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object:Dark Night of the Soul
class:book
author class:Saint John of the Cross
subject class:Christianity


  CONTENTS
  PREFACE TO THE ELECTRONIC EDITION
  TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
  TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
  PRINCIPAL ABBREVIATIONS
  0.06 - INTRODUCTION
  0.07 - DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
    PROLOGUE

  BOOK I
    1.01 - Sets down the first line and begins to treat of the imperfections of beginners
    1.02 - Of certain spiritual imperfections which beginners have with respect to the habit of pride
    CHAPTER III.Of some imperfections which some of these souls are apt to have, with respect to the second capital sin, which is avarice, in the spiritual sense
    CHAPTER IV.Of other imperfections which these beginners are apt to have with respect to the third sin, which is luxury
    CHAPTER V.Of the imperfections into which beginners fall with respect to the sin of wrath
    CHAPTER VI.Of imperfections with respect to spiritual gluttony
    CHAPTER VII.Of imperfections with respect to spiritual envy and sloth
    CHAPTER VIII.Wherein is expounded the first line of the first stanza, and a beginning is made of the explanation of this dark night
    CHAPTER IX.Of the signs by which it will be known that the spiritual person is walking along the way of this night and purgation of sense
    CHAPTER X.Of the way in which these souls are to conduct themselves in this dark night
    CHAPTER XI.Wherein are expounded the three lines of the stanza
    CHAPTER XII.Of the benefits which this night causes in the soul
    CHAPTER XIII.Of other benefits which this night of sense causes in the soul
    CHAPTER XIV.Expounds this last verse of the first stanza

  BOOK II
    CHAPTER I.Which begins to treat of the dark night of the spirit and says at what time it begins
    CHAPTER II.Describes other imperfections which belong to these proficients
    CHAPTER III.Annotation for that which follows
    CHAPTER IV.Sets down the first stanza and the exposition thereof
    CHAPTER V.Sets down the first line and begins to explain how this dark contemplation is not only night for the soul but is also grief and purgation
    CHAPTER VI.Of other kinds of pain that the soul suffers in this night
    CHAPTER VII.Continues the same matter and considers other afflictions and constraints of the will
    CHAPTER VIII.Of other pains which afflict the soul in this state
    CHAPTER IX.How, although this night brings darkness to the spirit, it does so in order to illumine it and give it light
    CHAPTER X.Explains this purgation fully by a comparison
    CHAPTER XI.Begins to explain the second line of the first stanza. Describes how, as the fruit of these rigorous constraints, the soul finds itself with the vehement passion of Divine love
    CHAPTER XII.Shows how this horrible night is purgatory, and how in it the Divine wisdom illumines men on earth with the same illumination that purges and illumines the angels in Heaven
    CHAPTER XIII.Of other delectable effects which are wrought in the soul by this dark night of contemplation
    CHAPTER XIV.Wherein are set down and explained the last three lines of the first stanza
    CHAPTER XV.Sets down the second stanza and its exposition
    CHAPTER XVI.Explains how, though in darkness, the soul walks securely
    CHAPTER XVII.Explains how this dark contemplation is secret
    CHAPTER XVIII.Explains how this secret wisdom is likewise a ladder
    CHAPTER XIX.Begins to explain the ten steps of the mystic ladder of Divine love, according to Saint Bernard and Saint Thomas. The first five are here treated
    CHAPTER XX.Wherein are treated the other five steps of love
    CHAPTER XXI.Which explains this word 'disguised,' and describes the colours of the disguise of the soul in this night
    CHAPTER XXII.Explains the third line of the second stanza
    CHAPTER XXIII.Expounds the fourth line and describes the wondrous hidingplace wherein the soul is set during this night. Shows how, although the devil has an entrance into other places that are very high, he has none into this
    CHAPTER XXIV.Completes the explanation of the second stanza
    CHAPTER XXV.Wherein is expounded the third stanza




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--- OBJECT INSTANCES [0]

TOPICS


AUTH


BOOKS


CHAPTERS

0.06_-_INTRODUCTION
0.07_-_DARK_NIGHT_OF_THE_SOUL
1.01_-_Sets_down_the_first_line_and_begins_to_treat_of_the_imperfections_of_beginners.
1.02_-_Of_certain_spiritual_imperfections_which_beginners_have_with_respect_to_the_habit_of_pride.
1.03_-_Of_some_imperfections_which_some_of_these_souls_are_apt_to_have,_with_respect_to_the_second_capital_sin,_which_is_avarice,_in_the_spiritual_sense
1.04_-_Of_other_imperfections_which_these_beginners_are_apt_to_have_with_respect_to_the_third_sin,_which_is_luxury.
1.05_-_Of_the_imperfections_into_which_beginners_fall_with_respect_to_the_sin_of_wrath
1.06_-_Of_imperfections_with_respect_to_spiritual_gluttony.
1.07_-_Of_imperfections_with_respect_to_spiritual_envy_and_sloth.
1.08_-_Wherein_is_expounded_the_first_line_of_the_first_stanza,_and_a_beginning_is_made_of_the_explanation_of_this_dark_night
1.09_-_Of_the_signs_by_which_it_will_be_known_that_the_spiritual_person_is_walking_along_the_way_of_this_night_and_purgation_of_sense.

--- PRIMARY CLASS


book

--- SEE ALSO


--- SIMILAR TITLES [0]


0.07 - DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Dark Night of the Soul
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--- DICTIONARIES (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)


Dark Night of the Soul: The final phase in the growth of the New Man, the complete purification of the soul which paves the way to the mystic union with God.


--- QUOTES [3 / 3 - 68 / 68] (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)



KEYS (10k)

   1 Hazrat Inayat Khan
   1 F Scott Fitzgerald
   1 Aleister Crowley

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   4 Gerald G May

   4 F Scott Fitzgerald

   3 Flannery O Connor

   3 Aletheia Luna

   2 John Welwood

   2 Gilly Macmillan

   2 Anonymous


1:In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald,
2:There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, Thinking Like The Universe: The Sufi Path Of Awakening ,
3:But before entering into the details of I. A. O. as a magical formula it should be remarked that it is essentially the formula of Yoga or meditation; in fact, of elementary mysticism in all its branches. In beginning a meditation practice, there is always a quiet pleasure, a gentle natural growth; one takes a lively interest in the work; it seems easy; one is quite pleased to have started. This stage represents Isis. Sooner or later it is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work. The simplest and easiest acts become almost impossible to perform. Such impotence fills the mind with apprehension and despair. The intensity of this loathing can hardly be understood by any person who has not experienced it. This is the period of Apophis. It is followed by the arising not of Isis, but of Osiris. The ancient condition is not restored, but a new and superior condition is created, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death. The Alchemists themselves taught this same truth. The first matter of the work was base and primitive, though 'natural.' After passing through various stages the 'black dragon' appeared; but from this arose the pure and perfect gold ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA Book 4,

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:the dark night of the soul is endless. ~ Gerald G May
2:The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation. ~ Joseph Campbell
3:To heal the wound, you have to go into the dark night of the soul. ~ Tori Amos
4:In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God. ~ Taylor Caldwell
5:In the dark night of the soul, bright flows the river of God. ~ Saint John of the Cross
6:Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul. ~ Flannery O Connor
7:You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul. ~ Sam Keen
8:In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald
9:In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. —F. ~ Gilly Macmillan
10:In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald
11:Someone observed darkly that it is always two A.M. when one is in the 'dark night of the soul. ~ Robert A Johnson
12:In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
   ~ F Scott Fitzgerald,
13:Being human is a complicated gig. So give that ol' dark night of the soul a hug. Howl the eternal yes! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
14:If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church. ~ Charles Simic
15:Sometimes you can't see your way out. The "dark night of the soul" - it's a reality for many, many people. ~ Mariel Hemingway
16:In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. —F. Scott Fitzgerald ~ Gilly Macmillan
17:In a real dark night of the soul, Scott Fitzgerald had said, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. ~ Anonymous
18:In a real dark night of the soul, Scott Fitzgerald had said, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. ~ Stephen King
19:The dark night of the soul is a journey into light, a journey from your darkness into the strength and hidden resources of your soul. ~ Caroline Myss
20:There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan
21:There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were. ~ Vilayat Inayat Khan
22:Regardless of when and how it happens, the dark night of the soul is the transition from bondage to freedom in prayer and in every other aspect of life. ~ Gerald G May
23:This deepening of love is the real purpose of the dark night of the soul. The dark night helps us become who we are created to be: lovers of God and one another. ~ Gerald G May
24:Three o’clock’s when every doubt and regret and guilty thought bubbles up out of your subconscious to plague you. ‘The dark night of the soul,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald called it. ~ Connie Willis
25:the dark night of the soul is an ongoing transition from compulsively trying to control one’s life toward a trusting freedom and openness to God and the real situations of life. ~ Gerald G May
26:...the important questions are answered by not liking only but disliking and accepting equally what one likes and dislikes. Otherwise there is no access to the dark night of the soul. ~ John Cage
27:Every artist, in fact, every human being, arrives at a place of being undone. Of being completely lost. Of having what mystic Saint John of the Cross called a “dark night of the soul. ~ Genevieve Parker Hill
28:The dark night of the soul may then bring us into contact with the inner light that expands our mortal lives through connection with the eternal essence dwelling in each of us. ~ Monika Wikman, Pregnant Darkness
29:There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.
   ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan, Thinking Like The Universe: The Sufi Path Of Awakening,
30:Won't You guide me through the dark night of the soul That I may better understand Your way... Let me purify my thoughts and words and deeds That I may be a vehicle for Thee... Give me my rapture today. ~ Van Morrison
31:I believe that the dark night of the soul is a common spiritual experience. I believe, too, that the answer is continued seeking and perseverance. It helps to know that others have endured a loss of faith. ~ Julia Cameron
32:Every spiritual teaching points to the possibility of the end of suffering - Now. It is true that most teachers have had to go through the "Dark Night of the Soul," although for one or two it was very, very quick. ~ Eckhart Tolle
33:The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the real dark night of the soul was always three o’clock in the morning, and those sixty minutes between three o’clock and four were reliably and literally the darkest in the city. ~ Dean Koontz
34:Ubik is clearly an allegory for the Christian concept of “grace”; author Michael Bishop has written that Ubik is “whatever gets you through the dark night of the soul.” In the Exegesis, Ubik becomes shorthand for redemption ~ Philip K Dick
35:But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work-- and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald
36:As highly sensitive empaths, we are particularly prone to experiencing the Dark Night of the Soul. The less defined our sense of self is and the more toxic energy we take on from others, the more we are prone to losing touch with our Souls. ~ Aletheia Luna
37:The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours. ~ Ram Dass
38:In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of, you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That's a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community. ~ Henri Nouwen
39:The reason why most of us can’t reconnect with our souls is due to an experience known as soul loss. When we experience soul loss, we feel depressed, isolated, fatigued, empty, and prone to chronic illness and anxiety. These are all hallmark symptoms of the Dark Night of the Soul. ~ Aletheia Luna
40:Christ takes a different path. His sojourn in the desert is the dark night of the soul—a deeply human and universal human experience. It’s the journey to that place each of us goes when things fall apart, friends and family are distant, hopelessness and despair reign, and black nihilism beckons. ~ Jordan Peterson
41:Christ takes a different path. His sojourn in the desert is the dark night of the soul—a deeply human and universal human experience. It’s the journey to that place each of us goes when things fall apart, friends and family are distant, hopelessness and despair reign, and black nihilism beckons. ~ Jordan B Peterson
42:Aphorisms are literature’s hand luggage. Light and compact they fit easily into the overhead compartment of your brain and contain everything you need to get through a rough day at the office or a dark night of the soul. ~ James Geary (b. 1962), American journalist, author and aphorist. The World in a Phrase (2005), Ch. 1
43:He thinks that, even if you have a great idea, there have to be trials and tribulations, errors and failures, a dark night of the soul, a slog, a time in the desert, a fallow period, a period of quiet, a period of silent and earnest and frustrated toiling before emerging, victorious, into the sunshine and acclaim. ~ Charles Yu
44:When you struggle with your faith, when you face the dark night of the soul, when you are not sure of where you
stand with the things of God, flee to the Scriptures. It is from those pages that God the Holy Spirit will speak to you, minister to your soul, and strengthen the faith that He gave to you in the first place. ~ R C Sproul
45:The dark night of the soul for me was one night in Florida, when I had been on the road for about four years and I realized that everybody around me was on my payroll, that my old friends hadn't been in touch with me and my family didn't know where to get me. I was a very unhappy guy and it was because I was really alone. ~ Barry Manilow
46:The first pale suggestion of dawn has appeared on the horizon as a faint grey smudge. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the real dark night of the soul is always three o’clock in the morning, but that’s not right. The darkest part of the night is just before dawn when we wake and peer through the curtains and wonder where the world has gone. ~ Michael Robotham
47:The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . . . ~ Flannery O Connor
48:But, mad or sane, Matthews was a man of no ordinary persistence. He was not prepared to renounce the peace plan, any more than he would be prepared to renounce his madness a few years later. A month later he was back in France, this time for an extended stay.

The optimistic dawn of his revolutionary adventures was coming to an end, and his dark night of the soul was about to begin. ~ Mike Jay
49:And through a dark night of the soul, I came to realize that salvation happens through a mysterious, indefinable, relational interaction with Jesus in which we become one with Him. I realized Christian conversion worked more like falling in love than understanding a series of concepts of ideas. This is not to say there are no true ideas, it is only to say there is something else, something beyond. ~ Donald Miller
50:Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. 'There are not foxholes,' I guess, and depression is the deepest and deadliest foxhole I've been in. It may be the 'dark night of the soul' that the mystics talk about but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost in the dark as one becomes the dark. ~ Parker J Palmer
51:The Dark Night of the Soul is not merely “having a bad day” or even week. The Dark Night is a long, pervasive, and very dark experience. If you’re experiencing the Dark Night of the Soul, you will constantly carry around within you a sense of being lost. Your heart will constantly, in some shape or form, be in mourning, and this is because you long deep down to feel the presence of your Soul again. ~ Aletheia Luna
52:The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul. ~ Flannery O Connor
53:Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald
54:Awareness born of love is the only force that can bring healing and renewal. Out of our love for another person, we become more willing to let our old identities wither and fall away, and enter a dark night of the soul, so that we may stand naked once more in the presence of the great mystery that lies at the core of our being. This is how love ripens us -by warming us from within, inspiring us to break out of our shell, and lighting our way through the dark passage to new birth. ~ John Welwood
55:Awareness born of love is the only force that can bring healing and renewal. Out of our love for another person, we become more willing to let our old identities wither and fall away, and enter a dark night of the soul, so that we may stand naked once more in the presence of the great mystery that lies at the core of our being. This is how love ripens us -- by warming us from within, inspiring us to break out of our shell, and lighting our way through the dark passage to new birth. ~ John Welwood
56:There's a dark side to each and every human soul. We wish we were Obi-Wan Kenobi, and for the most part we are, but there's a little Darth Vader in all of us. Thing is, this ain't no either or proposition. We're talking about dialectics, the good and the bad merging into us. You can run but you can't hide. My experience? Face the darkness, stare it down. Own it. As brother Nietzsche said, being human is a complicated gig. Give that old dark night of the soul a hug! Howl the eternal yes! ~ Stuart Stevens
57:In virtually every spiritual tradition, suffering is seen as a doorway to awakening. In the West, this connection can be seen in the biblical story of Job, as well as the dark night of the soul in medieval mysticism. The transformative power of suffering finds perhaps its clearest expression in the Four Noble Truths espoused by the Buddha. Though suffering and trauma are not identical, the Buddha’s insight into the nature of suffering can provide a powerful mirror for examining the effects of trauma in your life. ~ Peter A Levine
58:The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. It is relatively easy to become involved with a job, to enjoy the company of friends, to be entertained in a theater or at a concert. But what happens when we are left to our own devices? Alone, when the dark night of the soul descends, are we forced into frantic attempts to distract the mind from its coming? Or are we able to take on activities that are not only enjoyable, but make the self grow? ~ Anonymous
59:The point is only that the believer should not repress the shadow of doubt that hangs over all belief (the potential lie that may dwell in the heart of every belief). Instead the believer ought to acknowledge and even celebrate this dark night of the soul, understanding that this is not a threatening darkness which conceals an enemy but rather is the intimate darkness within which we embrace our faith. For when we can say that we will follow God regardless of the uncertainty involved in such a decision, then real faith is born – for love acts not whenever a certain set of criteria has been met, but rather because it is in the nature of love to act. ~ Peter Rollins
60:We don't need to stop at green or natural burial. "Burial" comes from the anglo-saxon word birgan, "to conceal." Not everyone wants to be concealed under the earth. I don't want to be concealed. Ever since my dark night of the soul in the redwood forest, I've believed the animals I've consumed my whole life should someday have their turn with me. The ancient Ethiopians would place their dead in the lake where they fished, so the fish would have the opportunity to receive back the nutrients. The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us. ~ Caitlin Doughty
61:Frank Halford was a master at the school and remembers Adams as “very tall even then, and popular. He wrote an end-of-term play when Doctor Who had just started on television. He called it ‘Doctor Which.’ ” Many years later, Adams did write scripts for Doctor Who. He describes Halford as an inspirational teacher who is still a support. “He once gave me ten out of ten for a story, which was the only time he did throughout his long school career. And even now, when I have a dark night of the soul as a writer and think that I can’t do this anymore, the thing that I reach for is not the fact that I have had best-sellers or huge advances. It is the fact that Frank Halford once gave me ten out of ten, and at some fundamental level I must be able to do it. ~ Douglas Adams
62:From time to time I feel as though my books and figurines were with me still. But how could they be? Are they somehow floating around me or over my head? Have the figurines and books that I lost over the years dissolved into the air of Mexico City? Have they become the ash that blows through the city from north to south and from east to west? Perhaps. The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving. ~ Roberto Bola o
63:The idea is a complicated one, as the burden falls to us to differentiate this Divine Darkness from other kinds of darknesses-- that off a "dark night of the soul," the darkness of sin, and so on. "We pray that we may come unto this Darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, to see and to know that which is above vision and knowledge through the realization that by not seeing and unknowing we attain to true vision and knowledge," Dionysius wrote, as if clarifying the matter. Equally complicated: the idea of agnosia, or unknowing, which is what one ideally finds, or undergoes, or achieves, within this Divine Darkness. Again: this agnosia is not a form of ignorance, but rather a kind of undoing. (As if one knew once, then forgot? But what did one know?) ~ Maggie Nelson
64:Here's what you need to know: some cliches are true, and war is definitely hell. It's being afraid all the time, and when you're not afraid it's because you're pumped full of adrenaline you could literally burst. It's watching people who you love- really profoundly love- get blown to pieces right next to you. It's seeing a leg lying in the ditch and picking it up to put it in a bag because no man- or part of a man, your friend- can be left behind. It's the dark night of the soul. There's no front line over there. The war is all around them, every day, everywhere they go. Some handle it better than others. We don't know why, but we do know this: the human mind can't safely or healthily process that kind of carnage and uncertainty and horror. It just can't. No one comes back from war the same. ~ Kristin Hannah
65:Religious despair is often a defense against boredom and the daily grind of existence. Lacking intensity in our lives, we say that we are distant from God and then seek to make that distance into an intense experience. It is among the most difficult spiritual ailments to heal, because it is usually wholly illusory. There are definitely times when we must suffer God’s absence, when we are called to enter the dark night of the soul in order to pass into some new understanding of God, some deeper communion with him and with all creation. But this is very rare, and for the most part our dark nights of the soul are, in a way this is more pathetic than tragic, wishful thinking. God is not absent. He is everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love. To feel him — to find him — does not usually require that we renounce all worldly possessions and enter a monastery, or give our lives over to some cause of social justice, or create some sort of sacred art, or begin spontaneously speaking in tongues. All to often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us, say, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep. ~ Christian Wiman
66:But before entering into the details of I. A. O. as a magical formula it should be remarked that it is essentially the formula of Yoga or meditation; in fact, of elementary mysticism in all its branches. In beginning a meditation practice, there is always a quiet pleasure, a gentle natural growth; one takes a lively interest in the work; it seems easy; one is quite pleased to have started. This stage represents Isis. Sooner or later it is succeeded by depression-the Dark Night of the Soul, an infinite weariness and detestation of the work. The simplest and easiest acts become almost impossible to perform. Such impotence fills the mind with apprehension and despair. The intensity of this loathing can hardly be understood by any person who has not experienced it. This is the period of Apophis.
   It is followed by the arising not of Isis, but of Osiris. The ancient condition is not restored, but a new and superior condition is created, a condition only rendered possible by the process of death. The Alchemists themselves taught this same truth. The first matter of the work was base and primitive, though 'natural.' After passing through various stages the 'black dragon' appeared; but from this arose the pure and perfect gold
   ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Book 4, Magick, Part 3, The Formula of I. A. O. [158-159],
67:He looked at the houses he had been passing these weeks and though he had never studied them carefully they had become familiar through the process of seeing them so often, and he was now impressed with the change in their appearance as he looked at them through the gray of the air and whiteness of the snow, each house, shrub, tree, bush and mailbox trimmed with snow and blending into the air as if they were just a picture projected upon the still, pearly grayness, just an impression created by the silent snow, a picture on the edge and verge of disappearing and leaving only the air and snow through which he now lightly walked.
It did not seem possible, but the air was even softer and quieter. He continued walking alongside his prints feeling he could walk forever, that as long as the silent snow continued falling he could continue walking, and as he did he would leave behind all worries and cares, all horrors of the past and future. There would be nothing to bother him or torture his mind and fill his body with tremors of fear, the dark night of the soul over. There would only be himself and the soft, silent snow; and each flake, in its own life, its own separate and distinct entity, would bring with it its own joy, and he would easily partake of that joy as he continued walking, the gentle, silent snow falling ever so quietly, ever so joyously ... yes, and ever so love-ing-ly ... loveing-ly.... ~ Hubert Selby Jr
68:Let us now assume that under truly extraordinary circumstances, the daimon nevertheless breaks through in the individual, so to speak, and is this able to let its destructive transcendence be felt: then one would have a kind of active experience of death. Thereupon the second connection becomes clear: why the figure of the daimon or doppelgänger in the ancient myths could be melded with the deity of death. In the Nordic tradition the warrior sees his Valkyrie precisely at the moment of death or mortal danger.

In religious asceticism, mortification, self-renunciation, and the impulse of devotion to God are the preferred methods of provoking and successfully overcoming the crisis I have just mentioned. Everyone knows the expressions which refer to these states, such as the 'mystical death' or 'dark night of the soul', etc. In contrast to this, within the framework of a heroic tradition, the path to the same goal is the active rapture, the Dionysian unleashing of the active element. At its lower levels, we find phenomenons such as the use of dance as a sacred technique for achieving an ecstasy of the soul that summons and uses profound energies. While the individual’s life is surrendered to Dionysian rhythm, another life sinks into it, as if it where his abyssal roots surfacing. The 'wild host' Furies, Erinyes, and suchlike spiritual natures are symbolic picturings of this energy, thus corresponding to a manifestation of the daimon in its terrifying and active transcendence. At a higher level we find sacred war-games; higher still, war itself. And this brings us back to the ancient Aryan concept of battle and the warrior ascetic.

At the climax of danger and heroic battle, the possibility for such an extraordinary experience was recognized. The Lating ludere, meaning both 'to play' and 'to fight', seems to contain the idea of release. This is one of the many allusions to the inherent ability of battle to release deeply-buried powers from individual limitations and let them freely emerge. Hence the third comparison: the daimon, the Lar, the individualizing I, etc., are not only identical with the Furies, Erinyes, and other unleashed Dionysian natures, which themselves have many traits similar to the goddess of death — they are also synonymous with the storm maidens of battle, the Valkyries and Fravartis. In the texts, for example, the Fravartis are called 'the terrible, the all-powerful', 'those who attack in storm and bestow victory upon those who conjure them', or, more precisely, those who conjure them up in themselves.

From there to the final comparison is only a short step. In the Aryan tradition the same martial beings eventually take on the form of victory-goddesses, a transformation which denotes the happy completion of the inner experience in question. Just as the daimon or doppelgänger signifies a deep, supra-individual power in its latent condition as compared to ordinary consciousness; just as the Furies and Erinyes reflect a particular manifestation of daimonic rages and eruptions (and the goddesses of death, Valkyries, Fravartis, etc., refer to the same conditions, as long as these are facilitated by battle and heroism) — in the same way the goddess of victory is the expression of the triumph of the I over this power. She signifies the victorious ascent to a state unendangered by ecstasies and sub-personal forms of disintegration, a danger that always lurks behind the frenetic moment of Dionysian and even heroic action. The ascent to a spiritual, truly supra-personal condition that makes one free, immortal, and internally indestructible, when the 'Two becomes One', expresses itself in this image of mythical consciousness. ~ Julius Evola

--- IN CHAPTERS (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)



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   3 Integral Yoga
   1 Yoga
   1 Psychology
   1 Philosophy
   1 Occultism


   3 Nolini Kanta Gupta


   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02


--- WEBGEN

Wikipedia - Dark Night of the Soul
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