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: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)