by John Stephenson of AlohaMystics.com
This idea has been mentioned more often recently because of the world situation. Is humanity, collectively, experiencing a Dark Night of the Soul? And, what does that mean spiritually?
St. John of the Cross came up with that term. Traditionally it refers to the struggle of the self to realize its spiritual nature. The Dark Night refers to a blockage in our journey into spiritual unity. Metaphysically it is the acceptance of power in material cause and effect, and the inclination to fight or resist. Your dark night is coming to grips with the simple truth that without the conscious realization of the presence of God, there is no God in this world. Looking at the world now, it is apparent that what was once considered normal is no longer normal. How do we, on the spiritual path deal with the appearances of pandemic, global climate changes, political polarization and the social restrictions imposed upon us in most every country on the planet?
For me, it is always back to the basic reality of Oneness. One power; One creation; One self. All mystical revelation unfolds from the realization of Oneness.
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Disregard the appearances and contemplate the nature of the One. That is a command we ought to give ourselves daily. What does the experience of the One do? One has no opposite. One is the substance and source of all life. It is the Peace that passes understanding. It opens our eyes to the nature of spiritual reality.
Oneness is the stillness that brings us into the now moment where the past is dead, and the future is a meaningless mental projection. In an instant we experience eternality. In an instant we are immortal, incorporeal and as the old metaphysical statement says, “Absent from the body and present with the Lord.”
When we are aware of our spiritual self, we see beyond the current world events into the harmony of the world as it truly is. We see the joy and enterprise of people giving and sharing their knowledge and their labor in love. There is no fear. We see the impotence of evil as a product of material belief having no existence in God. We experience the spiritual nature of life manifested in infinite and unique ways, revealing a new earth, One in substance, inseparable from its Source, and existent in eternal now.
The realization of Oneness is the way through the Dark Night.
When we have experienced the mystical self we have the means to deal with the appearance world from a place of understanding and compassion. Judgement and fear is what attaches us to the mental picture, and withdrawing judgement removes the fear. The greatest fear to mortal man is death. St. Paul instructed us to die daily. Would not that act remove all fear of any material situation, whether it is a disease, tyranny, war, or even the collapse of the life-sustaining atmosphere of the planet? And Paul also gave us the way to do that. He knew that the material sense of self, conditioned by the belief in two powers, could not grasp the reality of oneness. Christ Consciousness is an individual aware of his or her spiritual self – the Self not corrupted by material appearances. To live by Christ – “I live; yet not I, Christ lives within me...” you must die to the belief that life is material. It is not; it is spiritual.
We have great metaphysical tools for dissolving the appearances of duality. Impersonalization is the most effective tool to bring us into a state where we can look at the horrors of the world without reaction and fear. Do not attach a limited concept to any person by seeing them as their gender, race, class or age. By doing so we limit a person to a false idea of who they are. See through the concept to their spiritual reality! That is liberating. When we love our neighbor as our self, we free them – and us – from judgement. This seems to go against our human conditioning and common sense, but it works.
Recognizing the Christ in everyone who comes into your awareness is the essence of impersonalization. Recognizing the Christ, rather than seeing a human being, nullifies the material limitations projected by that person, and lifts you – and them – into the consciousness of One. We practice this daily. It has been part of the Infinite Way teaching since the beginning. In classes, Joel would always assign people to recognize the spiritual nature of all who entered. That way the class was conducted on the highest spiritual level. This has continued in classes today. Now, the world is our classroom, and we give the same recognition to humanity – to every person, around the globe, whether they come to us in person or by social media. This has the potential to lift people out of their personal Dark Night, but more importantly, it keeps the person practicing it in the kingdom of Oneness.
The companion discipline to impersonalization is detachment. We cannot mentally assign any human quality to another and expect to be free ourselves. When you contemplate “there is no person in whom, on whom or through whom the carnal mind can operate” you are not only impersonalizing the appearance, whether it is a disease, a storm, a riot or deceitful behavior, you are removing those concepts from your mind. When you remove a material characteristic from a person, place, thing or condition, you have mentally corrected an appearance generated by the belief in duality. Now you are free to enter the Christ Consciousness unencumbered by material belief.
All of this takes practice. We have all been educated in material cause and effect; viruses cause illness, warm oceans feed hurricanes, chaos and conflict kills prosperity. We must leave what we know about this world outside the door to our inner consciousness before we can experience oneness. The spiritual dimension has nothing to do with the reasoning of material sense. Like Isaiah, we must reason from a different dimension, and look upon the world through an enlightened perspective. By doing this we might witness the birth of a new norm; a new society where love is reflected in love because humanity realizes the oneness of all Life.
* This article was originally published here
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