Dark night of the soul

Fear, and all fears are based on fear of death, is often accompanied by a sense of meaningless for life. What you believe to be is a person and as the sense of being a separate individual dies also all the "reasons" that were keeping the idea of being a person going will dissolve one after the other.

This means that we might experience it as a sense of vacuity in ourselve, a void that is not perceived positivly as silence and peace but as a black hole that is sucking us back and destroying all things we were living for. This state that you could describe as depression is actually a very spiritual state that needs to be addressed as such: YOU ARE DYING, not the body, but the "ME".

This death of the ego can be so strongly refused that even suicide can be on the cards as an option to avoid to feel that extreme suffering: it is not actually an option as -even if the body dies- that suffering will be at last felt completly anyway, so really suicide is not a way to stop the suffering. If we could have a choice about it, it is of course far better to experience the pain and go over it and live afterwards a free life. The message is correct: dying, but is a message for the me and not for the body itself.

This deep crisis of the ego brings desperation, depression and a sense of meaningless in living life: see clearly that these feelings are a sign of a spiritual crisis, the darkest moments before the dawn, the crossing of the core of the sense of feeling separated from Life. They dont last forever, they seem not to go away because there is an avoidance about them.

Be clear that no emotion is too big to be observed as whataver is the feeling - frustration, anger, fear, or even desperation - you are what is seeing it coming up in consciousness and not the subject of it. In other terms the feeling is present, but you dont HAVE it, it is simply there. Recognizing this allows you see that there is a distance in sense between you, Consciousness, and the psycological suffering, it reduces the drama that the mind builds up about the suffering. For istance, the fear of not having money or being lonely might be present and needs to be felt fully for it to go away complety, but all the drama about YOU being poor and lonely is something fictious that entertain the "poor me" and self-pity image.

As long as your attention is on the story, on the drama, you will not be able to rest in the feeling itself because you will go in the mental story of it. Often we are thrown to avoid to sit with the feeling present and we run into strategies that temporarely less the pain. Becoming conscious of these strategies, (you will know with a bit of honesty which one you are playing) it is already a big step. What has to be clearly understood is that as long as you go into the strategies of avoidance the feeling will keep on being present on the background and when all the strategies will stop functioning ( they all do), when the sense of desperation is reaching a point of unbearability then the only possibiliy left is sitting with our pain without trying to fix it, hide it, or send it away.

There is no other way around, that burning sensation has to be felt fully and when this is done, it will disappear completly from your life to the point that you have been able to face it.

Shakti