The Return of Aliveness: The Dark

Night of the Soul

By Eckhart Tolle

The ‘dark night of the soul’ is a term that goes back a long time. Yes, I

have also experienced it. 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. The death of someone close to you could

trigger it, especially premature death—for example, if your child dies. Or 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 is the whole conceptual framework

for your life. That results in a dark place.

There is the possibility that you emerge out of it 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. A deeper sense of purpose or

connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or

anything conceptual. It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a

kind of death. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always

painful, but nothing real has actually died—only an illusory identity. Now, it is

probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation

realize 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 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. You now 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. You sense the aliveness through your own

sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a

conceptual framework anymore.

Another important strategy is to avoid making the dark night too

personal, too focused on yourself. Yes, you feel it intimately and alone. But it

could still have more to do with the suffering of the world than with yourself.

Maybe dark nights are generally less personal than they feel. At any one
time, beings on the planet are suffering. The planet itself is suffering; it is

going through a dark night constantly. If you live in a place where children

are hungry and dying in wars and in domestic violence, you are within the

realm of the world’s dark night. Listen to political leaders deny climate

change and you worry about the future, not of the planet on which you live

but the planetary being of which you are a living part. If you can stretch your

moral imagination to perceive this suffering, then you will have the energy

and focus to work toward a transformation.