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In spiritual advancement, more specifically in mysticism (which is the search for direct relationship with God) in the Jewish, Crosstian and Muslim tradition there is a phenomenon called The Dark Night of Soul.
It is, or is often described as, a huge crisis that turns a person’s faith upside down.
The Catholic iconography has drawn it as something terrible, a horrible desert or hell to go through to reach enlightenment, to the experience or direct presence of God.
But, curiously, this phenomenon does not occur in some different spiritual traditions, eminently in the eastern ones, in the impersonalists, in which they do not speak of an anthropomorphic god.
What is Dark Night of the Soul and why is it happening?
How do you avoid or overcome?
Between the mystics of the Crosstianity (also in Judaism and Islam) there is a phenomenon that does not appear in the mystics of the East: The Dark Night Of Soul.
In their search (read research) and approach to God, the Crosstians (and Jewish, and Muslim) mystic pointers fall into a deep and terrible crisis. It’s called the Dark Night Of Soul.
Curiously, as I indicated before, this crisis does not occur in the mystics of the East.
Why?
For only the pure mystics derived from Judaism believe in an anthropomorphic God .
Bewilderment comes from the biblical phrase God created him in his image and likeness (Genesis 1, 26; Genesis 1, 27; Genesis 5, 1 and Genesis 9, 6).
It may mean that human beings have awareness, knowledge of good and evil, the ability to put ourselves in the place of the other and we can choose. But evidently God is neither human nor has such a form. Such a form would impose human limitations and could not have the attributes of ubiquity, eternity, timelessness, omnipotence, luminosity, heat...
The deity part that we humans have (and that differs from that of other animals) is limited to being able to decide our path. To be aware of it.
And to conclude this, it is not only enough to look at the mystics of the East, but also at the Western mystics who have passed the aforementioned Night.
Let’s take a good example.
Francesco De Assisi* also had his great crisis. And after weeks (or months) of anguish, he came to the conclusion that he drew it from it. We don’t know too many details of that shock, but we know that it plunged him into a state of deep depression. And prolonged.
Curiously the phrase, the mantra that made him leave this state was God is!. With the variant of God is and suffices! And that of My God and my All!
And if they were not the phrases that brought him out, at least they were the ones he proclaimed with joy and happiness once he came out of the well, from his Dark Night Of Soul.
Although it was not the tool that allowed him to get out of the crisis, it is his conclusion, which summarizes the solution, which reveals the way out.
Something important should reflect that phrase.
The fact that the Eastern mystics do not suffer such crisis and these phrases of Francis of Assisi (especially the last one), leave us quite clear that the crisis is due, precisely, to the fact that believers accustomed to an anthropomorphic image of God, be the God of Armies (Yahweh Sebaot or Jehovah Sebaot I think it is transcribed), be it the Almighty Father God or Allover Father God, or the Allover Mother God (who preferred Francesco), they must abandon this image of God as soon as they approach him/her, because that is not what they discover, but an impersonal God, not anthropomorphic, not concrete, not figurative, but abstract, faceless.
And a God who is neither good (nor evil), cause He is ALL. He Is (Exodus 3, 14). khayá asher khayá (אֶֽהְיֶ֖ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר אֶֽהְיֶ֑ה) isn't masculine or feminine but neutral.
In Basque, completely neutral language (without masculine or feminine) DENA means both EVERYTHING and Who Is, Which Is, What Is.
Francesco has not affirmed God is good and God is love.
No, He Is ALL.
This profoundly disorients those who seek a God of love, who hopes to receive his love, his favor, his support, to those who ask for favors and he deals or negotiates with them. Or tries.
Francis of Assisi preferred to call God Mother and seems to consider her feminine. His personal experience with his father was not very good, with his mother, on the contrary, it was magnificent. And that marked him. Even in his way of seeing the Supreme Being
Jesus, on the contrary, never knew his true father and kept a fixation with that figure that led him to affirm that we have no Father but that of the heavens: we should only call God father (Mt 23, 9)
Francesco also had to abandon this image as he deepened his experience with the Uno. God is in the Fathers, and in the Mothers, but he is not completely, alone, neither one nor the other.
Most theologians like to leave in the unknown what led Francis De Assisi to that crisis and the meaning of this solution to the crisis, merely because they do not know the cause. And less to understand its internal process.
God Is!
God is and suffices!
My God and my All!
Francisco De Asis only manages to overcome the doubts that corrode him when he abandons the search for a Mother God and limits himself to accept God as he is, so different to our limited and limiting mental images.
In fact, he has just discovered that not only had he seen, heard, touched, smelled, liked, felt God, but he had not seen, heard, touched, smelled, liked, felt anything else, ever.
But, of course, to reach this crisis it is necessary to get close enough to the divine to be able to confirm that the previous image does not correspond to reality. That is why few people come to understand The Dark Night of the Soul and, still less, to solve it.
The scholars of Francis De Assisi do not usually understand the reaction of Francesco when he returned to his community on a specific date he discovered his brothers eating meat to celebrate.
He was very clear about this: How can you ruthlessly murder and devour those adorable creatures who meek and lovingly offer their help, friendship and companionship? ***. Therefore, a prisoner of internal anger, but determined to act without attacking anyone and with a certain irony, he took the stew with the spoon and began to spread the walls of the room with it, saying: Indeed, Today is a great day, a day so important that even walls should eat meat.
Perhaps precisely with this gesture, Francesco sought to spare his brothers the gift of the tasty stew, so unethical for him.
But, very few reach a sufficient approach to The Unity to be able to live and, above all, understand these crises and these options. Of course, most of the followers of Francesco D'Assisi did not reach the heel, as most of the a-postles*** did not understand Christ at all, so they reflect the Gospels and the books that follow. And those who understood it better and really wanted to follow it, were marginalized. It was the others, the thirsty for power, who took over the monopoly of Crosstianity (initially Piscianism) and channeled it through the ways in which we have known it: those of perversion and prostitution of the message of Christ
Notice how it is integrated in the East that God is everything, that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, apart from stating things like:
- For those who have faith, God simply is. For all, He is all He is. He is in us and beyond.
- God is neither in heaven nor in hell, but in each one of us.
- God did not bear the cross 1900 years ago, once and forever. Still today, day after day, he dies and rises... Do not preach to the God of an age, but to the one who lives in you.
- God is not a person... He is the very force, the essence of life.
- In order to discover that living power which we call God, it is appropriate to seek it in us.
- To seek God there is no need to organize pilgrimages, to light lamps to burn incense or to kiss the divine image. He is at the bottom of our hearts.
- According to Hindu philosophy only God possesses the Self and nothing exists outside Him.
He also states (and it is seen that there is a certain disinformation in it) that for the Islamic it is the same, that for such faith only God exists, that nothing else exists.
I think it is reflecting the point of view of the Muslims close to him, who are imbued with the Hindu knowledge expressed in his earlier sentences. Not the rest of the Muslims for whom Allah is the only God and Muhammad is their prophet. The Muslims to use would not dare to include themselves in God, they take it as a quite separate being, as above stated.
But it’s not exclusive to Gandhi.
Let’s read Anandamayi Ma:
- The only thing we can do is to open our eyes and see Him in both good and evil, in happiness and in the finger, in joy and sadness, even in death.
- There is not a single inch of earth where God is not.
- True happiness exists only in spiritual life. The only way to experience it is to understand what the Universe is. We must reorient our consciousness to discover that the entire cosmos is divine.
And add a revealing phrase from Osho:
- It is by the search that you cannot see it. Divinity is not an objective, it is here and now. It is this divinity.
Western people who have drunk from oriental sources agree in this regard, as Baruch Spinoza:
- All that is, is in God, and nothing can not, without God, be, even be conceived.
And his disciple Albert Einstein points in the same direction:
- I believe in the God of Spinoza who reveals in harmony all that exists, but not in a God who cares about destiny and human acts.
Dark Night Of Soul occurs in all religions derived from Judaism. Not in those of the East, for there they know that God is not made in our image and likeness.
In Orient they have not lost the deep intuition or knowledge of what God is. They do not lose their minds with drawings or phrases that represent it in human form. They reflect it perfectly in their concept of Brahman.
Therefore, when we are disoriented or lost, to get to know where we are or where we have to resume the path we call orienting ourselves.
Orient knows many things, intuitively, some that Science has not yet discovered.
He knew long before Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble that the Universe is expanding.
And that it contracts cyclically. That still Western science does not know (because it is by the other side).
It is often said that God is everywhere. Let’s say this is true. Let’s start from that premise. And see where it takes us.
What in our known Universe can we find everywhere?
There is only one reality that fulfills that premise: Energy.
Can we conclude that God is Energy**?
Let's do it!
But... all the Energy?
Or just some kind of energy?
If we limit it to one or several types of energy, we are restricting its area of operations. Then, if it is everywhere, God is all the Energy, not a mere part of it.
And since we know that matter is also a manifestation of energy, that is, matter is also energy, matter is also God.
God is Energy, and Energy (then also matter) is God.
What about God being good?
So we have to choose: either we identify God with the energy that does good, or it is everywhere. Both things are not possible at the same time.
What if God is alien to evil and good?
What if God simply IS? As Francis of Assisi stated.
Or as Moses says in Exodus 3, 14.
What if we’re the human beings who’ve painted it the color we like?
The truth is that the human being is not made in the image and likeness of God but that God (at least that of the Jews, Christians and Muslims and even more so the multiple Greco-Roman gods and many others) is(n) created(s) in our image and likeness, to justify what we want and want to justify, what we need to justify. Whatever we’re interested in justifying.
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And we just have to remember how we love to invent gods and demigods, different Olympians and Elysées, which today we call superheroes (books, comics, movies). Almost all of us anthropoamorphous. Power makes us crazy. With that mentality, the God we invented in our image and likeness is another superhero.
Also the extraterrestrials that we imagine, with which we fantasize, are superpowers, (demi)gods, when it is most likely that all the life we find in the Universe is more similar to bacterial.
They are all more than childish projections of our own desires.
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PS. I do not think that Teresa Of Ávila can be labeled as a bad Catholic, this group of people precisely holds her in high esteem. And it is curious a phrase that comes to us from her after having spent her Dark Night Of Soul:
To give oneself completely to the All, without making us parts.
God is EVERYTHING.
There is only GOD.
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* For me the human being of whom we have to endure in life to reach a deeper fusion with the All, in fact, I consider that he is the only Christian that has existed, the others did not even try to follow Jesus De Nazaret (which is what, from my definition, means Christian) or they did it the wrong way.
** Furthermore, if God is energy, the detail is given that light is the purest manifestation of energy that we can perceive (and God and his manifestations are usually represented as a very intense light) and, for light, curiously, time does not pass. The formulas of Relativity make it clear that for anything or anything that travels at the speed of light, time does not exist. For God time does not exist, it is everywhere... At the same time! And, therefore, it is eternal.
*** He had no qualms about fishing, as he paid for his land by fish. Perhaps in this he also followed the example of Christ told us in the Bible. The problem is that the only two times he is seen cooking or eating fish were only after his supposed and false resurrection (Lk 24, 43; Jn 21, 9-13).
***I am convinced that the apostle who best understood Christ, indeed his only apostle, was Mary from Magdala, but the misogyny of Simon Peter (the zelota, yes it was him, there was no other Simon, to invent another Simon that never appears in the life and made of Jesus perpretaba the double play of taking off from him the title of terrorist anti-Roman and anti-allied of the Romans and, in passing, removed of course Magdalena, that he had understood the message of Christ, while Peter and John at all and still less Paul who did not even know Jesus and mounted an idealistic religion far from the world and focused not on ethics but on ritualism). That’s why that a-postles. They don’t deserve the title of followers of Jesus because they weren’t.
Gerttz
