Dark Night of theSoul Episode #3

This podcast episode discusses the importance of studying ancient mystics who have found a true union with God. It emphasizes the need to seek God earnestly and the journey towards a union of wills with God. The concept of detachment is introduced as a pivotal component of the Dark Night of the Soul. Detachment involves separating from the false self, which is a creation of our own ego, and finding our true identity in God. The episode highlights the challenges and vulnerability involved in detaching from illusions and embracing our true selves. It also emphasizes the spiritual life as a balance between body, mind, and spirit, where God's will becomes our own. Ultimately, the episode explores the idea that finding God leads to finding oneself, and this process is both beautiful and dark. Hello, and welcome again to the Dark Night of the Soul podcast. This is the third episode of this particular podcast. And if you have not gone back, episode one has actually two parts. So this is really the fourth actual podcast we've put together, and I'm kind of excited about it. As always, your comments and your questions are certainly welcome. And there'll be an email at the end of this episode for you to do just that. One of the questions that's come up was, why these ancient mystics? Why these men, you know, 1,200, 1,300 women, 1,500? Why spend so much time looking at them? Simply put, these men and women found what you're looking for. You wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be listening to this, and you wouldn't be going through the Dark Night of the Soul if you weren't doing what they did, which was seek God. I'm not talking about seeking God like you may hear somebody say, oh, you know, I saw this brand new Corvette, and I'm just, you know, seeking the Lord's will on this. No, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a place where my will is exactly what God's will is, or God's will is exactly like my will. You know, Jesus said that many of you say, oh, Lord, Lord, but don't do what I tell you to do. And more importantly, just because you say, Lord, Lord, you're not going to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. What we're looking for is a true union of will. My will being exactly what God's will is, God's will being exactly what my will is. Seeking this kind of relationship, and this is a journey that would be nice to have a few people that have been down that road and can explain it. I'm certain of this, if you're seeking God earnestly, you are going to find Him. And when you do, the languages of these people, and again, we're not talking about the only people 1,500 years ago, but there's men like Father O'Rourke, there's men like James Finley, there's men like Dallas Willard, Dallas Willard passed not so long ago, but there's a lot of people out there that are speaking that language, and it will reverberate with you. God uses them. And some of them, I've had some pastors and preachers that have given a class or spoken to, and I've listened to them, and it just reverberates through me. I can sense it. I go and talk to them, and they're like, I don't even know what I was saying. That's when you know you're onto something. That's when you know, ooh, man, the Holy Spirit was working through that, and that union came into that. It's no different than looking out at a sunset, and you sense and you know God's there. You have union with Him right there in the midst of something. He's displayed out for you. He laid this out for you that morning, and it's so beautiful. And you're not taking the creation as the beauty, you're taking the present and the value of what God is in that beauty, what God is in His creation. God didn't just create you, He's in you, and He's in you wanting to be in your spirit, with your spirit, union with you, and He's got a lot of work to do inside of us, and there's a lot of hindrances. Without further ado, let's get into Detachment, which is the first night of the Dark Night of the Soul, and probably the pivotal piece in the first night. When Eckhart speaks about detachment, he's describing a transformative process that the origins of are very mysterious and intimate. He describes us living a life of the powers of the soul. That is, we're living a life in that human experience. We're living a life through our thoughts, our memories, our intentions, our feelings. These tend to form a horizon in this human experience, and this life in the powers of the soul is a life illumined by faith. So all things then are somewhat translucent to the divine, but still the ego remains the foundation. This is our understanding of God, our beliefs or our thoughts about God, and our feelings or even lack of feelings about God, all wrapped up in our ego. Seeing the ego now is clearly the center of this. Let's take a closer look at it, and let's dig in. The real nexus, if you want, or the center point of our detachment comes to the fact that we have to separate from our ego, and I'm going to give ego two pieces in this. The first is a false self. There's a false self that we have, that we've propped up, we've put ourselves out there. This is the man that we want ourselves to be, we want people to see, but this man, he can't exist, because God doesn't even know anything about him. So he's not a creation of God, he's a creation of ours. And this false self is the person that we push out in front for everybody to see and say, okay, I got it together, see how I am. Merton, in his New Seeds of Contemplation, 1961, says this about the false self. All sin starts from the assumptions that my false self is the fundamental reality of life, to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus, I use up my life in desire for pleasure and the thirst for experiences, for power, for honor, knowledge, and love to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. Though C.S. Lewis and Merton, I think, never met, they were in pretty close about the same time frame for each other, they spoke about the false self almost in unity. C.S. Lewis, in his Mere Christianity, the moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first, wanting to be the center, wanting to be God. In fact, what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could be like God, could set up on their own as if they had created themselves, be their own masters, invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside of God and apart from God. I think Merton brings this all home, again, in New Seeds of Contemplation, when he says clearly an expression of the more developed thought said, every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person, a false self. Now this illusory person is, without a doubt, the obstacle of us to God. This is the block that we have in front of us that we have to detach ourselves from. And this illusory person, this false self, is attached to our emotions, our expressions, everything about us we have, we feel, we touch, that all goes back to this illusory person because that's the person we're going to project, that's the person we're going to decorate. Everything has to go back to that person, this ego, this false self. And so as we look at that, that's one aspect of our ego. There's another too, and again, they're mixed in together, so it's really not fair to say they're separate, but it is all ego. And this is what we have, you know, our ground of experience and our humanity is all wrapped into. And until we lose this, we can't find who we really are. And we're not going to find who we really are until we find ourselves in God. As Merton again makes clear, we have the choice of two identities, the external mask, which seems to be real, and the hidden inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. Making this choice seems like a no-brainer, but it's not, and we've been so comforted by this person, and we love the fact that people see this person. Seeing our vulnerability, seeing us as we are, a good friend of mine used to say, being raw. Well, you can't get much more raw than stripping yourself of all those illusions that you put out there. And, you know, to just make sure people feel good about you, all of a sudden they're gone, and they see you as who you are. And when they see you as who you are, they're not as appalled by it as you are. But nonetheless, this is the person that we are wrestling with to open up ourselves and to detach. The spiritual life is concrete to that. We can't bring a false self into that. Merton, once again, again, the great book, The New Seeds of Contemplation, but this is Merton again on the spiritual life. The spiritual life is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body, with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit, with its passive illumination by the light of God, from one complete man who is in God and with God and from God and for God, one man in whom God is all in all, one man in whom God carries out his own will without obstacle. Now that's it. We're trying to do God's will. We want God's will over our own will. Our own will is buried and wrapped in our false self. Our own will is wrapped in our emotions and our experiences and our fears. We have to get rid of that. That is all has to be detached so that we can actually, without obstacle, be one with God's will. Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could find that true self, the real self of who we are? Too much life has gone by, maybe. I don't know. There's a lot of reasons I think we could throw at this, but the fact is we can't. We will never see the real self, the self of us. We'll never find that real self until we go deep in within ourself and we find God. And when we find Him, we find ourself. And that's the beauty of this whole thing. When we take ourselves, and this is the trip he's trying to make us go on, when we take ourselves out of that picture of our false self and say, Lord, turning it over to you, and he brings you through this dark night. He puts you in that place where you're detached from these things and begins to start illuminating and showing you the existence of the spiritual world, the spiritual presence of who you are and who he is. And so finding him and finding you simultaneously, this is a beautiful thing. And that's what's taking place in the dark night of the soul. There's only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depends, to discover myself in discovering God. If I find him, I will find myself. And if I find myself, I will find him. And that's again, Thomas Merton. It's a beautiful thing, but it's dark. And you know, the mystics all colored this out to be a dark night of the soul because it is. It's never going to be pretty to look at ourselves in reality. And the reality of ourselves in this world is that we're false, that we have this false front. And tearing that down is not an easy task. But as I experienced, the Lord told me that he was going to take me on a journey. I had to ask for it. I wanted to be ready for it. Are you ready to go on this journey? And when I said yes, he took me deep into my own heart to show me me, to show me not necessarily just the real me, because I was really still fairly obscured, but the false me that had wrapped my heart, all kinds of roots of all kinds of emotions and I guess traits, whatever you want to call them, but there was these roots that were very visible to me that were so disgusting. They were so dark. And I thought, Lord, how could you love that guy with that stuff in his heart? How could you even want to spend any time with him? And more than that, how could anybody else want to spend any time with him? And so that was the beginning of when he started to take these things apart for me. That's the good news that I'm going to give you about your ego and your self is that God's here to make sure that you can take care of that by him taking care of a lot of it for you. Beyond the false self, there's a self we must give up that's a self that stands outside of this intimate interiority of this vulnerability that I spoke of. That's the I. It's the I trying to live on its own terms. It's the I. I know in my own thoughts about myself who I think I am, who I think you are, who I think the earth is, who I think God is. This is the I that lives in my own abilities, that tries to maintain certain conditions that are conducive to the things that I seek and getting angry and upset and enraged when I realize I can't do it. I become manipulative and controlling in my efforts to do it to the best that I can. This self that is its own center of gravity apart from the grace and the vulnerability of the flow of life itself, this is the self we must give up. This is extremely hard to give up. This is hard for several reasons. One reason is it's hard for us to give up the control that we think we have in this life that we think we are living. There's a certain vulnerability required as a sort of rite of passage here. This is a vulnerability that we need to have to let go of the sort of claustrophobic sense of self that hinders us from finding what we seek. It's also hard because we are deeply attached to these things that hinder us. We've grown accustomed to them even though we know we're not happy with them. The things we know that compromise our heart we find very difficult to let go of. Eckhart is really inviting us into a sort of intimate honesty with ourselves. To be ruthlessly honest and endlessly compassionate towards the habits of the mind and the heart that hinder us from stepping bravely forward into this vulnerability. This vulnerability towards this boundarylessness that is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Another aspect with Eckhart that we can pick up on regarding detachment is that he's inviting us into a way of life in which we don't let the circumstances of life determine the fundamental state of our mind and our heart. Emotions are not eliminated. When happy things happen, we truly are happy. But we realize that the happiness evoked by happy circumstances is infinitely less than what consummates the restless longing of my mind and heart. And I can let go of the illusion that the happiness that happy circumstances provide is enough for me because they are ephemeral. They are passing contagions. Doesn't mean that I'm not happy, it's just that I can see shining through the happiness, the echoes and reverberations of the boundlessness that's echoing in the details of that happiness. Likewise, if I'm in the hospice or I'm in a very sad or bereft situation, it's not that I'm not sad or bereft. It's just that I'm not letting the suffering have tyranny over me. That I know that the suffering that I'm going through does not have that authority to take from me, from my deepest self, what I know is real, which is something deathless and vast, which permeates and grants itself to me in the mystery of my death. If God is Lord of life, then God is Lord of death. And God is in the infinity of death, which is why death is trustworthy and eternal. And there is a kind of childlike wisdom here. The peace that surpasses all understanding. Then how do we come to this freedom from sorrow in the midst of sorrow? Freedom from circumstances of happiness in the midst of happiness. We come to an underlying receptive openness detachment. In Buddhism, they refer to this as equanimity. Totally familiar to Thomas Merton, Eckhart and Merton both exhibit this beyond a state that you can describe. And when an individual comes to this place, it is evident, indeed, this is the peace that surpasses all understanding. With him, well, sin handcuffs that possibility. The Father wants to abide with me. Well, thank you, Father, for your word and for your servant, John, who recalls what Jesus said about this relationship. It is written in John chapter 15. It is all about God abiding with and in me, and me abiding with and in him. Through Jesus, who I abide in, that I might abide in the Father. Abide, abide, abide, live, live, live. Oh, how I so chased after this abiding principle. Please, this is, as it turns out, is not theological. It's not exploration. In fact, no grand exegesis is even necessary for this is as plain as day. God desires that I live in him and he in me. Jesus, the same and the Holy Spirit all in one. Oh, okay, easy peasy. We die, go to heaven, and live with him there, right? Well, sort of, but a greater understanding comes through our understanding of abide. We are here physically, and physically or fleshly, we cannot abide with God. We are not slaves to sin, but we can sin. So what now? What can I do to live as the Father designed me, as he desires me? How do I follow his will now? The answer is in who we are. We are only flesh for a wisp of time, but we are spirit forever. We are spirit as God is spirit. This we must better appreciate, the spiritual existence we have. No matter how dependent we are on the physical senses we have, a far deeper, more profound existence spiritually and the spiritual realm is intensely greater. Understanding our spiritual being as God created us. Now please get this. Though our bodies die to sin and death, we live, but not later, now. We exist now and because of Jesus' sacrifice and our acceptance, we can live once again with the Father, abiding with him forever, right now. How glorious the day when no more we are hindered to the knowledge and the awareness of not what we are or who we are. But again, I say we need not wait to abide. God our Father fiercely desires that relationship now. He paid everything to get us back. But to abide with the Father is our true self, not a propped up false self. The Father cannot, will not abide with that sinful Michael. In fact, should the Father come into me with sin being present, I truly believe I'd explode in raging fire, in seconds consumed. God destroys sin, or should I say sin destroys itself by being sin in a combustible substance and being in the presence of God. We by grace are not, but the sin within us, the sin that remains, is and is destroyed in his presence. The dark night of the soul is part of the awareness of this beginning, where through a process God helps us destroy the false self. And from there, we begin to see the Father. We begin to draw closer and he draws closer to us. Because of all this, we now, in glimpses and moments, can experience the spiritual side of our own existence and of God. As Meister Eckhart put it, although I am not God, I am not other than God, either. Although I am not any of you, I am not other than any of you, either. This is all a lot of an abiding existence and a study in the word and understanding of God's love. As Paul put it to the Ephesians, through experience we begin to know this abiding, even as we only see it in glimpses at first. This growing mystical experience has been described by several. For Merton, it is mountains. For Teresa, it is a mansion. For Eckhart, it is the ground. In all cases, it starts by a spiritual awakening and a better understanding of our existence, who we really are, in Christ and through Christ, who we are in the Father. The dark night of the soul is an open door to our abiding, or as John of the Cross so well describes, our love affair with the Father and his love affair for us. It is but an open door to our abiding. Hannah Hanard does a fantastic job of demonstrating the transformation and the love of the Shepherd in her book called Hinds Feet on High Places, a story about a young girl called Little Much Afraid and her struggle with her self-image and of course the battle of the world as it treats us. What a fantastic story depicting the spiritual journey of not only finding the Shepherd but finding herself. So yes, the reality of the dark night of the soul is that it begins the journey from where we are and who we are, really, to return just as the prodigal son returned. The mystics such as Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, Therese of Avila, Thomas Merton, and others have given us much to examine, but yet the mere word mystic or spiritualism still brings that stigmatism and even still persecution. The 20th century was no different, neither was the 13th or 15th century. All these people received some sort of persecution. The Catholic Church not only persecuted, some excommunicated, and at the very least, much of their teachings were just discounted. There's a lot to be said for the persecution that was done and a lot to be said for the fear that seems to bring about the words mysticism or spiritualism, yet we can look no further than the scripture in 1 Corinthians 6.17, but the person who is united with the Lord becomes one spirit with him. It's pretty clear to me that we're talking about an existence that we must spend our time understanding better and exploring and finding where God is, because that's where we're going to find our union and find ourselves. So that's not really something that we can ignore. I'm wondering what we'll do as we go beyond the dark night of the soul, we'll look at the actual abiding, the actual existence, and so much is written about the relationship in the spirit of God and his wonderful creation. Again, Meister Eckhart, a great quote, We shall therefore speak of this birth, how it will take place in us, and be consummated in the virtues of the soul. Whenever God the Father speaks his eternal word in the perfect soul, for what I say here is to be understood is for the good and perfected man who has walked and is still walking in the ways of God, not the natural and undisciplined man, for he is entirely remote and totally ignorant of this birth. There is a saying to the wise man, when all things lay in the midst of silence, then there descended down to me from the royal throne a secret word. The sermon is about that word. The way these men and women speak and the way they write is a language into itself. We have to accept the fact that they're describing an experience, something that doesn't have frame of reference. It's an experience that no one else has had, or at least appears to them because it's unique to them. It's something that's happened to them. It's something these men and women have encountered that doesn't have words. It's not physical in nature, it's spiritual. And so in that stead, one of the mystics coined a phrase, saying the unsayable, saying something about something that words are inadequate to express. Now in that same vein, another word shows up, and this one from James Finley, I heard it first, but I don't think he actually coined the phrase, but he talks about experiential to mean that this is describing an experience, which means it's not going to be completely adequate because the experience is unique. And so experiential shows up in his writings and in some of his works, his audio works. And so these two words are used quite a bit, and I've adopted them to do exactly the same thing. I mean, besides a different language or a created language to describe this, a lot of metaphors are used. I mentioned earlier about Teresa of Avila, who used mansion. She was describing a mansion, a building, obviously a structure that had different rooms, different levels. And what happens in these levels is you encounter new experiences and new places, new things that are happening in your spirit and in your soul. And these things, as you encounter God in a different way, and you encounter yourself in a different way, you move through the mansion. And as I said, the darkness of the soul is the courtyard, you're not even in the building. And so it's just the beginning of it. But again, it kind of puts that metaphoric path for you, so that you can understand kind of where you're traveling as you go. Merton used mountains, and that's that, you know, you're kind of moving up along that path from one mountain to the next highest mountain to the next highest mountain. When you look at John of the Cross, this is where we get the dark night of the soul. So, you know, in each one of these writers, in each one of these mystics, you see them coming across with metaphors to describe much of what they experienced and what we're experiencing. And so that's one way for us to frame it up. But I can promise you that for every one of us, there's going to be a different version as you go through it. For me, I've got some words that we'll bring along to this as we go, but to be sure, it's a struggle. It's like saying the unsayable. The beauty part about it is once you experience it, it doesn't matter how you say it, it's just you'd love to be able to describe it, you'd love to be able to tell somebody, show somebody. But the reality is, it's an experience that you will live with and it will change you and radically so. It's fair to say that to do His will or to be in His will the way, that's kind of the way it started. I wanted to do the will of God. I wanted to do what He wanted me to do. It's so much bigger than that. It's no longer what God wants me to do, because I'm going to do what He wants me to do. Not because He's told me and I now understand it and now I'm willing to do it. It's that I wouldn't, there's nothing I wouldn't do for Him, but because, not because He's told me, but because I have a relationship with Him in a manner that says that I can experience Him in the Godhead. I can sense Him in the ground. My ground is His ground and His ground is my ground. They're the same. It's not a matter of, oh, okay, no, no, that's not my will, it's His will. No, it's both. What I do, I do for Him. And again, is this a perfect thing for me? Is there times when I'm in line and times when I'm out of line? Yeah, absolutely, but they're not in the sense of a correction as much as they are in a path. I'm walking a path. I'm moving through a world that it's hard to explain for me what that is, but it's more that what happens here means so much less than what happens in my soul. What happens deep inside me where I abide with Him and where He abides with me, and it's not what He wants me to do. I become what He wants, no matter what. And so therefore, manipulation or pliability, I don't really come into picture here, I am Him. I do what He compels without effort. If you recall what Paul said, we become one spirit. Those who are united with Christ become one spirit. As one spirit, we have one will. God's will becomes my will, and my will becomes God's will. So this intimate taste of what is happening, the parameters of which anything I know, and now having tasted it, I want so much more. Eckhart says it, it's here where we begin the intimacy of this detachment. We really want that separation of those things that are of the world, those feelings, those emotions, that ego. But without a doubt, that ego is our number one target for us as we now recognize it and we see it for what it is. While still very attached to this ego and very much still involved in our physical life as it's been, we seem to be coming to these places where all of a sudden a vast bounderlessness appears. We're standing on the edge of almost an abyss. And what's happening here is a mix of this beginning, this clarity begins to come out for us. But it happens because these glimpses that God gives us, in an answer almost to our lack of enthusiasm towards the chase of pleasure and profit and the physical nature of our life and that ego. And so these things that the ego has been driven by don't seem to have that pizzazz. And we start to look for a deeper relationship in finding God. And so these points of clarity happen, but yet still very much still tied up and undetached, if you will. James Finley describes these as almost like a sweet invasion, as these moments that we're talking about are just all of a sudden they come upon you in the midst of something that you're just traveling through, or as you're just walking here or talking there, and all of a sudden there's that moment. And it's this ego that we're looking to separate from. This is where that disconnect, or in Finley's words, this discontent, we're struggling against that ego as we encounter these momentary glimpses. The whole point of this detachment is that we become open to God. The things that are hindering us, the ego, the sensitivities, the intellect that we have, the combination of that, our false self, these things hold us back from seeing God as God, and more importantly, to receive God as God. We receive Him in generosity, and generosity is what we give out. A word that he used, a Golosanite, which is the giving the generosity of God away. The Golosanite is something that Eckhart uses quite a bit to explain this infinite generosity that God gives out to us, that we give back, and in that reciprocity of it, this becomes God. It becomes larger than that. That's a lot. I know it is. You may have to replay that over and over, you just may have to write it down. It's an experience that's happening to you as you start to awaken, as you start to detach from the naturals of your life to this spiritual experience. You'll feel it, it'll reverberate, it'll be a sense to it, and these explanations will come out of that, and maybe make more sense. The best way I can explain it is to go find that thing, that something that you do, find that act, find that relationship, find that form of service, and again, in service, it's almost always when you give yourself over to it with your whole heart, it unravels your petty preoccupations with your self-absorbed self. This is that detachment, you're removing that ego, you're going away from that ego, and you do that when you find that act, that in doing it, you swallow up all of that, and you find the generosity that you're giving is that generosity that God gave you. That's how it happens, it's not going to happen because you sit there and think about it. You're going to act on it, even if you can't feel it, because you can't sense that, you can't know that, that's part of your awakening in the Spirit. Now when I read Meister Eckhart, and I do so not for an informative purpose, I'm not trying to get information out of it, but rather for guidance, it seems. The more I study it, the more I find I have not yet even tasted even half of what he's relaying here. What we are really looking at is some bounderless blessing that flows so unexplainably out of the immediacy of the life deeply lived. We need to look at our most unassuming hour to see the reverberations of what Eckhart is inviting us to sit with and to live in fidelity to. All that we have is what we've been given. We've been given it to give it. What Eckhart is saying is that what we've been given is God, and we've been given God to give God in the generosity of a fully lived life. This is what he explains as the Galazanite, which is that generosity. It is infinite. It's infinite because it flows back and forth in this reciprocity between us and God, which is God. From today's talk, you can probably gather that this is a fairly larger process than just a dark night. Certainly, it's larger than just detachment, but detachment is a pivotal point, and I think we've pretty well covered that. It's a place where we're going to open up the aperture of God for us, and so we can see him as he is, and so we can recognize ourselves in him. This is a place I'd like to stop at this point, even though I honestly would go on, and I'm hoping that it wasn't too long for you, and looking forward to the next opportunity when I think we'll start into a little bit more about breaking into the Godhead, the ground, and start talking about what Eckhart had for that as a description, and maybe some of the other mystics in that. I hope you enjoyed this talk today, and it's a little longer than the first couple, but this is a pretty heavy concept for sure. Hoping to get out the next podcast over the next 10 days or so, and we'll start covering a little bit more of the path after detachment, or after that first dark night, and a little bit more of explanation of that United in Spirit, and again, I appreciate all the questions and comments. For most of you who don't have an email, I'll give you an email address you can send your comments or your questions to. It'll be Fogisfire, F-O-G-I-S-F-I-R-E, at iCloud.com. Looking forward to anything you've got for me, and that you'd like to hear more about, and of course, any questions, I also have some documents that I can show you that'll give you some reference material. Hopefully you've been blessed by this, and I'm certainly blessed by the fact that you listened.