Dark Night of the Ego

The dark night of the soul, and all of its underpinnings, is a common topic for those on the “twin flame journey”, as well as those engaged in new age practices. The phrase, “dark night of the soul” is derived from the book Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, an account of his own experience with the divine energy, and the surrender of all his attachments in the light of it. But it is an illusion that this dark night is of the soul at all. On the contrary, the dark night is the death and dying of the ego, which has enjoyed for far too long and in such an extreme manner, the self-appointed title of soul and self. The soul, by nature, is never suffering, as it is already in unity as Self with God, as One Unity. It is the consciousness, deluded by ego, that is the source of the suffering. And the darkness, well, the darkness to ego is actually the light of the soul itself, the nondual light that cancels both false light and false darkness.

The ego has never been able to fully function as the soul does, even though our entire society is determined to make it so, through technology primarily, genetics, and various other scientific means that would allow human beings to reprogram their bodies in accordance with the egoic intentions. Most people live inside their minds, and even when they think they are experiencing life, they are spending most of the time judging, critiquing, analyzing, and deconstructing, as if this world in their head had any reality whatsoever. It has gotten so out of balance and severe that most people, if placed in a room alone with no distractions, books, phones, etc., become extremely uncomfortable and would do anything to leave. Most would end up simply talking to themselves, perhaps to strategize how to get out or how to make the best of it. People just cannot sit still. They believe there is nothing in it. That is because they believe that, without the project world of their mind and the active engagement of their physical body, the soul is nothing, and Self is nothing. This is the true source of their despair, the existential fear of existence, the void, the infinite space.

People wonder why there are so many problems in the world. Simple things like starvation, affordable housing, health care. With our big minds, you’d think we’d figure it out. But we don’t have time. We are too busy in the thrall of the egoic collective, creating systems, self-congratulations, money and profit collecting. You see, there is not even such a thing as one single ego in an individual. That idea is also an illusion. The truth is that each person is witness to and is absorbed in the collective consciousness, or rather, the egoic consciousness. Twitter is closer to reality here than we think. Imagine your Mind, a pool of twittering and tweeting, incessant arguing, boasting, self-projection and promotion, 24-7 all day long. That is the collective ego. Many are vampiric, monstrous, or even angelic. They take many forms, depending on who they are projecting out to. Some of us can even see them, because many of them do not even inhabit bodies, but travel from one body to another, lost when their body died long ago, haunting and possessing those who can experience them, usually in sleep, where most people are anyway.

We have had years of conditioning in order to train the mind to obey the egoic programming and animation, to the point where many people can no longer even detect the illusion that they are living in, the maya, the matrix that creates so much suffering, simply because of the uncomfortable, extremely unnatural way of the egoic entities. The egoic mental and imaginary projections, through the Mind, are also expressed through programming, repetition, and mantra. The programming of ego includes the belief that ego is the unquestionable foundation and source of all things, and so should not be questioned. The ego, in this modern world, has proclaimed itself god, and that is the dirty secret that many hold within them. But like Christians blame the devil for all evils, and credit all goods to their God, ego never blames suffering on ego. It either blames it on another ego or egoic entity, or it blames Self and God. Many people have witnessed a homeless person arguing with another invisible person on the street. Most people cringe and look away; some feel pity, others disgust. But that man is just a projection of the ego that most people are, yelling at others in their head, having heated conversations and arguments with some voice in their mind, fearful that they may lose something, love, wealth, or something else that they need. Angry at this or that situation; shameless in its assertion of its own reality. The only difference between the man in the street and the ego in the head, is that the ego is obeying the social restrictions of the egoic community by keeping this reality behind closed doors.

There is a tacit law in the egoic community, and that is that you must not reveal the secrets of the egoic community.

This is why the issue of diversity has arisen at this time. The egos are at each other’s throats, on political and cultural levels. You don’t have spend too much time on the internet to discover the venom that is spewed from left to right and back again at all different levels of society. The inner war always, through ego, shows itself on the public stage, just like the madman on the street corner. If you look at social media as a whole, from a neutral point of view, you would only observe absurd chaos, incoherent ramblings and arguments from beings who are talking about nothing at all. Look at the world from a neutral point of view, allows you to become the witness of the ego, instead of the participant. In that position, you can start to see the maya that has deceived your consciousness.

When you see this illusion, you realize that you can’t see the illusion of “others”. This is impossible, and only appears to be possible in the egoic community. There are many people who claim to be healers of others, either psychologically or spiritually. This is an illusion. If they help at all, it is only by the presence of truth that they hold. The more academic and technical the healer is, the less they help, and the more they will resort to brute force such as medications. Many therapies are simply attempts to prolong the life of the current egoic occupant of the body, and that is all they do. This of course does feel good to the ego. What doesn’t feel good to the ego? When the inner witness sees what it is, and, as the light shines upon it, all the parts of that ego, the tiny little roaches that that they are, scatter back into the earth.

Each individual is a multi-layered energetic expression of Self or Source or God. Each consciousness however doesn’t begin in this knowledge but is born into a body with complete forgetfulness of it. As it proceeds through its lives, it creates layers and layers of what in the Yoga Sutras, are called vrittis, which are basically different wave forms of thought, different types of illusions. It is difficult to point to what these are, as the ego, by nature, doesn’t see them. The ego believes it is excactly some of these forms, or one of them, and it imagines it is a body with a personality and attributes attached. If you look at a computer screen, like this one, you see letters and words and sentences. You are reading them. But these symbols are not what you think at all – they are tiny pixels that are displayed through a sequence of electrical charges, expressed in bits and bytes. Ego is: simply an entity created out of thought waves, an entity could be of any shape or form it wants to be, just like the graphical image on the computer. When something is working for the ego, it tries to find something on the screen to fix it. This is always a temporary fix, if it works at all. It certainly is a primitive approach. Everything the ego does is primitive in nature, brute force, and always creates more problems that it is trying to solve. This is why “adulting” has become so derogatory and undesirable. Ego creates unbelievable messes: red-tape, bureaucracy, a world of chaos, war, and unnecessary starvation and lack. It’s solution is always more effort by ego: more money, more technology, more control.

And as this goes on, the young individual ego conjures all this energy in as a member of the collective ego, wanting to be a part of it, to not be left out of what is affectionately known as “society”. The consciousness, in this primeval soup ruled by ego, perceives its wants and fears swimming about, available and close, impossible and far. It creates monsters and corresponding heroes that it learns to love, whether that be politicians, entertainers, “stars”, or itself. Egos then experience relationships that project these inner desires, ideas and circumstances that are designed to appear as medicine or spells or salves to relieve their deep inner fears. In today’s work, this can all happen in the comfort of home and Mind, inside TikTok videos and YouTube, where the ego finds connection, entertainment, and mental massaging from those sources that give it more food and fuel.

As the ego gets more and more immersed in the delusion, the consciousness experiences a great deal of anxiety and instability from even the body itself. The inner soul is screaming for freedom. But this triggering is interpreted by the ego as needing more mental stimulation. Perhaps something more “hard-core”. This is where deep addiction begins and where the Self seems to be utterly disconnected from the ego, inside the Mind. But the more ego chases these solutions, the more instable it gets. It’s like trying to climb a mountain without keeping your feet on the ground. At some point, the consciousness realizes nothing is going to satisfy it. The things that it worships and loves aren’t working. This realization can be devastating to a weakened heart and tired soul, all its energy depleted by the egoic engine. This is very dangerous territory, unless by grace, a light of awareness is allowed through, as the egoic delusion crumbles. And this grace often will come, at the very point when the individual, in all of his exasperation, pain and darkness, cries out to the Self, the true divine, and let’s all of the illusion go in order to live a true and beautiful life. At that point, the realization and awareness will come of the deep serenity and joy of the void, the very place the ego feared to go. Being by oneself, quiet, with no more egoic voices, conversations, and arguments to distract one. This is the state of bliss and state of freedom of those who truly practice yoga.

But until the ego can break through this delusion and the lies, it cannot experience love or yoga (union) without also experiencing attachment, jealousy, fear of loss, and fear of abandonment. Love, a state of calm serenity and peace, and deep trust that is only of the divine, and cannot be present for ego, because to ego love is always something it needs to earn or get or create. And once it gets it, it has to work hard to keep it, to possess it, to own and control it. It needs the ego community to reflect back its identity (fame) in order to feel real. It needs the constant adulation and support of others, anyone but God and Self, in order to feel safe. The ego must, at all costs, “make love mine”. This desire to make love “mine” is the source of all efforts towards control, power, abuse, and narcissism in the world. As more and more witness the ego and transcend it, the more we will see all such things vanish from the face of the earth.

Blessings.