Revelation's Great Tribulation,
the Dark Night of the Earth
and Pachakuti
“For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people...”
“We’re in a time in which literally all systems are in transition, everything has shaken down into chaos, everything is breaking down, governments, politics, economics, religions, relationships. We are probably in the greatest shaking up in human history.
There are basic themes of our spiritual journey, our preparation for heaven, that run throughout all of history and are felt most keenly in dark nights of the soul which are leaps in our transformation. The most difficult experience of the themes of our preparation takes place during the last part of our journey, the experience of the age of the “end times”. The combining of two great teachings, the Biblical "Great Tribulation," or "Purgatory," and the Inca's "Pachakuti," is very helpful in understanding what is going to happen that we are now building up to. The age of Pachakuti, "one who brings an era to a close." Pachakuti is a time to set things right. The other meaning of Pachakuti is a time of upheaval, a turning over of the earth for a new planting, "the greatest catechism in your life to come clean," a time of purification.
The physical signs include the disappearance of the condor and the high mountain lagoons and also the wrath of the sun which translates into the tearing of the ozone layer. Then looking at Biblical teachings, Jesus said that someday He would return and the world would end: “Just as the gathering of vultures shows there is a carcass nearby, so these signs indicate that the end is near. Immediately after the anguish of those days, the sun will be darkened, the moon will give no light, the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” Jesus also said that there would be an antichrist and that now there were antichrists indicating that before the end we live foreshadows of the end. From Genesis to Revelation the Bible is full of these pictures of the end of our way of life as we know it, teaching us what to look for, and not only the signs of physical cataclysms but also a cataclysm of our souls. There is going to be and even now there is a great tribulation and day of judgment and purging in both our outer and our inner worlds. The foreshadow experience of the Great Tribulation and Pachakuti has been called "a dark night of the soul" and now that we are in the last days ready to break through time, the foreshadows are being replaced by the real thing and not only are people but the whole of the universe is in its dark night. Sanctification is the spiritual process of making one holy, set apart or cleansed of untruth to make an intellectual and spiritual connection to God just as we do to certain people when we are likeminded. Having truth become clearer and clearer is an evolutionary process where you organically arrive a a place where you think like God because your belief system about everything is exactly what is in God's mind, seeing with His eyes, feeling with His heart, knowing His thoughts, the truth about everything that has happened and where it's going. All of history has been moving towards this union, spiritual marriage, with God. Our dark nights of the soul is this renewing of the mind during a sanctification process in a much more intensified state that needs to take place now. The dark night covering the entire Earth will dawn in the birth of God's dream... glorified bodies living on the New Earth.
Biblical history has been teaching us about Pachakuti but Christians have not been equating the dark nights of the soul in history with the end times. Their theology, that teaches them that the Great Tribulation times are for those who are going to hell, means they are only going to view signs like earthquakes and what is going on in Israel as reasons to really focus on their last chance to get people saved so they won't go to hell. It is a very superficial interpretation of the Bible and incorrect. We are in hell now and the work that is being done during the age of the Great Tribulation and Pachakuti will be transforming earth, which is now hell, into heaven. The great seers of the world, the Inca, Mayan, Aztecs, Hopi and others, while they do not yet have what they need from the Bible to complete their journey, do have this truth. This means that they are looking at their outside signs to reveal the inside which is much more significant and it enables them to prepare for the times and get through them. The Inca are seers who are listening to God as He is speaking in these times. The Mayan have had another way to show us the end. Their calendar has accurately foretold every significant event in history. It has a date of 2012 as the time when life is no longer as we know it. At this time the orbit of the sun crosses the equator of the Milky Way, aligning our solar system with the black hole at the center of our galaxy, an occurrence that only happens every 26,000 years. Our solar system has entered the path to this place. The calendar actually ends signifying that we will pass into a calendarless world, a new kind of time. The world is changing fast.
What is on the surface goes underneath. The mystic, one who is passing through his Night and entering into oneness with God and all things, has his outer life taken away. He is somehow mysteriously disconnected from this life and enters another realm, the realm of the shadow, the cloud of unknowing. It's not visible from the outside that this person is in this other place. Only those who understand this disconnection can see it. Then the dark things underneath come to the surface and the mystic faces his past and the negative things deep inside of him and all the wrong ways he thinks and the wrong ways he lives his life. This is Judgment Day. His deep seated concepts are worthless to him and his strong rooted beliefs are uprooted. He is broken and humbled so he will be able to live a life of love when he is reconnected. His deepest pains from all his lives are brought to the surface to be seen with new eyes and healed so he can love. The ancients are showing us how we are disconnected from God, the universe, the earth and from each other and we have too much connection to things. We are not living a spiritual enough life. In this very physical-minded place, with too much focus on creating things, everything has become polluted and our bodies are getting strange diseases. The age of purification is to reach the end of a world that is as insane as it can possibly get, as yang as it can possibly get, which will give birth to a new kind of man, what the Inca call a homoluminous race and what the Bible calls "glorified" bodies. There is no end to our lives because there is no end to God but we are heading towards a wall that would be the end if it were possible for mankind to become extinct. It will be frightening because having reached the end of insanity, there is more to set right than has ever been. But what will come of it, the opposite of insanity is more than we could ever imagine.
If you think about it, you can have an amazing view of yourself and of God and beautiful happily ever after picture of the enchanted world foretold throughout history in fairy tales and in stories like the lost Atlantis.
At this very moment the first fruits have entered the age of the Pachakuti or Great Tribulation. The world is moving into confusion that is steadily going to get worse because it is on sand and not on rock. Those who find the rock of truth with do better as the full storm hits but there are few who are waking up and focusing on finding it. People are caught in building towers to God, their own way of survival and salvation that they believe to be founded on truth. The whole medical field in itself is a belief system as strong as any religion out there...maybe stronger. This is a critical area where we desperately need truth. What a Dark Night is needs to be on the 6:00 news and sent to everyone via the internet. As a result of medical beliefs and practices many of the people who have entered the darkness are only seen outwardly. They look seriously mentally ill and they are being put on drugs for their 'crazy' behavior. As the last days progress, the next ones will enter and if we don’t educate each other to recognize what is going on so that we can comfort them with truth, they will suffer a great deal more difficulty from the administration of incorrect remedies and the isolation they feel because of the lack of truth that is making them appear even more crazy. We know how to deal with earthquakes but the more significant Battle of Armageddon takes place in the soul. Getting ready for the Night is being made aware of what it is, where it is, what it looks like and how to deal with it using truth.
What does the dark night's effect look like?
"Once Lao Tzu was asked how he found the Way of heaven, and he said, 'I made a great effort: I tried and tried and tried to find it, but I couldn't. Then one day as I was sitting under a tree, a dry leaf fell, slowly moving with the wind. The wind moved north; the leaf moved north; the wind moved south; the leaf moved south; then the wind stopped-and the leaf fell down and rested beautifully on the earth. Then again there was some wind, and again the leaf rose high in the sky."
The mystic who has passed through his Night does not move by his own independent mind and effort. He is moved in a mysterious way where he is supposed to go and only one who is moved that way can understand the mystery. This new way of living begins with your old way of living being stripped from you. God knocked Saul of his horse while he was on his way to Damascus. He was blinded for three days and then sent into the desert to remove all that was incorrect in his teachings. He was renamed St. Paul and lived a new life. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ".
“So Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he should not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said 'Let me go, for it is daybreak.' But Jacob said, 'I will not let you go unless you bless me.' The man asked him, 'What is your name?' 'Jacob,' he answered. Then the man said, 'Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.'" “…and he was limping because of his hip.”
Jacob was a manipulator. That night transformed him into a man who was still for the rest of his life.
“To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.”
There are many foreshadows in your life but the Night seriously begins when the rug is pulled out from under you and you are made to sit helplessly still. You are going to live in heaven, another world and it begins with you losing this one. What I mean by this is life as you have known it doesn't work the way it used to anymore. You have just fallen down the rabbit hole and the rules are strange and backwards. Our journeys are unique, they are moving very fast and are very complicated. You can't even begin to record everything or even tell everything that is happening to you to someone. You go into the tangled, ugly darkness and receive teachings that can only be seen in the dark and come out with clear, pure light. You experience the worst of life, seeing hell clearly, to give birth the the best there is.
“Then the Lord said unto Satan, ‘have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.'” "…But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.” “…everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.” “...He has blocked my way so I cannot pass; he has shrouded my paths in darkness. He has stripped me of my honor and removed the crown from my head. He tears me down on every side till I am gone; he uproots my hope like a tree. He has alienated my brothers from me; my acquaintances are completely estranged from me.” “...The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.”
It's not about man and "Satan"...it's about man and God. There is no agenda that isn't God's agenda. Think of each of our individual paths, very precisely laid before us by the Great Blueprint of the Universe, as a pyramid. We all start somewhere along the bottom of the pyramid, quite far away from many of the others and follow a perfect path to the top of the pyramid where we all think as one. No matter what happens to you on this path, no matter who is involved in making your circumstances what they are , it's all God. It only appears as a battle between two great forces. To think that some entity or being apart from God has taken over control any moment of you life is an illusion that you see as you approach the top. Everything is God and it's all good.
“Here is a situation that has astonished many a Christian: to look at a friend who has lived a holy life, even like the angels, and then see him go through unending distress. Men have no way to account for all this, for it is not according to their theology nor their understanding of God.”
This rare and perplexing supernatural experience of intense, dramatic suffering that Madam Guyon describes here was given the name Dark Night of the Soul by the 16th century mystics. The internet is full of testimonies and articles on ‘dark nights’. Many of them are foreshadows but some have become in part more significant, a person's real Day of Judgment, when things from deep inside them and from their past are brought the the surface for their transformation. When it is the real thing that each of us has to go through, when it is no longer false labor pains and God's getting down to business, the testimony of that soul will speak of torment that is described using frightening words. A real dark night is not of this world and it is a torment to the soul to the maximum degree that the individual can handle. The cross you carry in a Dark Night is an agony beyond any words that absolutely nothing you’ve ever done or known about or can find in any person or place anywhere can alleviate. This very fact in itself once realized is distressing beyond your imagination. You try the things of this world but there is nowhere to go and nothing to figure out to do. What you have known your life to be has been stripped from you. You have left the age when you got to practice creating your little piece of heaven earth by using the secret, being aware of your thoughts, and have entered instead a state of utter helplessness. Only God can restore what is not working and He can't do it until the work is complete in you. You will go through the progression of squirming on your cross, trying everything, running away, pushing your feet down against the nails to lift yourself up to get a breath of air until you don’t have the strength to do it anymore. The struggle is over and you wait to die and wait while you rot in the ground and wait to be resurrected...all spiritual experiences of the soul that you can't even imagine until you are there.
Because today we are at the end of time, the dark nights are becoming increasingly worse as people enter into the real thing and not just a foreshadow of it. For these first fruits going into the Tribulation/Pachakuti, the Nights are far more dreadful and they have been being abandoned because no one has known what to do. Those in a real Dark Night of the ends times age will not respond to the remedies that are used for the normal bad times and comparatively milder dark night foreshadows of the previous age. This is the key sign to look for in determining whether a person is in a real dark night. The person is in a completely unreachable other realm and they are not meant to be, nor can they be, raised up again until their breaking, healing and training process is complete and they are a new creature not of this world but of a new world.
You may think this is morbid. Books on dark nights have been inaccurately translated and things left out because the translators thought the writings were too morbid. 'Too morbid' is scary and not going to sell books. But since some people are going to have a dark night that is that awful, we have to have these words. They are the ones they are going to resonate with. They are the words that will comfort them because someone else has been there and wrote about it. The internet will be extremely comforting. When the words seem too morbid, you don't need them. The answer is not to rewrite them or discard them. Just don't read them. They are meant for others.
There isn't really a battle between good and bad but until you get out of the illusion world of hell, it feels like a battle and you will act accordingly. Hell is not a sane place. There is no place where you can live according to truth. You will have the truth in your head but you will not act according to it until you have all of it and your world has become sane. Another picture of the end of time involves the Battle of Armageddon, a battle for truth so our mind has what it needs to set us free. Anti-christ means untruth or unclear truth. It has caused pain all throughout history but the effect of being wrong is much more noticeable in the Night. We are at war with the dark things, teaching that keep us in the dark, that have come to the surface through a spiritual upheaval and all people must be educated and work together to help each other deal with these things that are coming out. Everyone will need to help everyone and they will be able to because one will have passed through a place and seen truth and can teach it to another. While that one has passed through something the other hasn't and they will help them. Older will teach younger and the young will teach the old so that all will remain humbled.
The dark nights are ever new in their appearance and they will continue to trip up even the very spiritually learned individual. We must know the basic elements that are present in a Dark Night so that we would not speak to and misdiagnose and treat these poor tortured souls as Job’s ignorant friends enabling negative words to make their cross more horrible.
The Purpose and Definition of Our Dark Night of the Soul
A heart that wants to change the world and rescue people from suffering is born out of a Dark Night and this mission takes on the form of whatever worldview a person holds to.
“The truth shall set you free” and in a dark night nothing but words of truth about what’s going on between God and you will enable you to keep moving and nothing but complete knowing of these things and entering into them will save you from the hellish Night. You can pray a thousand prayers and you can rebuke Satan, a concept you will mature past, until you are blue in the face and occasionally you will find a very short lived relief but nothing will work as it once did. There's no instant healings. You are beyond what these are used for in spiritual growth. Now you wait. Now you will only frustrate and exhaust yourself until you have to rest having learned to be still and quiet and wait.
You may be saying to yourself that you have been through suffering and know the difference between the good man and the Godman, who is one with the universe and following the mysterious flow. This is truer for some than others. We are all on the road somewhere and the lessons are being learned in the foreshadows but still remain veiled and unclear. It is easy to look around and see the varying degrees of dark nights and the corresponding degrees of light ministries born out of them. The difference between one who had some work done in them and one who is completely done is how broken and open they are and how easily they see and teach truth. The Bible pictures this as the experience of being caught up with Christ in the clouds while others remained. Being in the clouds, is being above in terms of how you view things. This is best pictured with an understanding of traditional Chinese medicine. There are three levels of TCM. The first level deals with a health problem after it has taken hold. The second level was being more preventative. The third was to bring the body to such a high state of health it was out of danger of having any kind of sickness or disease. Each level had specific types of herbs for that level. The highest level involved what is called the building up of shen. Shen is one of the three energies, the three treasures, that are our life. Shen involves spiritual growth and spiritual sight. There are specific herbs like the reishi mushroom that do this.
Another picture of our Night being over and being out of danger is entering the Ark and the door closed to those who laughed, just as the door was closed to the foolish virgins. “Blessed and holy are those who share in the first resurrection. For them the second death holds no power.” The other difference between the foreshadows leading up to and the real thing is the degree of pain. St. John of the Cross recognized two levels of suffering. “The Passive Night of Sense, we are told, is ‘common’ and ‘comes to many,’ whereas that of the Spirit ‘is the portion of very few.’ The one is ‘bitter and terrible’ but ‘the second bears no comparison with it,’ for it is ‘horrible and awful to the spirit.’” The Night of the purgation of the senses prepares one for the purgation of the spirit to enter the union. The first still leaves a person feeling pretty normal. Things were taken away and they felt out of control and felt distant from God. They can pass through and return to things changed, with a renewed appreciation, but not anything very unusual. However after passing through the second, one is a manna being from another place. Something very supernatural is going on. They are not normal. St. John did not witness one of these. As difficult as his Night was, the end times Nights are far worse. It is time for God to have His spotless Bride. There is a Battle to gain Her. Satan is being let loose and there needs to be a army to get everyone through the Nights of the Great Tribulation.
The journey of the dark night to become one with God is initiated by God when our path has reached that point and it's our time. Some are taken and others left…for later. You don’t volunteer for this and there’s no stopping it. The mystics had to encourage one another to continue and not give up and turn back. But now you have no choice and you will be dragged through something more supernatural where there is no turning back. Jesus said to Peter, “I tell you the truth, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you don’t want to go.” John 21 At that time, this referred to Peter’s crucifixion but now it has a deeper meaning, the crucifixion of the Great Tribulation Nights.
People do not want to hear this. People are going to think of other ways to not have to believe that they have to carry their own crosses. They want to interpret Christ’s cross as being the only one. He did it so we don’t have to. But He said to pick up our cross and follow Him. He made the way possible and He led the way. You can only know God as your Husband, when you follow Him through the Dark Night. You can only know Him and hear His voice when it’s dark because you’ve been emptied of what you’ve known and now you’re asking the right questions. Here in this quiet and still place the Master Surgeon does something to you. You’re being broken and all these strange new teachings are getting in. They are truth. They are how things really are. You see Him differently and because you can see Him as He really is and see yourself as you really are, He begins to make His home in you. These teachings are not going to fill the church pews now but when the Great Tribulation hits in full force, there won’t be room. People will need the truth to fill the place that gets emptied before Satan fills it up with something else that’s wrong. Now is the time to prepare for when Satan is fully released and Dark Nights is a world epidemic.
Dark Nights in History
The term “Dark Night of the Soul” is from the 16th century mystic St. John of the Cross. The word “Dark” is used because you enter a place where you initially don’t have answers as to what is going on. Nothing that you do know prepares you for this. You do not know God’s ways. You do not know that you are not in the relationship with Him that He wants to be in with you. You do not know where you are and so you walk blindly from one moment to the next. The term “Night” indicates a period of time that will end and be followed by a day. The words “Soul” represents the mind, emotions and will which are what are addressed in the Night. Born out of this Night of miserable thoughts and feelings you are going to have your mind renewed and you are going to love with God’s love and find joy unspeakable, and your will, your separate ego that has it's own ideas and does it's own thing, will be one with God's . St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Madam Guyon were the most famous of the mystics. All three were heavily persecuted by the church and had a huge following.
The Protestant Reformation came about through a Dark Night of the Soul. Martin Luther had been beating himself with a whip until he was lying in a pool of blood for the six weeks leading up to his famous revelation, ‘the just shall live by faith alone’, words given to him as he crawled up the stairs of St. Petersburg’s cathedral. During his Night the priests had gotten to the place where they all took off when they saw him coming for confession. They couldn’t handle how crazy he’d become confessing every little thing that would pass through his mind. They didn’t understand the great preparation work God was doing in him. The dark nights in history have been for a privileged higher ministry. Following in Jesus’ footsteps, St. Paul was the first Christian mystic. “God must do a work in us before He can work through us.” Saul was hunting down Christians to be killed. God knocked him down on the road and physically blinded him and sent him out to the desert to retrain and spiritually unblind him to the extent that a man could understand truth at that time of Dark Night foreshadows. His name was changed to St. Paul, a true servant of God not according to the concepts and laws of men.
The Dark Night is a journey to the truth, the unfolding of all secrets, hidden manna, about who God is that will set you free of the Night in the desert to start your help meet ministry. This same truth becomes the treasure in the earthen vessel pulled out as God requires in whatever circumstances He puts you in during the Great Tribulation of the earth. We are but a glove and the Master inserts His hands and moves it. This is Him in us and us in Him, the abiding oneness of the spiritual marriage. We need to stop being children feeding off the spiritual highs. Gary Thomas said, “We needn’t be concerned with miraculous. If it happens, it happens. What is usually of even greater testimony is the ability to meet people one-on-one where they are and cooperate as God leads them out of their own private hell.” It takes one who has followed Christ through the dark night, whether a foreshadow or the real thing, to do this. “His [Jesus’] ministry was the natural outpouring of a tremendous individual walking step-by-step with the Father. Jesus chased out ignorance, defeated the demonic, and released the ill and oppressed. In other words, as Jesus walked, hell broke apart at his feet. Jesus and hell did not occupy the same spot, so wherever Jesus went, hell was dismantled.” This is for the coming forth of the Kingdom of God. “…this is the last hour…the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come.” Jesus was not just speaking for that moment in time that He spoke those words. These words were making reference to Genesis through Revelation. Revelation started in Genesis and Genesis was the beginning of Revelation. The making of God’s Bride and heaven is the work of all of history. Jesus came to reveal a relationship with God to enable us to reach that union state. He came to increase our power to do this thing. His ministry to impart this greater power stated at the time He was here and reaches its most glorious display at the end of our history when it’s actually time to bring in Heaven. The kingdom is now. He is the king and we are the queen. It is now and forever.
Symptoms and Remedies for Spiritual Physicians and Guides
You are not looking for something outward. Outwardly they will look like they are going through something really bad but a Dark Night gives a new meaning to the word pain. It’s not being in a German concentration camp or having parts of your body cut off and going through chemotherapy. It’s not losing your job, having your house burn down, your wife walking out, and three relatives dying all in the same month. These outward things can be used to escort you into a dark night but you do not need anything outward to send you there which is why “if only all these things were restored to me” will not change where you are. Do not pay attention to the outward things. A Dark Night is the result of something organic that has happened to your connection to God and the universe. He’s done something to your soul so that it doesn’t respond like it used to. He will use the outer life to give you an occasional lift and hope by reconnecting you to it for a time, so you get a breather, then He removes those immature connections again. Like a tree with no rain searches beneath, when your roots have reached the new source, your connections can no longer be disrupted nor would they ever need to be.
So what you are looking for is something you will hear them say. They are not experiencing all the symptoms all at once. They come and go. And there are stages of progression so symptoms clear up and go away.
Every Dark Night is entirely different. The Universe tailors the Dark Night according to the person's worldview because that is the filter they use to interpret everything that happens as they seek answers. The picture in the Psalms of a Dark Night is hungering for God’s word and waiting for deliverance from many enemies. In Job, we see the stripping away of life. For some people the Night it is primarily a sinister torment from an evil entity they call Satan that comes in many forms and for others the primary pain is fear or grief or guilt. Everyone gets almost everything to a degree. Not all Christians lose the sense that they are saved. This concept needs to be redefined anyway. Not all question the existence of God. This truth also has to be straightened out. All are afraid. Many have their brains racked to death because they are so indoctrinated into what God can and can’t do and what a Christian can and can’t do. In the dark night they are broken until they accept that they don’t know God and His ways and religion as we know it is destroyed. It is the very existence of a Dark Night itself which they had no idea existed and their having to pass through it that is the fundamental breaking. People do not know that they will have to pass through hell on earth and experience and learn everything about the bad and ugly in order to know the love and beauty at the other end when the earth is transformed into heaven. They do not know what it means to follow where Jesus went. So when they get there ‘Hell is not a place where I belong, so this can’t be happening. Being in this place is not possible. I must not be saved! Or God doesn’t exist! This just isn’t right!’ According to whom…you or Him? They experience "Satan" having a field day with this religious stuff. So either you stop thinking, speaking all these lies and condemnation into yourself making you crazy, or you change how you think and accept another belief system. You accept that the entire world is undergoing a dramatic passage through an eternity in hell’s fires where God’s Being is finishing evolving by refining you to be one of His white stones that make up His spotless Bride.
The Mystical Stripping of Life
You know that you are in a Dark Night when your senses are mysteriously turned off so that you can’t feel anything good. Something has happened to you and you’re in some weird place going crazy trying to get out. You try everything and nothing works to stop the pain. You’re stuck in hell.
Life is the feeling you get from the relationship you have to people and the things you enjoy together. This has been completely stripped from you. Each person’s Dark Night is different but the beginning of the Night usually looks like Job. This can happen two ways. Someone gets injured or sick, losing income, threatening the loss of material things or something along those lines. Externally all hell breaks loose and it is bad. The other way is more hidden. Life gets out of balance and it gets dramatically messed up and you slip into hell. God does not have to let Satan kill your children in order to take them away from you. Your house doesn’t have to be burned down or your possessions taken from you. You do not need to lose your health to be unable to participate in life. God does something and it's as if you've gone down a rabbit hole and it's all backwards and crazy. You are stripped of your outward senses to enjoy as if a light switch was turned off inside of you and then as you get a grip of yourself you say "Oh no, I'm not dreaming, this is real!" At first you attribute it to the external but the external crisis has only been a springboard into this other place. It is very supernatural and unlike anything you have ever experienced and it is very frightening. In a panic the person acts a little crazy doing crazy things. They become hyper-spiritual and try all kinds of everything they can think of. Pray and read the word, rebuke the demonic spirits and call for miracles, go on a trip, try a movie, eat chocolate and take Zoloft all you want. There is no escape from the Night but men have to find that out by trying everything they can, both secular and spiritual. There is no place to run to and nothing they can do. At the end of this lesson, they are brought to a place of stillness which they learn is being brought to God, the only place that they have to go. They in time learn that they were very deliberately brought to this place to have a relationship with God so that they can have a real relationship with people and things. God is waiting for Jacob, out there doing it on his own, to give up and sit still and wait.
“The believers’ desperate attempts to alleviate his or her frustrations through familiar spiritual practices are unsuccessful, leading only to spiritual fatigue…they renew their efforts and invest more energy to no avail.” Because of the inadequacy of one’s former practices to bring about change, the believer feels like he or she is backsliding” or not saved at all! The advice is to “allow the soul to remain in peace and quietness” “at rest from all knowledge and thought.”
The Mystical Stripping of Gifts
The mystics taught that a lesson you must learn is that God is all and you are nothing. You may have been great at your job and a great father or mother and a great cook, a wonderful artist but now it’s all gone. You’re as good as dead, just lying there. If we don’t feel like doing something and if our mind doesn’t see that it needs to be done, it doesn’t happen. The channels with the flows that enable us to feel about the things of life so that we participate in them are what have been removed so that there is no motivation. It has been by a flow out of God into us that we have a vision each morning and get out of bed. It is God’s grace that we remember to brush our teeth before we leave the house in the morning. To learn this is to have it taken away. Now you don’t know how anything is getting done. Somehow you get through each day…somehow.
Have the awareness of this lesson and do not get frustrated with a person in a Dark Night. You must give them their dignity they deserve as they pass through this blessing. They cannot think to do the simplest things. Be very conscious of this so that through attentiveness in love and understanding you can do it for them.
Utter Helplessness
You have lived in the illusion that you had control. God says “Apart from me you can do nothing.” Now you are left to yourself to show you what you are apart from God. God allows Satan to do all these things to you that you can’t stop and you see that you are just a puppet. Even when you know all things and have all the treasure inside of you, if God doesn’t do His part, you are still nothing.
Jacob’s new name represents the change from doing things by ourselves to God doing them with us. “It is no longer I [Jacob] who live, but Christ [Israel]”. The Revelation “white stone” with the name written on it that you are given represents the spotless bride, having clear truth, who is now Mrs. God only moving with her Husband. As Children, before we grow up to be a bride, God lets us have a sense of our own strength so we would feel secure and be able to do what we needed to do to get to the place where it was time to turn off the light. Thomas said that “…one must break through the initial fear of leaving this world of sense and psychological experiences that so easily assures him of his own self-sufficiency” in order to know God in a relationship that is the only source of real security and strength.
Don’t miss this lesson. There is no crying out to God ‘Show me what I’m supposed to be doing!’ or ‘Help me do what I’m supposed to be doing!’ There’s no more doing. Nothing will work until God in fully in you and He is doing it with you. This takes time. You are not being negligent and you are not in sin because you can’t do anything. If you think you are incapacitated because there is something you’re not doing right, you’ve missed the point of the lesson. If you think you have any responsibility for the bad things that are going on in and around you, as if you did something or could do something, you have missed the lesson. Just sit there or lie there broken open and allow your soul to process the pain and your mind to learn and wait until your transformation is complete, surgery over and you have graduated.
God Has Seemingly Walked Off the Set
At first men do no see God’s hand in their trials. They see Satan. They see men opposing them or they blame the environment. Jacob wrestled with the Angel all Night and finally as the day approached, he got the lesson. He saw that it wasn’t Laban or Esau that were his enemies. His whole life had been about him and God. At some point in the Night you see God. Job said to his accusers, “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Satan may have killed his children but your life is not according to Satan’s agenda, it’s God’s. This is very important to see. Satan went to God to challenge Him but had to ask permission to attack righteous Job. This event that transformed Job from being good man to a higher condition needed to take place at the beginning of history. Job is the oldest book recorded in the Bible. This was of the utmost significance in terms of getting us ready for the end times Revelation when the most painful time of our evolution would take place.
Christians are taught that hell is the place where a whole lot of people have gone and are going because they didn't accept Jesus as Savior. They believe that it is a literal place where the unrepentant sinners are punished forever. This interpretation of Jesus' salvation from hell is completely wrong. The truth is known in your dark night at the end of time. When your soul goes to hell for what feels like an eternity in a Dark Night, you learn that being in that place forever is humanly impossible. Your soul would reach a limit of experiencing that pain and eventually, within a short period of time, relatively speaking in terms of a literal eternity, shut down. You would blow fuses , short circuit and just turn off and you'd be floating around in some form of semi to non-consciousness existence that wouldn't be capable of acknowledging being punished. It could no longer register pain.
When studying the original Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible you find that there are four different words that were almost translated with the simple word "hell" and have mistakenly come to be understood as a place where millions of people are tortured forever. The four words actually mean a dark pit, a place where dead people are (with no reference to whether they repented or not), burning trash dumps, a place of darkness outside this world, a fire that consumes evil, the purging, refining fires of tribulation, and one reference means a place of eternal damnation. ALL of these references are something you feel in a Dark Night. God isn't gone. He's everywhere...He can't go. It only feels like it. You aren't in a dark place in another world. The supernatural experience of feeling like you are in another place, an outer darkness, is a real experience to prepare you for heaven, but you haven't gone anywhere in a physical sense. A misunderstanding of what hell is from poor translations by people who were interpreting the Bible according to their lack of experience and their agenda and concepts of what the world needed to hear from God, followed by too much emphasis on it, changed the training Jesus gave the original church and has caused great harm over the centuries. Jesus didn't preach hellfire and damnation. Jesus preached love and the Kingdom by taking up their cross and following Him. The hell references in the Bible have been completely misused. They were put there to tell us what you experience in a dark night like He was in. Jesus saved us from our sins means He saved us from having to live with them and live in a place of misery. He looked over the city and wept. He's leading the way through hell by taking up our crosses and getting out and after some practice and we're ready to handle it, we take up our real cross and get to heaven... and heaven is here not out there in another dimension somewhere. Preach the cross and the kingdom on earth, not hellfire and damnation and we'll get a lot further.
The reference to eternal suffering is a strong figurative picture of the depth of the refining and purging, making one ready for heaven, that takes place in the real Dark Nights at the end of time during the Great Tribulation. The foreshadows, practice, are not as supernatural as the real dark nights so when the mystics wrote their books about them, the teachings weren't clear, and bookstores and libraries have to file them in the fiction sections. This will change and we'll be looking at these strange experiences as facts describing the end of our mortal existence, like wrinkles and heart disease at the end the life of a body.
Like all other learning, we go the opposite way first to compare and to create what is good and right. In the real Night you reach a supernatural place of sensing an eternity in a bad place. How God does this I don't now. What He does in the Night to prepare us for heaven is a visit to the opposite of heaven and it is remarkable how He does this to our soul to make it ready.
We we're given our diamond about hell before Jesus came. When Jesus was teaching about the Kingdom, He said the kingdom was like this.... then He'd give us a picture. Then He'd say again, the kingdom is like... and He's tell another story. You put all the pictures together and you get a clearer and clearer picture of the whole. When we are studying spiritual things, we have diamond minds... a treasure. We learn one facet of a diamond, set it down and pick up another and learn a facet and set it down, then go back to the first one again and are shown another facet and this keeps going until we have them all. The more people we talk to and get their pictures, the better we see the truth about whatever it is. All the references in the Bible, the stories about pits and outer darknesses are like the facets of a diamond teaching about the Judgment Day purging, and the Great Tribulation suffering, at the end of time. The four hell words in the Bible are describing the different experiences of some of the foreshadows of our end and the language has become more dramatic as the foreshadows have become more intense as history has progressed. We have many more facets to that diamond and more words and the strongest sense of the words will come out as the darkest of the words enter the deepest places they can go into a soul and the world will be describing the actual experience of the Great Tribulation of Revelation. We've been taught that God is not present in hell. In a dark night God does something to His connection to you and you feel like you are in a place where God is has left you. God has seemingly walked off the set. This isn't just being upset that He's not answering your prayer right away so He must be gone... or maybe He doesn't exist. This separation is not normal. You have new senses in your being opened up and the separation goes on for what you can only describe as an eternity and going far beyond, a beyond that is beyond a normal beyond, what you think He should be doing to get an inner work done in you. God supernaturally does something to make you feel those words and hundreds of other words in the Bible, like being in the belly of the whale, and it can only be described as beyond unbelievable. God has somehow blocked Himself off from your senses enabling you to undergo an extraordinary transformation and there are no low frequency words to describe it on paper. "My God, My God, why have You forsaken me." You live those words and then you understand. But the fact is, He has never been more closely working on you. You have to go purely on words like these, the testimonies of others before you, walking by faith and not by what you used to sense. He will now and again give you a personal Bethel Rock, like he gave Jacob, to hang on to as you journey.
The Exodus experience is about a separation and a return. “I will seek him whom my heart loves…I sought but did not find him…Have you seen him whom my heart loves.”
“…essential to the exodus experience is the excruciating sense of the absence and separation [from God] which builds up within the contemplative those awful searing, burning desires that touch the mighty tender heart of God and promise a coming reunion. The night seems very dense and dark, the desert seems very dry and empty. One feels that he will never find God again; and yet there is no true panic or disquietude. There is only a deep abiding trust that God will come; that in a way He is present in His absence. The soul is being called to experience God in a new modality, no longer experiencing Him through one’s own concepts or feelings with assuring repercussions in one’s physical life, but now nakedly through faith. God has been preparing for a great meeting through the dryness. Perhaps, suddenly He makes Himself felt in a flashing light that illuminates the desert, and all the sweetness that was felt before suddenly is very empty in comparison to the presence of God that is felt now.”
A Walk of Faith
Faith is something deposited in you at the time you are regenerated and it is something that is exercised until you have it all. This exercise has to be done in the dark. Jacob walks by what he sees and what he does gives him his strength. Israel walks by the inner leading and doesn’t pay attention to what he sees on the outside or any of its rules. Israel can walk on water like Jesus.
If you try all your ways and nothing works, if you can’t count on anything anymore, you will have been stripped of the old rules that said ‘if you do this, then that’. Now you are ready to walk blindly until God is fully in you and you walk by the law of life from within that empowers you to defy all known laws and doing the impossible becomes the norm.
In the dark night you are still and you also have times when you are fighting for your life. By being brought to this place of being incapacitated and under attack and afraid and having to get up and walk through life blindly each moment, again and again, you are not letting the attacker win. You hear the lies, accusations and ‘what if”s and you challenge each one by walking no matter what you feel as if you were already walking on water. You ignore your thoughts that are making living your life impossible and find yourself just living it somehow. There’s no choice but to walk this way. You wouldn’t do it willingly so you are being forced to do it. You were a child of God and now you must grow up and be His wife and so you are bound and being taken to a place you don’t want to go. But there is no where else to go. John 6, “Then Jesus turned to the twelve and asked ‘Are you also going to leave?’ Simon Peter replied ‘Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life.”
Death/Resurrection
You are emotionally very up and very down in a Dark Night of the Soul and Job’s friends would accuse you of being “bipolar." Like storms, the nightmare gets more intense then lets up. The dark clouds come over head, get darker, then move on. The fog descends then lifts. Each death gives birth to resurrection life as you are enlightened and transformed. You may even get to visit St. Paul’s third heaven and bask in lovely feelings, then back to hell.
Just as when you do hot stones then cold stones over the body to increase circulation and healing, all contracts will intensify in the Night to accelerate your growth... from darkness to light... from slow energies to the speed of light and past time.
A Marked Detachment
This is a mystical sense of not being here. You are outside the box looking in. You are in a spiritual twilight zone in the middle of everyone else around you still in the place you somehow left. “You have left men in order to find them.” In this place your eyes are open to others who suffer that you would never have noticed had you not come here. Here where you are wholly engrossed in yourself because of the severity of your pain feeling that you don't care about others, the very opposite is happening. Now you can be of some real use to God concerning others. You can help anyone who walks where you have walked. You can now be “all things to all people.”
Job’s Friends
“It is very, very hard when someone close is truly going through a ‘dark night of the soul’. There is nothing I can say, nothing anyone can say. Only God’s grace and mercy will see him through until he comes out on the other side.”
The only ones who are not going to be a Job’s friend to a person in their Dark Night is one whom God is speaking through. God speaks through all believers so anyone can say a comforting thing at some level. However, if a member is educated about Dark Nights, and better yet, has or is passing through one, their speaking is more healing. The further a person is through their Dark Night the more useful to God as a spiritual physician. The deeper the Night, the more that person can be used to get one who is also going through a deeper one. At the same time, it needs to be remembered that the purpose of a Dark Night is so a person will turn to God and not another person. So even the strongest of spiritual physicians will not be readily available or will not say as much as someone might like to have come out of them.
People who are still children do not understand and they speak as antichrist, ones who do not know the truth.
St. John of the Cross “warned of unwise counselors who do not understand the necessity of difficulty. He predicted that those who suffer ‘will meet someone in the midst of the fullness of their darkness, trials, conflicts and temptations who, in the style of Job’s comforters, will proclaim that all of this is due to melancholia, depression, or temperament, or to some hidden wickedness, and that as a result God has forsaken them. Therefore the usual verdict is that these individuals must have lived an evil life since such trials affect them’.”
Suffering has nothing to do with God being mad at you for having done something wrong. He is disciplining you to make your path straight to heaven. Satan will torment you with words in the Bible that you don’t know how to read right yet. He will use the laws that Christians have added to the Bible by misinterpreting it. You haven’t known that you’re thinking is off and you are going to feel guilt that is not something you should feel guilty about, being a Job’s friend to yourself, as well as guilt that it is appropriate according to the Bible. Both will break you and you will change how you think. Deformed truth, taking a little truth, magnifying and twisting it, is the soil of hell, Satan’s playground to torment you.
Self-centered and Needy
The pain that is a result of being disconnected is beyond bad and you are desperate and not yourself. You are losing it and you are hungry out of your mind to reach the flow that makes you okay again. You give a new meaning to the word 'high maintenance'. You wear everyone out sucking them all dry because only God has what you need. You will care about them and begin to sense the need to back off being so needy as you get more used to being detached and disconnected.
Being hyper self-centered in a Dark Night gives birth to being completely selfless, full time others-centered with an endless out flow to give them from the new Source you are now connected to (in union with!).
Hungry and Lonely
You need to be in union with the mind of God to be okay. Prior to the Night, God has been sending something fake into you so you would feel like you were okay but you never were. Your real need was blocked off. When people reach a certain age they long for their physical marriage partner. They feel the ache and the loneliness. They hunger for a flow to come into them through this other half to make the ache go away. In a Dark Night the patch is taken of your spiritual half of a heart and it bleeds as it waits to be sewn into its other half. No other person and no other thing can do what emotional and physical intimacy with your physical other half does for you…how much more so your spiritual other half.
Until they enter their dark night, people do not understand what you are feeling and the one who does has walked off the set. God has put you in the Garden and you are looking around at all the animals who have mates and you don’t have your Husband. Job’s wife walked off the set. God needs you to be alone and feel his loneliness. Now when you get out of here, you can understand Him and help Him get His Bride.
Don’t be jealous of others. You don’t want to go back to having the fake flow coming into you making you feel good and making you feel like you are really enjoying things. Be glad that the rain was shut off and your senses cut off from this so you can get the real enjoyment from God. Long for this reconnection and reattachment to people and things. You’re undergoing surgery, transplants, and the old organs had to be removed first. The new organs are not able to feel pain of any kind.
Introspection/The Inward Journey
“The ascent toward God begins with a descent into oneself.” You need God’s mind. And this means having your mind renewed. You have a great deal to unlearn and learn about yourself and about God. This takes a lot of time. People don’t have any time. They are too busy being Martha. So He takes you to the detached place and your outward life is stopped. Now you’re no good at being Martha. You don’t have any interest in the usual outward distractions. You are now Mary. It’s all about you and God. You are laid up undergoing surgery and on a mission to find all truth and get out of hell. Then you will be Mary being busy like Martha but not doing Martha’s busy-ness.
The Outer Mind in a Knot
The Greek orators used to practice their speeches on mountain tops with marbles in their mouths so that they could project and enunciate better when they were on stage. The spiritual layer of our minds develops to compensate for the loss of the physical facilities as our mind is being renewed to receive the hidden truth. The condition can be described as having cotton balls stuffed in between the connections in your head so that you can’t retrieve things and your mind works like bad reception. As something external or internal strikes and a spiritual storm hits you, you enter deeper into the darkness. This is a death. Then you emerge back into a lighter place and your brain unknots and you are able to receive better understanding about something.
The Earth Not Talking to You
Not only have you left men but you have also left the planet. You walk out into the warm breeze at night and a there is a full moon and bright stars and music and other wonderful evening noises and you don’t feel a thing. Whatever the sensing mechanisms are that receive the good stuff, all are removed. Serotonin is in critically short supply. The pituitary/hypothalamus gland is malfunctioning and the adrenals are on overload.
Emptiness/Dryness
“In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your paths straight.”
You will not feel like you are getting enough to be okay as you wither away because your roots haven’t reached that underground Source yet. As the rain is withheld God whispers “acknowledge me” in all things. ‘Acknowledge what I was doing for you that you are now being made aware of. See where I am taking you so that you are no longer a child that I must take care of who is too young to appreciate it. “Apart from me,” you are not okay as a child or a bride. You are no longer to be a child that I have to reach down to. Learn and grow until you reach Me. I will give you just barely enough to make it. At times you will be upset for being starved but also know the sweetness that I know better.’ You are on a path and to the extent that you do not know yourself and know God with respect to yourself, acknowledging that He is all and you are nothing, to that extent you take detours. Acknowledge Him as your life. You cannot live without Him abiding in you and living your life with you. Let Him empty you of living as a child in an illusion and see truth. Let Him take the rain away. You don’t want that life. Abide in the vine and He will fill you with the endless supply.
Fear
You do not need an anxiety pill. Unless you have highly charged psychological issues that need to be addressed through reverie therapy, there is nothing wrong with you. This is a dark night of the Great Tribulation and you are working “out your salvation with fear and trembling.” You are going to be overstressed or under too much attack or hyper restless, over worried insecure, afraid, maybe very jumpy, confused, lost, insecure — fear of every kind will be intensified throughout the entire Night.
Humiliation and Breaking/ the St. Paul Thorn and Jacob Limp
We don’t look so good in the earlier stages of a Dark Night and we act peculiar if not crazy and people look down on us, including us. St. Paul said, “I am less than the least of all God’s people”. Because of this humble place of guilt and fear, he received from God much of the mysterious manna that had been hidden.
St. Paul also said, “To keep me from becoming conceited because of these unsurpassing revelations, there was a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecution, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” St. Paul is talking about the powerful ministry that is a result of suffering. In the Night you receive revelation, amazing truths previously hidden to you, and you will receive a thorn to keep you humble and highly aware of your weakness (nothingness) and His power (Allness). The Godman powers only come out of you having been broken and knowing you are and acknowledging who He is to you. You are a jar and there is a treasure inside on you and you and Him move together as one. If He doesn’t move, neither do you. If you feel any strength in yourself, you will still be acting as Jacob not Israel. Miraculous healings are good for bringing in children but look for one in your dark night.
You are going down a river, and a boulder will get in the way and God is not going to remove it. He is going to raise the level of the water so you can get over it.’ This is the thorn. This is Jacob’s limp at the end of the struggle.
“When the outer man is smitten, dealt with, and humbled by all kinds of misfortune, the scars and wounds that are left behind will be the very places from which the spiritual flows out from within.”
The torment of wondering what people are thinking while we are dragged through the gutter gives birth to a very high place.
Experiencing All the Opposites for Being Broken Open to Receive the Great Mystery
The wealthiest men went bankrupt first. To know joy, one must know grief. The principles of death/resurrection, going the opposite way first, work together as the principle of spiritual growing up to be Christ in us, the abiding bride. All the negative things in the Dark Night give birth to their opposite. Every negative emotion to the depth that it is felt breaks us open and gives birth to its opposite. We all live in hell in order to live in heaven.
Endless Waiting
Endless waiting for the emotional supply that once reached will be exclusively coming from a deeper place. This is our prize that can never be taken away from us.
“Let patience have its perfect work in you.”
“I wait for the Lord, My soul doth wait. My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they who watch for the morning, I say more than they who watch for the morning.”
During your Dark Night, God is doing the work as fast as it can possibly be done and there will not be one more single moment of pain that is not absolutely necessary. “The Lord is good to those who depend on him. So it is good to wait quietly for the salvation from the Lord. And it is good to submit to the yolk of his discipline. Let them sit alone in silence beneath the Lord’s demands. Let them lie face down in the dust…for there will be hope at last…For no one is abandoned by the Lord forever. For he does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow.”
“Yet a divine light pierced the darkness of that prison cell, and John’s teachings on the dark night of the soul has inspired many Christians to persevere through the spiritual and temporal, that fortunate [notice, he says fortunate] souls ordinarily undergo on their way to the high state of perfection are so numerous and profound that human science cannot understand them adequately.’ He added later, ‘Both the sense and the spirit, as though under an immense and dark load, undergo such agony and pain that the soul would consider death a relief.’ Remember John’s life was not easy, but he didn’t mention the physical pain, the cold, the hunger, or the loneliness. Instead, he was concerned about the difficult war within, the battle for his soul. This was the struggle he focused on.”
Wanting to Be Dead
The Night is a torture chamber of the soul. You can’t feel any love towards those you care about nor can you feel theirs towards you. Madam Guyon said that there was “an emptiness worse than death.” Given the choice between being in the darkest parts of a Dark Night and being dead, death wins. When it gets to the dawn phase, you rarely feel suicidal anymore and you see that it's not real. In one of the 'ah ha' moments, when you get outside and look at what is happening, you look at the suicidal and all negative words flowing through your brain and separate them from the real you. It's not really who you are and what you want. What you really want is for the Night to be over and have a wonderful life, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
“…and in those days shall men seek death but will not find it; they will long to die but death will elude them.”
It's NOT demon possession taking you over and making you want to kill yourself. You've simply can't handle the level of pain and you want to shoot your brain to turn it off.
"My soul is exceedingly sorrowful even unto death... Oh my Father if it be possible, let this cup pass from me."
Wanting to be dead because of pain is not demon possession and has nothing to do with Satan. Is Jesus saying anything about Satan? Is Job saying anything about Satan? "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away." Wishing you hadn't been born like Job did, or not wanting to be alive because you're about to be crucified are normal human responses to pain so bad your soul can't handle it. This is a dark night of the soul... an unimaginable ache, a desperate longing from the depths of your soul to be rescued from pain. All you want to do is sit at the top of a mountain or sit by the water's edge while prayers are sent out from the deepest place in your heart and you listen and wait for God to say something or do something to set you free from the pain.
Craziness
The whole experience is crazy and you are going so say ‘this is crazy’ a thousand times. At first it’s crazy because your concept of the Christian experience hadn’t taught you about this place you have to go to. Then it’s crazy because it’s hell, Satan’s territory where you find yourself doing things and thinking things that are not you. It’s crazy because hell is a living insane nightmare and you are a sane being that doesn’t belong there but after being there awhile your head’s being messed with so bad that you begin to believe that you really are crazy. Your being is screaming from the pain of being separated from God and you are sure that you are losing it and you might even look like it on the outside too especially if you run to alcohol and drugs and Satan can really take over. And how do you tell anyone what is going on? Can you tell them you entered some other zone? Now for sure they will know you’re crazy.
All this craziness gives birth to every question being answered and everything making sense but believing that is what comes out of the mess is also crazy. The principles as to how the Night works goes against every concept of sanity while the lessons learned and the revelation revealed makes more sense than you have ever believed truth could be.
Hypersensitivity/Hyperawareness
Being overly sensitive is a symptom that intensifies the insanity. You are going to act peculiar. You are going to think and act upon nonsense. Being sensitive and aware is a good thing. But you are going to go overboard, go the wrong way first, to give birth to walking according to the balance in these areas. You’re feeling the pain of mistakes beyond the norm and into another place that makes you act crazy like Martin Luther did. But you are going to think/feel that your evaluation of what you have done is correct and so you are going to think that others feel the same way. They don’t and when you don’t keep it to yourself, you are going to make yourself look like a nutcase. You will suffer and be broken through it and reach desperately for God to live in you so it doesn’t happen anymore. You must be shown in every way how life is too complicated to figure out the balance and God has to do it.
A Hidden Work
We have a God who hides Himself and the work that is being done in us is mostly hidden. In your secret world you imagine you are alone and being sneaky or covert a great deal of the time. Your hyper, overthinking brain intensifies these emotions to do a deep work in you.
Sleep
Sleep? What sleep? Everything and anything that goes bump in the Night is going to keep you awake a lot. A nap during the day? What day? It’s all night so it does bump during the day too. You will have to let go of your health concepts of need for sleep and put that on the alter too. You will initially have many 3:00 AM, "the mystic hour", appointments.
Mind Chatter/Static
The constant talking that is going on in our heads is not something we’re very aware of normally. Most of the bad things we think just float on by very quickly and we don’t think about what we just thought about. But in the Night where there is no rest or peace, we are made very conscious of our thoughts and they torment us. Then on top of this we begin to over think and look at things the wrong way. We relive scenes from our days over and over. Self condemnation over what people might have been thinking about something we did or said takes on an alarming twist. We are somehow made to believe that we have done something wrong that not only wasn’t wrong, it wasn’t a moral issue that needed to be reasoned about. When we get our wits about us we look at what just happened and are blown away at the power of words to make us feel that we are in a sane frame of mind and believing something utterly ridiculous. How does it do that? This same power can make our mind dwell on a pair of shoes someone is wearing that are just plain shoes, like work boots, and our mind is remaining stuck on them and we are deciding whether there is something wrong with them. You snap out of the train of thought and look at what just happened and it’s nuts. It’s just ridiculous nonsense like an Alice in Wonderland scene. One 16th century mystic cut his tongue out because his spoken words had been used in this way to cause him such horrible grief. There was no spiritual guide around to tell him that he would be getting past the torment of an intensified mind as it gave birth to the renewed mind. Someone needed to tell this poor soul that these things he was thinking were only his reality and it really wasn’t that bad. This is a birth. Your mind is being made to go the wrong way and over think on its way to becoming the very efficient, on target, balanced renewed mind.
"Manna"
Something a person will notice about the desert is that the hidden manna only works to give them something to survive for the day it is given on. After that the words don’t do anything. The words are stored away in them and they are looking for more the next day.
"Judgment Day"
I think we all at one time or another envisioned this day as standing before a judge and him listing off all our sins and us feeling bad or something. It’s much worse than this. It’s a much deeper work to clean us up and transform us into a different person who doesn’t live this way anymore.
I like to refer to this process as Scrooge’s Night with the Ghost of Christmas Past. He was in love with his money and one Night a ghost took him back through his past and tormented him over all the things he had done that were so hurtful. He awoke from the Night acting like Santa Claus.
Revelation tells us something about the end times. The most popular discussions as we’ve tried to interpret this book have been over the antichrist, the beast, the false prophet and the earthquakes. People are looking for the signs. People have written a lot of books and made movies about what they think these things mean. The rest of the Bible and how history has played out is our clue. We have got to stop being so physical minded, focusing on the hundreds of physical signs that are happening. There is something bigger than these. The final earthquake is something spiritual. There isn’t going to be a meteorite hitting the planet in 2012 destroying everyone. Even if there was a monster with horns and 666 on its forehead lurking in the deep ready to rise up, we don’t get to die. The battle is with “principalities and powers”. The worst part of the battle started at the beginning of time unseen and always will be primarily unseen. As we approach the time of Armageddon, God will have made the world so aware of Him, by doing heaven only knows what, that He, not Christians, will finally be on the 6:00 news. Buildings will still be standing. The satellites are still going to be working. The internet will still be all connected all over the world. Just as the Greek language became universal and the Romans roads went everywhere, the world has been made ready once again. God has something to say because there’s something He wants done.
With that in mind, these are the attackers in the battle, the giants in the Promise Land that we have to conquer:
"Antichrist"
The spirit of antichrist is all teachings that are not out of God’s mind. If we are to win the battle against antichrist, we all must be His wife, one with His mind, so that every word we say is from God’s mind. 'Christ' means THE word, THE truth, and the only way to have every word we utter be 'Christ' is to have reached the place where we see as God sees and think as He thinks and know the truth about everything.
‘Satan often does this [tells lies] during a dark night. God is leading us through a hard but necessary journey – and silence is a vital aspect of this journey – but Satan will tempt us to believe God is being cruel or that God is abandoning us or that we have somehow pushed God away or ‘lost’ the Holy Spirit or any number of lies. The truth is, God is simply calling us into maturity. He is preparing us to drive ‘blind,’ without sensual support, through the night of faith. His silence, then, is not abandonment or agreement with the accuser’s twisted logic. It is a necessary weaning of sensual support.”
Christian legalism is antichrist, the antithesis of truth. It is taking truth and adding to it and twisting it until it becomes untruth. The natural mind is very easily made to go this way. Saul had been convinced that through legalistic thinking he was doing the will of God. The legalist is very sure he is doing the will of God but the opposite is true. The natural mind doesn’t know God. Blind Christians are legalists filling themselves up with wrong concepts about right and wrong. The legalist thinks he’s being good finding all this bad and staying away from it or using spiritual warfare against it. He has made his path to God focusing on where 'Satan' is and staying away from that place or fighting it. This is not seeking God, it’s seeking 'Satan' and it can grow and get very out of hand. The legalist is closing himself off to the God in things by focusing on finding where Satan is in everything and then rejecting it along with God. After running this program for awhile, it becomes very automatic and self sustaining and it grows. The legalist is having all of God camouflaged by 'Satan' and for some this becomes a very frightening deep descent into hell becoming increasing more bizarre. At first you started off finding the bad and not seeing the good that you need then your thinking can be messed with and make you see bad when there is no bad. Since the whole process of living the Christian life started off with the Ten Commandments and was slowly added to and twisted, you don’t question the rightness of it when it starts to go haywire. As it continues to grow, it starts to destroy your life and you go over the edge. As you look out, your eyes play tricks on you and you see gross images in the middle of the day. The more of the Bible that you know the more there is to add to and twist and then you drop into the nightmare.
Legalism is modern day Phariseeism. It’s being spiritual and law-abiding gone amuck and Satan can logic you right out of your sonship with his accusations using your own concepts of being righteous. Your faith goes into a crisis in a Dark Night only because you added to the Bible and 'Satan' is holding you to those things you added. Now you have to let those things go or you will remain stuck in his web. It's a game you have to see.
Christians can be very easily made to walk away from good. As soon as the Christian legalist thinks he’s found the bad then out goes the whole thing. The legalist can’t see beyond the bad, can’t see the reality of whatever it is. God has allowed 'Satan' to do this so that we would go the wrong way first, seeking Satan, seeing him and finding him, and falling into a tangled web, making a mess of everything, then go seeking after God, get the renewed mind, enter the spiritual marriage, so He could live our life and get us out of the hellhole. Let’s not go this way anymore. Accept that there are very good things mixed up with bad and don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Be broken and open and let God lead you to what is good and keep you away from what truly is all bad. Seek God. See God. Find God. The renewed mind of a bride is the mind of Christ that knows the truth, the right way to go to find the treasure, the straight path to the Kingdom.
"False Prophet"
These are lies about what is going on and lies about the future. These are all the mirages in the desert that looked like they were the door out. These are all the places you go that look like they are the right way, all the wrong ways that you have to go first to give birth to the right way. The false prophet is all the “what if”s in the dark night that come into your head and scare you about the future. Don't watch the news. It creates an artificial fear that becomes paranoia. The real fears of the moment are bad enough without artificial ones about what could be.
The false prophet speaks words to stop the vision God gives men to create the way to Heaven and sends them another way.
Christ in you, the true Prophet will tell you how to go straight down the road to heaven, no wrong turns, no detours. What doesn't go 'right' will be seen as right. You may curse the pain and get angry but you will see clearly how it is God sending you to these places and completely understand why.
The Tibetan monks make mandalas, sand paintings. After they spend hours of tedious work making something so incredibly beautiful, they destroy it. During the journey of the Night you will put great effort into things you think will ease your pain that will end up a mirage. The sand paintings did the foreshadow work of the same principles and lessons. The Tibetan monks have been the largest group experiencing the deepest of the foreshadows of the time when the whole world enters the Great Tribulation and with their witness to the future came unspeakable sufferings. The stronger the testimony of truth the greater the battle to destroy it. But this causes it to be more until one day it grows so powerful it overcomes.
Sometimes you will see an overlap of the Anti-Christ and the False Prophet principles at work. I think one of the worst parts about going down all the wrong roads to find truth is putting the worst interpretations on the motives behind what someone has done. These false images of reality are the false testimony of the False Prophet and you have nothing but a mouth full of sand... not food.
There are those who as Jacobs manipulate with guilt. They construct a sentencing using guilty until proven innocent without a trial. You are brought under their control as they play with your emotions and until you are wise and can see the tactic, your mind is immediately tied in a knot and can't think straight and your instant reaction is to cower to them. You haven't done what they are so eloquently and harshly are accusing you of but they have succeeded in raising themselves to a place of authority, putting you under their control by a mind game to confuse you. The dark night of the soul breaks all False Prophet/Anti-Christ Jacobing. Every self-righteous silver tongued devil who capture the hearts of men will be exposed... and one's who use the Bible to control the trusting ones will be sent a much greater thorn to stop them.
"The Beast"
The beast is what makes us old and ugly. It is our bad eating habits, bad hygiene, health issues, being messy and disorganized, wasteful, breaking and mistreating things, losing things, our addictions, our ego, pride, jealousy, selfishness, morbid thoughts, evil plots. The beast is the behavior of a wild, unmannered animal.
The beast is what makes people slow down to see what they can see when there’s an accident with ambulances and fire trucks on the side of the road. Don’t feed the beast in you. Stop looking.
"Earthquakes"
The whole of the dark night is an earthquake because you’re foundation is shaken and you have nothing to hold onto to be okay. You also feel tremors in the Night and they are very frightening. What is so frightening about physical earthquakes is that you don’t know how long they will last and how bad they will get and how much damage they will cause. It’s all completely out of your control. Your mind goes a mile a minute looking for a safe place mentally, emotionally and physically but all you can do it hold on and wait.
The foundation of your beliefs concerning the Christian life and the interpretation of Scripture are shaken. You start to spiral down and there’s nothing to grab and hold onto to keep you from falling. True knowledge of God is slowly making its home in you and you will find yourself built on an unshakable rock.
“Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth”
In the Night you may do a lot of crying out for God’s mercy, sobbing because of the grief and getting angry at God for not listening to you as if He were heartless.
You’ve heard that there is an up side of anger. Anger has strength and can make good things happen. There is also an up side of tears. They are our deepest prayers to God. Hold on to this when these emotions come up in the Night. Experiencing these emotions is not any fun but when you go to those places then come back to yourself don’t allow your mind to say that they are bad. Untwist the untruth bad into truth. God is not upset with you for being human.
The “Unleashing of Satan for a Season”
We evolve through pain. Revelation's reference to Satan having been bound and being loosed for a season means the worst of negative things happening to us so we finish evolving and are made ready for heaven. Satan being thrown in the everlasting pit means all negative things will be gone forever. There is an angel that is playing a role. He has put on a costume and doing what God needs him to do. He is God's highest, most powerful angel. There are many angels playing these negative roles to get the job done. There are no evil angels. There is no evil being called Satan. Only costumes and roles in a play.
“Prayers Saved in Bowls”
“…they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.”
The dark night of the soul is described by Teresa of Avila as a prayer walk. The way you pray keeps changing. Eventually you learn what it means to be praying without ceasing. There is an ache deep down inside whether you have been made aware of it or not, that is constantly calling for your Love. Prayer has become a feeling that words cannot describe. The prayers are all saved up and answered at the end when you as a butterfly are released from your cocoon and spread your glorious wings, your crown.
We Are Given “a White Stone”
He who overcomes the attackers of the Night receives a white stone with his new name on it…God gives you a diamond ring and you take His name.
You are not the same person you were. The fires of hell in the Night eventually produces a white stone, like the heat and pressure of the earth turning coal into diamonds. You are learning their games, seeing the antichrist, the beast and the false prophet, setting you free from their being able to attack you anymore. You’re becoming the bride who walks with her Husband in pure truth, only the right way. “…and they will walk with me in white because they are worthy [a worthy opponent and a pearl of great price]. He who overcomes will be clothed thus, in white garments.”
The name on the white stone is only known by you because the work was hidden and you where not able to tell every detail of it, now can you even begin to remember every detail. What also makes it unknown is that your path follows the same principles as everyone else's but every detail of it is entirely your own and no other person experiences any part of the Night exactly like you. You are unique in every way just as stars, snowflakes and diamonds.
Helpful Passages
“Forgetting one’s self, a conversion of the heart or man’s turning away from his habitual selfish towards another in love, necessitate a certain amount of the death process that the interior desert alone can teach us. But the desert is not the end of man’s wanderings. He is heading through the experience in the desert toward the Promise Land. ‘Heaven is within,’ said Jesus Christ.” The desert experience, a dark night of the soul, purges man of many false delusions and is the recreating process “into the New Man.”
“It happens often, when a soul is drawn to God in the period of greater silence and solitude, that there is a period when a person cannot go out, cannot feel the warm rapport with others. One’s interior is so totally fixed upon God that such a person feels ‘out of it’; human commerce seems useless and banal.” Evagruis of the desert said: "I leave men in order to find them.”
“Man must learn, as Thomas Merton has so often suggested in his spiritual writings, a sense of poverty and of a ‘sickness’ that ultimately is a healthy sign of a detached pilgrim in journey to the fatherland. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ Only when the contemplative enters into a vivid experience of his own utter poverty and sickness, of his incompleteness before his Maker, can he begin to experience something of God’s richness.” God reveals Himself in the darkness “through a new way of knowing.”
“Into this supreme and dazzling darkness we pray that we may come, that by not seeing and not knowing we may see and know him who is beyond all seeing and knowing through this very act of not seeing or knowing.”
“…you are not to retreat no matter what comes to pass.”
“And for anyone who is in Christ, this is a new creation; the old creation has gone.” You are not the same when you come out of the Night. “The experience of all mystics, a union in love that begets the mystic a burning desire to serve the world.”
“At the center of our deepest awareness, beyond our habitual pre-conditioning of sense and emotional and intellectual responses, we are gradually purified of our false ego-orientation in order to open ourselves to the Allness of God.”
We are shown in every area of life that we are nothing. Abiding alone all our fruit is to remain in hell. None of it gets us ready for heaven. But abiding in Him and growing in our relationship with Him, all that we do is creating heaven.
“Brother Lawrence [Practicing the Presence of God] lived with chronic gout…eventually developed into an ulcerated leg…in a world without cars and wheelchairs…that forced him to walk with a limp.” “but he didn’t spend time writing about his physical condition; to him, the spiritual was the truly difficult one.”
“A few years later, Teresa became very ill and was nearly killed by fantastic methods of treatment. After one ‘doctor’ was finished with her, she slipped into a coma for three days and without any sign of life. When she came to, she was partially paralyzed, and three years later, she was still unable to walk. Her difficulties were more than physical however. During her thirties, Teresa experienced severe spiritual travail. The woman whose prayer life has inspired so many actually gave up prayer for a short while because her prayer life caused her such pain. She wrote about this period with horror, believing it to be her worse lapse into sin; but during that time, prayer was so difficult to practice she said she would have preferred heavy penance to prayer. Teresa once wrote to God, ‘If this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so many enemies.’ Thus when Teresa wrote about the difficulties encountered in deepening one’s spiritual life, she knew what she was talking about. She said, ‘What interior and exterior trials the soul suffers before entering the seventh dwelling place! Indeed, sometimes I reflect and fear that if a soul knew beforehand, its natural weakness would find it most difficult to have the determination to suffer and pass through these trials, no matter what blessings were represented by it.’” “Both the sense and the spirit, as though under an immense dark load, undergo such agony and pain that the soul would consider death a relief.” “The ‘seventh dwelling place’ as Teresa’s spiritual marriage’ through prayer. When she obtained it, another classic author, John of the Cross, was in the room.”
Thoughts for a Soul in a Dark Night
Every person’s suffering is intensified to be as bad as they can possibly handle. Do not pay attention to the outward circumstances. Do not compare. They are all horrible beyond horrible for everyone.
Focus on what God is doing, not some evil being. All beings playing a role in the process are God’s tools.
Shove the pain in a closet and don’t listen to the antichrist.
Don’t trust your eyes and your crazy thoughts. You don’t want to act on these things. You do not want to do something that you are sorry for or that bring you shame. Be still and wait. Everything flows by like a river and will go away.
Keep it simple. The only rock (truth) you really need right now to stand on is the fact that God is doing a work in you and you are learning the basic principles that will be taken out of you to help others when He is working on them.
If you are normally a very expressive and dramatic person, being still and quiet is harder for you. You tend to like to draw people’s attention. Try to keep your inner life hidden and live your outer life as normally as you possibly can as soon as you can.
After you have been in the battle for awhile it gets easier to look normal on the outside. Don’t let the attacks take you down anymore. Try not to react to the attacks. Try to remain calm and even oblivious as soon as they are not as intense and you are able.
At first you need a lot of help. Later as you get used to your new twilight home outside the box, down the rabbit hole, or whatever you want to call it, it is healthier for you to take care of yourself and look as normal as possible on the outside.
Follow your left brain and not your emotions. So what you have learned is right as much as you can. God allows some seemingly crazy stuff to happen to you but you should sense that it is good and that it does makes sense. The understanding is just beyond you right now.
Remember Moses did exactly what he was told and it went badly first before it went right. You have no where else to go but to God no matter what.
When the noblemen had to dunk himself in the river to be healed, we learned that simple things are very significant. Don’t despise the little things or think that they are silly.
The karate kid didn’t understand why he was painting the fence and waxing the cars. Don’t need to know.
Don't be a religious legalist making things worse. Be open. This principle is taught in the story of the town that flooded and the man on the roof waiting for God to save him. Friends came by in a boat and told him to get in and he said 'No thanks, I'm waiting for God.' Then someone came by in a helicopter and dropped a ladder and told him to grab on. He said the same thing to them, "No thanks, I'm waiting for God." The man drown and when he got to heaven he asked God, "Why didn't You save me?" and God said, "I sent a boat and a helicopter?"
It is a living nightmare. You don’t feel like you are here and it’s crazy and you feel like you are nuts. But this is how this is how it’s supposed to be. There is a dusk, a midnight when it’s the worst, and a dawn and you will wake up and it will be all over forever.
“Do not grow weary; wait humbly in His presence until the door opens.”
Photo of Inca city of Machu Picchu by Magnus von Koeller, Creative Commons