From: slider@anashram.com

The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. 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. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child
dies. 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.

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. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework
for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in
a dark place. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. Quite often it’s from there
that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.

They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in
your mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life
that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer.
It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death
that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is
always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an
illusory identity. 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. Often it is part of
the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.

You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness. Or one
could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you
had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on. Then
you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of
meaning. It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything.
That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. It can bring about the dark night of the soul –
to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively,
as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a
deep sense of aliveness. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense
of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a
conceptual framework anymore.

--Eckhart Tolle

### - cc called the ability to turn this on/off: "stopping the world"

later he said/suggested that it becomes a permanent feature when the
'foreign installation' finally flees for the last time: a grave day in the
life of a warrior because there's no longer anything to dictate the
inanities we're used to pursuing etc...

iow: when 'ego' ceases to dominate one's whole perception, an alternate
view of the world automatically arises

a much older/original one ;)

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)