that they secretly crave. And one way

or another—through disobedience, through terrorism, or through

sexual scandal—their façade crumbles. They talked the talk all

right, but they didn't know the first thing about real love. In

fact, they feared love all along and were blind to their own

blindness.

And so they were blind to genuine religion.

http://guidetopsychology.com/reltx.htm#victim