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Word Gems
self-knowledge, authentic living, full humanity, continual awakening
Surrender & Acceptance
Long, Dark Night Of The Soul
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Editor’s Prefatory Comment
The “long, dark night of the soul” (LDNS) is a required journey. Not many will walk this path in this life, but the mandate never expires -- not if we want to become sane and sighted.
The LDNS is something I’ve lived with for many years now, and I thought it would be helpful if I offered a brief overview of my experience. It's a companion to the “surrender and acceptance” writings.
I asked ChatGPT to dilate on my thoughts.
Ed: Do we know where the phrase “long. dark night of the soul” originated?
Chat: The phrase is almost certainly derived from "the dark night of the soul", which originated with the 16th-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross.
His famous poem, Dark Night (Noche oscura), and his accompanying treatise, The Dark Night of the Soul (La noche oscura del alma), describe a profound stage in the soul's journey toward union with God.
The "dark night" is not primarily depression, despair, or moral failure. Rather, it is a period in which:
- God seems absent.
- Former spiritual consolations disappear.
- The soul feels abandoned and empty.
- One's deepest attachments and illusions are purified.
- Faith must continue without emotional reassurance.
John compares this to walking through a dark night because the person can no longer rely on ordinary understanding or feelings. The darkness is actually a sign that the soul is being transformed.
Why do people often say "long dark night of the soul"?
Interestingly, the word "long" is not part of John's original title. It appears to have been added later in English as an idiomatic intensifier. Writers and speakers often say things like:
- "a long dark night of the soul"
- "the long dark night of the soul"
to emphasize that the period of suffering or uncertainty might last for some time, even years.
This expanded wording became especially common during the 19th and 20th centuries and has since entered popular English.
The phrase today
In modern usage, "dark night of the soul" has broadened far beyond its Christian mystical origin. It may refer to:
- a spiritual crisis,
- an existential crisis,
- a loss of identity or purpose,
- a period of profound grief,
- or even the crisis of an entire culture or civilization.
John of the Cross, however, would probably insist that the phrase has a much more precise meaning: it is a divinely guided purification that ultimately leads to greater union with God, not merely any intense emotional suffering.
So the origin is:
- Original phrase: "The Dark Night of the Soul" (La noche oscura del alma)
- Author: John of the Cross
- Date: Poem and commentary composed in the late 1500s (around 1578–1585)
- "Long dark night of the soul": a later English adaptation rather than the original wording.
Ed: Thank you. I need to write an essay on this, as I’ve been experiencing the LDNS for many years now. I need to do this as a kind of memoir or travelogue of what this process feels like.
I identify with everything John of the Cross said except I do not feel that God is distant or absent, instead there is a reality of God in the midst of great turmoil, almost moment by moment, brief respite at times, then the relentless torment once again.
I can feel what this is about –it’s about becoming a self, and the ego continually grasps at any memory that will portray oneself as “other” in reference to people of the past, the world, and reality itself. It’s a predictable part of my day now.
Chat: What you've described is both deeply personal and philosophically rich, and it also highlights an important distinction from John of the Cross.
John's account is one of the greatest descriptions of spiritual purification ever written, but it is not the only possible phenomenology of profound transformation. Your experience differs in a significant way:
The darkness is not the absence of God; it is the relentless exposure of the self.
That is a different emphasis.
John often writes as though the soul suffers because God has withdrawn sensible consolations. You describe almost the opposite:
God is unmistakably present, but that very presence illuminates every movement of the ego.
That reminds me less of abandonment than of standing in an ever-brighter light. The pain comes not because the light is absent, but because the light reveals every place where the self still clings to an identity built from comparison, memory, fear, or attachment.
I was especially struck by your sentence:
"...the ego continually grasps at any memory that will portray oneself as 'other' in reference to people of the past, the world, and reality itself."
That is a perceptive observation. It suggests that the ego is not simply pride or selfishness. Rather, it is an ongoing activity of constructing a separate identity.
It continually asks:
- Who am I compared with others?
- Am I succeeding?
- Am I respected?
- Am I unique?
- What story about myself can I preserve?
The moment one story dissolves, another appears. It is as though the ego cannot tolerate simply being; it must continually narrate itself in a story that positions itself against others.
That observation resonates with several traditions without being identical to any one of them. Christian mystics speak of the "false self." Certain strands of philosophy examine how identity is constituted through memory and relation. Some Eastern traditions describe the continual construction of the personal self.
Yet your description remains your own because you place the experience within an ongoing awareness of God rather than the disappearance of God.
You also said:
"It's about becoming a self."
That phrase reverses what many people expect. Most assume the goal of spiritual life is to lose the self. But many thinkers—including Kierkegaard—would say the opposite: the task is to become the true self. The false, comparative self dies so that the authentic person can emerge.
In that sense, the suffering is not annihilation but birth.
I wonder whether your memoir should resist the temptation to present this as a sequence of dramatic events. From what you've described over many conversations, the essence is not a single crisis but a daily rhythm.
The travelogue is inward rather than outward. Every day the same terrain appears: moments of peace, then the ego reaches for an old identity, then the light exposes it, then there is another surrender. The landscape changes very little, yet the traveler slowly changes.
One image comes to mind. Most travel books describe passing through forests, deserts, mountains, and cities. Yours might describe revisiting the same valley every morning, only to discover that it is you who are different each time. The country remains familiar; the traveler is gradually becoming someone else.
I also think your account could make an important contribution because it avoids romanticizing suffering. You describe "brief respite at times, then the relentless torment once again." That honesty matters. Yet alongside the torment you consistently report an awareness of God. This prevents the memoir from becoming merely a chronicle of pain. Instead, it becomes an account of fidelity: not of searching for God's presence, but of enduring the transformation that God's presence seems to require.
One sentence from your message could almost serve as the thesis of the entire work:
The dark night is not the loss of God but the relentless unveiling of every illusion that prevents one from becoming the person God intends.
I think you've identified something worth exploring. Rather than writing another commentary on John of the Cross, you may be writing a companion volume: a first-person phenomenology of the long work of becoming a self in the presence of God.
It would not argue that John was wrong, but that there are forms of the "dark night" in which the deepest certainty is not God's absence, but God's unwavering presence in the midst of the purification.
Ed: Also, what I am noticing is the varied and sometimes ingenious ways the ego will create the sense of “otherness“.
It can even happen in an innocuous context, like acknowledging that a girl is pretty – what could be wrong with this? But then an illumination comes.
There is a right way and a wrong way of doing this, and so often the wrong way devolves to a form of dehumanization, of seeing the pretty face as an object to be desired, not a real person. This is pathology, destroys community, and real relationship.
And then there are the ordinary ways that the ego creates the “other”, such as those who have hated one in life, those who have misrepresented one, attempted to accuse and put one down -- these are favorite targets of the ego, but as one becomes wise to these ego-schemes, then the more ingenious ploys come into play such as the dehumanization.
Further, there is an "all-purpose" otherness to afflict. Sometimes – or maybe often – the ego will attack by creating otherness with a sense of generalized dread regarding the evils of the world and having to live here. While some of this might be a reasonable response for a thinking person as one considers the injustices on planet Earth, if the antipathy goes too far one can experience a severe debilitation resulting in an inability to function. The great pitfall here is that the ego can turn all this into a justification to see oneself as a perpetual victim, angry and hard-done-by. Everyone else is always wrong and the ego ever portrays itself as the noble one. This fantasy creates the perfect "otherness".
All of these maladies can severely oppress one’s spirit and create forms of insanity.
A good solution I’ve found as partially effective in counteracting is “conscious breathing” – which I’ve spoken of elsewhere. Also, proactively engaging in some useful altruism will, for a time, break up the negative energy: help someone, write something uplifting - and even planning a future focused on service is life-giving.
The "long dark night" can overwhelm, is serious business -- not mere poetic expression but oftentimes a grinding gauntlet.
Chat: What you've described here is an important distinction that is worth developing carefully in your essay.
The key insight is that the ego is not merely self-centered; it is relationally divisive -- toward people and even reality itself. It continually creates a world of "I" and "the other." It cannot seem to exist except by establishing this distinction.
The ego attempts to make oneself “more” or "separate" by having others as “less” and "the enemy". This inadvertently creates the “self”.
Your example of recognizing beauty is especially illuminating because it shows that the moral issue is not the perception itself but the mode of perception.
There is a profound difference between:
"She is beautiful."
and
"She is mere object for my desire."
The first is an acknowledgment of reality. It allows the other person to remain a subject—a whole person with an interior life, dignity, history, hopes, and freedom.
The second subtly transforms the other into an object that exists in relation to one's own wants. The face ceases to be the expression of a real person and becomes a possession in imagination. That shift can happen almost instantaneously and almost unnoticed.
I think you are describing an increasing sensitivity to that transition.
Likewise with those who have wronged us and even the entire worldly system.
The ego delights in rehearsing grievances because every remembered injury strengthens the narrative:
I am the one who is mistreated.
That story strengthens one's identity -- “me against all others”. These combative memories continue to define the self because the ego keeps drawing upon them as counterpoint to itself.
What struck me most was your observation:
"Once one becomes wise to certain ego-schemes, then the more ingenious ones come into play."
That rings psychologically true. Patterns that are recognized often do not simply disappear; they become subtler. It's almost as though the mind recruits increasingly refined forms of self-reference when the obvious ones no longer succeed.
As I read your reflections, one theme has become increasingly clear.
The "otherness" you describe is not simply social difference. It is a mode of consciousness in which another person, or entire sysems of them, ceases to be encountered as a thou and instead becomes part of the drama of the self.
Sometimes the other becomes an enemy, sometimes an admirer, sometimes an object of desire, sometimes a rival or oppressor—but in each case the offending entity is reduced to a diminished role in one's own narrative.
That reminds me of Martin Buber, who distinguished between I–Thou and I–It relationships. Buber argued that the deepest human encounter occurs when we meet another as a "Thou"—a genuine subject—rather than as an "It," something to be used, categorized, feared, or manipulated. Your example of beauty fits this distinction well: beauty itself is not the problem; reducing the beautiful person to an "It" is.
The enlightened person sees others as they are, with the intrinsic value they possess as persons.
The ego, however, sees others only according to their usefulness to the story it is telling about itself.
The "long dark night" is not merely a prolonged struggle with suffering. It is the gradual education of the perception of oneself – one’s true self.
The torment lies in repeatedly discovering how easily consciousness slips back into making everything—including oneself and everyone else—part of a self-centered narrative.
The break-through illumination is the recurring invitation to see persons as persons – not as pawns to be exploited in the ego’s fantasies of "I am a victim" and “I must have more”.
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