by Kiara Windrider

We have received the deeksha, or ilahinur transmission. We have had our first taste of enlightenment. We have experienced the rush of infinite divine possibility. We have caught our first vision of an imminent Golden Age. We have seen the Big Picture where all the world’s problems have been miraculously solved. We have glimpsed a hope deep in our psyche that spells freedom from a lifetime of despair and suffering. We have fallen in love with the infinite possibilities of being.

Then, suddenly, comes the ‘reality check’. The wave of enlightenment is suddenly churning backwards, as the ocean inevitably pulls back towards itself, and all our dreams suddenly dissolve in the foam. There is a great turbulence. It is a time of testing and agony. No longer are we experiencing divine ecstasy. We watch helplessly as our fondest hopes and dreams begin to collapse all around us. The universe suddenly seems to have forgotten all about us, or even seems to have turned against us. We wonder if we have been given a false vision, or if the universe makes any sense anymore. We find ourselves being pounded into the sand and churned around by the universe until all that is left is a blind sense of betrayal and despair.

Eventually we break through this sense of soul pounding, and we enter into an altogether new realm of mastery. The last remnants of the ego’s attachment to separation dissolve, and we are free. But how do we get from here to there?

It was St. John of the Cross, one of the early Christian mystics, who first coined the term, ‘dark night of the soul’. In my early twenties, when I was going through bouts of tremendous depression, I came across his book and found myself fascinated. It seemed that every word was written just for me, and it helped me understand what was going on from a different perspective. I would like to share a few reflections here on what this might mean for us now at this point in our journey.

St. John referred to two distinct processes, which have surface similarities but are actually quite different from each other. The first process is what he called the ‘dark night of the senses’. Later on in the book, he describes the ‘dark night of the soul’. I refer to them both together as our journey into ‘endarkenment’.

I would like to distinguish here between these two events. Most of us have experienced feelings of great loneliness, emotional dryness, and depression. Sometimes these states come and go; other times they remain for weeks or months, or even years, at a time. Much of this is a psychological process. We feel unworthy, small, unloved, and insecure. The universe feels too big and too frightening for us to handle, and we find ourselves retreating from it into an increasingly tiny box in order to feel secure. We feel lost and cut off from other people. We feel too inadequate to live out our dreams. We have been hurt by life and by other people, and we retreat into a cave of our own making, alternating between feelings of anger, betrayal, helplessness, loneliness, sadness, and grief.

Dealing with our unhealed psychological issues is often painful, and the deeksha can accelerate this process as it pushes us towards wholeness. All this is part of the ‘dark night of the senses’. Often we find that the stronger the light that shines upon us, the stronger also the darkness that gets stirred up.

When I lived in Mt. Shasta, California, there was a lake I would frequently visit. It was a very shallow lake, and the bottom half of it was soft squishy mud. I loved walking through it, stirring up all the bubbles of methane gas from the muck at the bottom, watching as they made their way up to the surface to be released.

Our psychological process is very similar to this. We see for the first time some of our shadow aspects that have been buried under the mud for so long. We have tried to deny, change, project, or suppress these things for a long time, but they are still there. What do we do with these bubbles of subconscious material that get stirred up?

Very often we try to suppress or deny these feelings, memories, or sensations once again. They are uncomfortable, and don’t fit with our ideas of wanting to be spiritually enlightened beings. Or else we go into depression or contraction, and then feel guilty or ashamed for what we perceive as failure or unworthiness. A third thing we might do is to project these feelings onto other people or circumstances, actively or passively blaming them for our own feelings of darkness and discomfort. This becomes especially evident for those who have experienced significant hurt or abuse in their early childhood. The need to blame oneself or somebody else can get intensely strong to compensate for all the shadows that the deeksha begins to push towards the surface.

If we no longer want to get into old patterns of suppression, denial, or projection, there is a fourth option. We can simply watch and observe this process. We don’t need to try and change anything. If we are willing to hold still and stay with the feelings, the bubbles from the mud will naturally come up to the surface of the lake, and get released. However, when we actively go into blame or judgment, we halt the process and become stuck in the dark night. This is where many people have felt lost or betrayed, feeling like somehow the deeksha hasn’t worked for them, or that they are worse off than ever before.

If we can allow ourselves to go through the dark night of the senses, simply experiencing the reality of the mind as it is, it soon passes. More light can then come in, and deeper experiences of oneness begin to permeate our lives. We discover a stronger connection with our inner divinity – the ‘antaryamin’ – and a greater sense of our unique destiny as a soul on earth.

At some point of this journey, another transformative crisis begins. This is the deeper ‘dark night of the soul’. Whereas the dark night of the senses is a psychological crisis, the dark night of the soul is an existential crisis. Whereas the purpose of the dark night of the senses is to dissolve the sense of a separate ‘self’, leading to enlightenment, the purpose of the dark night of the soul is to discover the divine ‘Self’, and enter into God-realization.

The inner experience may be similar. There is again the sense of emotional dryness, loss of vitality or enthusiasm, and a sense of desolation and darkness. But this time it is the experience of the inner soul, not the outer personality. Often we feel that our very connection with the divine is broken, there is no more joy in our hearts, and everything that had been so smooth and easy on our spiritual path now becomes burdensome and difficult.

Why is this happening? This is where the last and subtlest shreds of our personal ego are being confronted. Our deepest certainties and sense of ultimate purpose is being challenged. We are being pushed into the void where everything that has to do with our last remaining ideas and concepts about divinity, truth, and ultimate reality dissolves. Even our ideas about the ‘big picture’ get eaten up in the void. It feels like a dismemberment of our very being, a journey through the valley of death. The journey feels endless, and just when we finally surrender to this death, we emerge reborn as a Christed being.

This is the stage which the avatar Jesus went through in his ‘forty days in the wilderness’. As he struggled with the last remnants of his inner demons, he was able to dissolve the last illusions of a separate self, and merge with the ‘Father’, his inner divinity. This is when he became the Christ. This is when his mission as an avatar could truly begin.

We are on this same journey. We are all aspects of the Collective Avatar which is descending on Earth. We each need to go through our own dark night of the soul, and step into our own mastery.

Let us not confuse the dark night of the senses with the dark night of the soul. Just because we are feeling miserable does not mean we are automatically moving into mastery. The journey has begun, however. The way through both of these dark nights is the same. We must simply become awareness of our inner process without judgment or blame. And we must trust that this divine intelligence is equally with us in the darkness as in the light. When we can finally surrender fully to the perfection of God within the darkness, we mysteriously discover that we have emerged once again into the light!

When we emerge from the dark night of the senses, we step more fully into oneness. When we emerge from the dark night of the soul, we step more fully into mastery. We become God-realized, and can serve humanity as part of the Collective Avatar on Earth, one cell in a Planetary Body as it slowly builds the critical mass necessary to achieve the collective planetary awakening!

Some Christian mystics referred to this as ‘the cloud of unknowning’. At first God steps towards us and gives us an experience of sweetness. Then a cloud of unknowing comes in between. It is up to us to step through it, un-defining all our conceptions of God, however dry and stark it feels, struggling with all our doubts and uncertainties, until we step past the cloud of our unconscious mind, and discover that God’s grace has indeed never left. We now experience ourselves as one with God.

To those of us who have not experienced this unity with God, He is conceptualized as mechanistic and separate from us. It is a belief held deep within the unconscious. In order to truly experience oneness with God, we must go through the dark night of the unconscious mind, which I see as our personal version of the Ancient Mind. Once we have cleared this, nothing in the Ancient Mind can influence us anymore. Then we become the power of God to heal, help, and liberate humanity from suffering. Then we become a Christ.

Christ was about love. This love is what gave Jesus the power to heal people. This is what the deeksha is creating within us. We do not gain the ability to love by trying to develop love. It happens by itself as the deeksha begins clearing out the unconscious mind.

I sense that the cycles of enlightenment and endarkenment which each of us will be going through in this passage towards Oneness are the same cycles that collective humanity will be going through in these years to come. It is the same cycles that our beloved Earth is going through as She prepares to birth humanity and all life into a Golden Age. Despite appearances, there is a huge omnipotent, loving Intelligence that is working through all of this.

It seems to me that perhaps we are now collectively entering a cycle of endarkenment. From all the feedback I seem to be receiving from people, and from indications within the Mayan calendar and other prophetic systems, it may be that something is coming to a head on a planetary level, a big collective process that is now beginning or about to happen. What this would look like I do not know and cannot say. But it is important for us to recognize that the Divine Grace which is pouring into the Earth today is beyond all temporal forms and can never be diminished or held back by anything.

Sri Aurobindo, the great mystic sage of India, referred to this collective endarkenment as the ‘supramental catastrophe’, and noted that there would inevitably be a period of transition where all our collective shadows would surface. My sense is that this is about to peak on our planet in these coming months and years. Yet he also stated that this would be followed by the ‘supramental manifestation’, identical to what others have referred to the as the dawning of the Golden Age.

So if we are experiencing the dark night at this time, let us remember the big picture. No matter what stage of the process we are going through, the gift is alive in us, and we are blessed with the capability to pass it on and on and on. If we stay in a state of transparency with all this, and allow the storm winds to blow through us without resistance, we shall come out the other side of this in a much deepened capacity to serve the One. It is where the ‘fire’ from heaven has burned away the last remnants of separation. It is where we experience our true face, which has nothing to do with the face we have learned to recognize in the daily mirrors of life.

In the words of an ancient Indian prayer, “Lead us from untruth into truth. Lead us from darkness into light. Lead us from death into immortality!”