“But what does a ‘hard eye’ look like?” I’d ask. “Watch out for it,” trainers and behaviorists with more experience than I had at the time had told me. And then I realized that Nell’s eyes had gone “hard,” a look that people had been telling me about, but I had never seen. I didn’t even know why at the time, it seemed to happen automatically, and too fast to consciously evaluate. As I got closer, she turned her head toward me, and… I froze. Her face was buried in the tall grass by the driveway and I could hear her snuffling at something under her nose. However, one day she didn’t respond when I called her. A sweetheart of a dog, she melted when petted and came when I called, eyes shining, radiating joy and exuberance. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.Little Nell, a fox-faced Border Collie, came to visit the farm over twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting started as a behaviorist. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. 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. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything. Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. 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. You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness. In the dark night of the soul it collapses. 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”. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”. 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. 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”. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self. 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. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind. Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain. But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. 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. 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. The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. 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. Can you address this subject?ĮCKHART: The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time. QUESTION: Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul? Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period.
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