A few months ago I experienced the dark night. It was an excruciating experience that I was not prepared for. Honestly, I do not think anyone can prepare for it. It lasted for roughly 4-5 months, but I did not realize what it was until the end. The entire time I was beating myself up for not feeling myself because I wasn’t motivated to do any of the things that had previously brought meaning in my life. Which took me by surprise having experienced a rather significant awakening 2.5 years ago which helped me to target and release many conditioned beliefs that were not serving me, to make room for a life that felt more like truth. To go from feeling like I was co-creating with the universe to feeling abandoned by it felt like a massive punch to the gut.

My first awakening and beginning of my spiritual journey happened about a decade ago. Since, I have been aware of the value of shadow work and acknowledging the painbody, so I entered the dark night with this perception in mind which I feel helped the experience along. But, as to be expected, the conventional opinion would have been that I was experiencing depression.

The Dark Night of the Soul and Depression may not be the same, I suppose this is up for debate, but I feel confident in saying that the dark night is often mistaken for depression. And, sometimes, the dark night can turn into depression if perceived and treated as depression. I sit here wondering how many people are treating themselves for conventional depression when they are truly experiencing a natural spiritual process.

Tolle is a well-known spiritual teacher who openly shares his experiences with depression and with the dark night, and he has helped many people to navigate these difficult times. For those of you who have experienced the dark night, does he speak the truth? For those of you who have experienced depression, do you think it may have been the dark night?  If you are willing, share your thoughts or experiences after reading Tolle’s thoughts below.

Q: Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul? Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period. Can you address this subject?

Tolle: The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I have also experienced it. 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.

The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”. What is the purpose of a lesson like that? It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”. With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”. You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it collapses.

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.

Source: https://www.eckharttolle.com/newsletter/august-2011/