Reaching the Mind of God
Through a Dark Night of the Soul
In the Biblical records we are told that the people of Earth gathered together in Babylon to build a tower to God. We can see from how they tried to do this, that according to the evolutionary level of mankind's minds at this time, this was how human beings thought they would come into the presence of God. As the story goes, God put an end to what they were doing by changing the one language everyone spoke at the time, into many different languages which sent them off in groups to spread all over the Earth.
As men had spiritual experiences and their minds and spiritual language evolved to integrate these experiences into their belief systems, they figured out that God was not a being that could be seen with physical eyes in the physical world, rather it was a spiritual part of their being that felt His presence. But the spiritual experiences were different in each of the cultures, so each group had a unique language to describe the different truths they were paranormally told and experiencing and this is how all the religions were born.
As we look back at history, the separation of mankind because of all the different evolving spiritual languages made man's story much more dramatic than just the different physical languages. And as we continued to evolve, we developed new belief systems to fit what has been categorized as different stages of mankind's worldviews, beginning with the traditional stage of cultural evolution, where religions were born, then adding the modern stage with its worldviews, then the postmodern. All the religions and belief systems that were developed in the earlier stages of our spreading apart are still now present in the world. And from the beginning, the separation into the different groups has been the source of a great deal of suffering.
But the story of the Tower of Babel will end well. There is an evolutionary process going on. Not the one about monkeys turning into men. But the development of the rest of the human mind that is going to show them the answer that will bring us all back together. In the midst of the fallout from the separate languages, there have been the deep thinkers, the philosophers on a wave of the evolution of the human mind who seek the real truth. Today they can see the wave, see that they are at the front of the evolutionary process with a passionate mission to help others get there and make the world a better place. What these men have discovered is that pieces of the truth are hiding in each of the developing belief systems and they are looking for the right way to integrate them together. They are outside of all the current belief systems and developing a new language to describe reality from this place that is past the others, at the front of mankind's place in the evolutionary process. In this place you see something. To experience an evolving mind, is to experience finding solutions to the everyday problems of life. Somehow they get fixed. And this shows you that the evolutionary process of the mind leads mankind to the answers for the bigger problems on the planet caused by the behavior due to of our minds being separated.
Finding the right pieces and putting them together correctly has also involve different groups. You get outside of all of the belief systems, seeing how they each have a piece of the truth, and you find another level of separated minds going though the process. Then you get to the end and find the one bridge that everyone has to cross. There is one truth. The one that is in the mind of God. The one that everyone has to believe in order to not be separate but work together. None of the belief systems on any of the levels have it. You have to reach the top. And it's only this one that is the answer that will not just fix the world but transfer it into much more than we can imagine.
It is a highly evolved mind that sees that it is outside looking for the answers. Which means there's more evolving involved in having the ability to see which of the pieces from all the different belief systems are the right ones. Integrating the right pieces the mind sees the bridge out of the hell condition the earth has become as a result of separate selves all hurting one another. Those on the wave have a deep desire, the higher calling, to figure out their part in the evolutionary process of getting everyone out of the present box of belief systems which leads to a better place in hell for some but not God's goal.
What the evolutionary path teaches you is what needs to happen to everyone. They need to go through a dark night of the soul and wake up which means having the rest of your mind starting to function so you can see what is wrong with everyone that is creating hell on earth, that needs to change, or rather be changed by everyone evolving.
As you experienced the dark night, before you were so sure you were doing the right thing and thinking the right way. Life worked until it didn't. Man's ego is certain it is right and everyone else is wrong and this has been reinforced for centuries by experiences of spiritual or supernatural activity. Each belief system had its unique paranormal activity that matches the belief system that developed from the original paranormal thing that happened to someone that started the religion. This ongoing activity makes groups of people very sure what they believe is right and in many cases must be upheld or is in danger of God's wrath. As long as the supernaturally reinforced system fits their experience of life, they stay in that system.
From outside the box looking in, if everyone's beliefs are being confirmed by the supernatural phenomenas, and their beliefs are different, then it makes no sense to believe that these phenomenas are confirmation that the truth anyone has is THE truth. To see this experientially, you just have to step in the shoes of another belief system and feel one of their supernatural experiences. Even if someone doesn't subscribe to a religion, all belief systems are the result of paranormal activity guiding them to what they think. So now you see what the evolved mind's eye sees from outside the box of belief systems.
Many people believe in God because there is a spiritual part of us that can feel Him. It comes with a warm fuzzy side feeling that is blocked in a dark night along with life becoming very difficult and not enjoying it. Their mind starts to reach for answers to be okay again only to be met with more questions and entering a darker place. This causes their mind's eye to evolve to be able to see the solution. You go through a supernatural honeymoon or paranormal ecstasies and warm fuzzies so you have solid experiences of a bigger reality, Bethel Rocks, to hold on to when all hell breaks loose in your life and you are greeted by the ghost of past negative experiences and present shortcomings that are in the way of having a perfect life.
In the place of aloneness where you experience more growing pains as you reach desperately for a good life, God's being is working on evolving you much faster. The Dark Night of a Soul, the more intense evolutionary process, changes a person's language that defines reality making it clearer and clearer, starting with a mystical language arrived at by anyone who goes through a dark night of the soul regardless of their original worldview. You are reaching to for the place where your mind's eye can see what God sees. It's gaining a more accurate ability to put the right pieces from all the developing belief systems, the pieces that make them partially right, all together correctly. The evolving of the mind's eye is becoming less partially right, until it is able to see what is exactly right and it finds the door, the teachings that are the bridge out of the dark night process and back into feeling warm fuzzies again and enjoying life.
Whatever we believe is according to the level of the evolution of our mind's eye and we're all in different places needing to be brought into the one thinking that is accurate. In order to do this a person has to see clearly how the evolutionary process works using pictures from life and seeing what you are becoming, what it means as a human being to have the rest of your mind functioning so that you have the ability to see everything like God does, and operate as a fully developed human being.
One of the first lessons you learn is that it is ego that is in the way. Not just evolution's way but your way. You are in your own way of being happy. To get out of your way the suffering will involve humiliation and being stripped of thinking you have something to be proud of that you did and experiencing a spiritual death that will feel like you are living an eternity in hell. The strings of words in your mind you use to explain the evolutionary process that is happening is being wired and rewired into your mind as you move from one level to the next seeing more clearly and with each shift up to a higher level you pass through a storm and then crawl out of a box and look back where you were which is now lost. You don't belong there anymore. For many this has a huge effect on relationships as you move beyond what is no longer needed, what no longer works. These break ups are a type of the hundreds if not thousands of little and big 'deaths,' holes in hell you fall into where you wish you were dead.
Besides the pain of what our egos are going through to be evolved, there is another reason the pain of a dark night is felt so deeply in the core of our being that it feels like a death. We are what we eat is not just about physical food. It's also the words we feed on. We become what we think and our lives manifest themselves accordingly. What we believe is the truth keeps us feeling okay and and keeps our life moving in a way that makes us feel secure. The reason for this is because human beings are a person with a mind that is organically like God's mind. Thinking of men as immature baby gods explains a lot about their behavior towards one another in history. We are part of His being that is learning and becoming like Him and His being is running a program that is moving the entire physical universe through the process and in the meantime there have been atrocities against one another. God knows the truth and operates perfectly and we act like we are perfect while at the same time underneath we know we aren't. What is underneath is intensified by making thousands of painful mistakes in the a dark night. They break us and the pain causes us to run for answers to escape going through this. The pain is also the growing pains of evolving and having the ability to recognize the answers. The spiritual part of a human that is like God's that is evolving to have the truth that is in His mind, has the clearer understanding of the truth put in it step by painful step. Because we have the DNA of attributes of God and are growing up to connect to Him and see everything as He does along with some powerful abilities, we are innately a big deal. And having our immature inaccurate beliefs disturbed by the growing process constantly pulling out the rug from under us, causes us indescribable pain emotionally and physically. We are very special to God and His being has to be very careful moving us through the process as quickly as is possible for maximum growth which means we have many moments of feeling like we are on the edge of going insane from the pain.
As part of this divine nature DNA that us baby gods have, ego thinks it does what is right and it is certain it's right concerning the truth and everyone else is wrong. This is a baby gods security until they are ready to be pushed out of the next and put through the Dark Night process. For all of history all belief systems have been an illusion. Not only has their truth not been THE truth, THE truth has been something that was not possible for their unevolved mind's eye to see. But in the developing all the different belief systems, a piece of the truth was being developed getting all the right pieces ready for a fully evolved mind to put together.
Many have formed new belief systems by integrating pieces from all the others. This means taking what is believed to be partially right and leaving behind what is thought to be incorrect. This integrating process is evolving and to the place where the correct pieces are taken and the correct ones left behind. If everything is holographic and our individual Dark Nights of the Soul, leaps in our spiritual transformation, are a smaller picture of something that all of mankind will be entering, then a global Dark Night of the Soul would be everyone very quickly reaching a very high level of the evolution of human being. It would mean a new world mankind has been dreaming of. The goal of evolution could be closer than anyone has thought.
A Diamond Mind
The ancient peoples of Earth knew that there was a time coming when the Earth would be overturned and people would face a darkness within and life as we know it would change. Mankind may have evolved into this time. People are having their lives interrupted and in some cases completely halted by depression. On October, 2011, it was reported that 1 in 10 Americans were taking anti-depressant medication in the hopes of gaining their life back. Sometimes the medicine works but as in the case of Robin Williams and thousands of others, it doesn't help and life can't go on. He was a brilliant man who was unable to find the help he needed.
The help is two fold. You need to feel like you belong and this means finding a place of support where others like yourself are working together to get through each day of your Dark Night. What you do together is keep moving by finding the clearer answers you need, speaking the language that is progressing from religious and mystical to include a scientific understanding that depression and suffering and Dark Nights are the evolutionary process at work. Part of the mystic's 'union' with God is arriving at the place where you are able to communicate with Him because you are on the same page believing the same thing about what life is, just like the relationships we form with other people who think like we do. If you are able to make it thought having your mind upgraded through the entire series of progressively less inaccurate views of 'truth' so that it had the one real truth, you can have a conversation with God that is authentic.
Something that is beautiful about the mystical language is the use of pictures to teach and spiritual principle. The teaching language in a Dark Night of the Soul is a language of diamonds. Whatever the particular experience, each person has a unique way of describing it, a different facet for that diamond. And as you hear each facet, the diamond becomes clearer. Different versions of Dark Nights of the Soul are each a facet of a clear seeing of what a Dark Night is. It's through the minds of different world views that this accurate definition of what they are emerges. An important diamond to see using your higher 'seeing ability' is that the facets of the diamond of truth come from everywhere and from every level of the process of the evolution of a mind.
Those who experience a Dark Night of the Soul speak an evolved language. New words are added from unexpected places when your foundation gets destroyed and you are open. Then you move to a higher level, bringing some of the old with you that takes on a new meaning in the context of new data in the higher level where you build another diamond. Then it is destroyed again and you are lost again and have to look at the pieces once again with new eyes, picking up pieces and having them evolve again and once again leaving something behind that no longer serves you.
Then one day, what you have put together is not disturbed quite as much. It feels more like there’s just some refinement needed to make it match what is in the mind of God.
An Integral Mind
A basic principle you experience as you evolve is that there is no clear cut line. It’s not one or the other, it’s an integration of both giving birth to something new. Like combining blue and yellow paint and ending up with green.
An example of this principle at work to evolve our thinking would be that some people who have experienced a Dark Night feel that the term Dark Night of the Soul belongs to the more dramatic Dark Nights that last for decades and once you are out, there are no more. But it is pretty clear as you look at the internet that people experiencing periods of difficulty only lasting months identify with St. John’s teachings and are calling what they are going through a Dark Night.
It has become cloudy. The line between what is and what isn’t is fuzzy. As truth evolves into what the truth really is, it becomes cloudy and you are lost again, then the pieces come together as your mind is able to integrate them. As you see a bigger, more uncloudy picture of what evolution is, you see how both of these truths concerning what constitutes a Dark Night of the Soul fit together.
The big picture is that all suffering indicates that evolution is taking place at some level. Since suffering is growing pains then long periods of more intense suffering indicate more changes taking place. And the suffering itself, because it makes you stronger, becomes a catalyst for more evolutionary growth to take place. This is why longer periods of pain without letting up can potentially do more.
The question isn’t ‘should shorter periods of suffering be labeled Dark Nights?’ Evolve past this by coming from a higher view. The more evolved question is ’what is the difference between shorter and longer periods of suffering that people are calling a Dark Night of the Soul?’ Whether suffering lasts moments or decades and, more importantly, how deeply the pain is felt, determines how much evolution of your being has undergone. You get emotionally exhausted and reach the end of all you can handle by how strong and how long the pain lasts and you hit bottom and bounce to the top.
If the time the ancients have heard for centuries is not here, then we may start passing through a fully evolved Dark Night of the Soul process, one giant leap, a highly sophisticated concentrated version of the evolutionary process, that would do something to a human that is beyond something we have every imagined. It would be what has been pictured by the Dark Nights in history only exponentially more intense, where everything that can go wrong, goes wrong, and men experience all the pain of it as intensely as each human being can handle, and learn everything that can be learned, spiritual eyes are wide open and the language is completely accurate, matching God's. Evolution has been very slow but if the Dark Nights are a pattern that is being shown to us. This huge leap for human beings is very possible and could happen any time. Many have been trained to think integrally and this makes them ready to take this leap into the future.
When the diamond mind evolves it gets past the game of putting data together and moving higher, it recognizes its home among integral philosophers. It clearly sees that this wasn’t just about their own mind evolving but about how the world has been evolving. It sees the potential of having a mind that doesn’t choose sides but has been trained to integrate them. It sees the incredible value of a human beings higher ability to collect the facets and put them together and the next step in the evolution takes place as something new emerges.
The integral mind has the ability to look at data and put pieces together and look at what life is through new glasses and then develop the worldview for the next higher level.
A more highly evolved integral mind does this better and is more effective in making hell on Earth a better place, because a more highly evolved mind has the ability to pull in data and string thoughts together to address the more evolved problems of life as a result of life evolving.
If you think evolution’s purpose is to move us in the direction of finding the fully evolved truth that’s the real truth, becoming good and better without bad, and manifesting and enjoying beautiful and more beautiful without ugliness, then it follows that human minds are developing the ability to make that happen. The more fully evolved mind will start to see that it’s going to be able to find the pieces that are put together that the real truth emerges out of and it’s going to begin to have an idea what the world is evolving into.
Opposites are at work, both constructive and destructive. On number of levels mankind is getting ready to hit a wall. The more fully developed mind operating integrally with fewer and fewer errors will recognize that at some point the survival of mankind will require the ability to put all the right data together that is needed to give birth to the worldview that will rescue us.
Taking this another step forward, it would make sense that this mind will eventually match the worldview of God, the origin of evolutionary process that we are all a part of. When a human being has the right words in the right order wired into their minds that match God’s thinking, they will know the way out of the hell on Earth man has made, into making heaven on Earth.
A Scientific Evolutionary View
Our physical bodies are only a fraction of who we are and the organic changes taking place during a Dark Night of the Soul are making us more conscious of this other part of who we are along with our additional abilities. Rather than looking at a Dark Night of the Soul as something that is just religious or spiritual, it is clearer to be conscious of it being something is scientific. The most evolved language is primarily scientific. A 'union’ with or ‘spiritual marriage’ to God is mystical language that can be evolved into scientific language, becoming something that can be clearly understood. What exactly is the goal of our evolution is only unclear and believed to be unknowable while your mind's eye isn't evolved enough to see it. We say that because we are baby gods that can't see anything wrong with us. Because God is perfect, we come up with beliefs that justify our condition. We can't see is justified by saying that what we have been trying to see is unseeable by humans. Ultimate reality is unknowable. This way we think we have arrived at a profound truth and are satisfied.
Every religion thinks they have the real truth. We're all born in one of these illusions that thinks life works a certain way. The intense Dark Night completely renders these false lives useless. They remove you from church to be guided along a journey among all the other belief systems that have the other pieces into clearer truth, with the end of the path being the real truth. If you stay in the most evolved form of a Dark Night of the Soul or leave and come back until the job is finished, your mind is able to see what’s really going on exactly the way God does. It means that you move from religious to mystical, to philosophical to scientific. Each level of our evolution moves us out of a box where we can look at all the other boxes we where in and compare them and see what we took from each one of them to get into the next outer box. As our mind evolves its ability to do this better and faster evolves like a computer's operating system being upgraded and being able to run more sophisticated software.
Looking at what is going on scientifically means seeing this technological picture and seeing God's being as the larger operating system that is downloading the information and doing the upgrades.
The Next Paradigm
The language of each paradigm of the growth of consciousness has specific teaching pictures that go with it. From Jesus' teachings we know that part of how a mind is taught and evolves to clearer truth is through the use of pictures from life. As we grow, a new picture is added and integrated with the previous pictures, which are made cleared by the new 'facet' as they move to higher levels. A picture of the evolutionary process from the Old Testament would be the Temple's outer and inner rooms, and Jacob's Bethel experience of the angels going up and down the stairs letting him know that something bigger is going on. New Testament pictures would be ego dying on the cross and being reborn, or deaths and resurrections we experience over and over, the camel going through the eye of a needle or the mustard seed becoming the tree, or how we are vessels or jars of clay which charismatics and energy healers all experience. Mystical pictures are the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, St John's ladder and St Theresa's interior castle pictures of the stages of the Dark Night. More recent pictures of St. John's and Theresa's pictures have been boxes and levels. Getting out side of the box and observing is seen clearer by adding the picture of a play. Life is the drama on the stage that keeps being rearranged and the one who is seeing what is going on is both backstage observing themselves onstage. Facets of diamonds integrated with the yellow and blue paint making green, make the experience of the transcending and including experience of putting the pieces together clearer. Vortexes or storms of confusion then the sun comes out and there is more clarity. Learning not to throw the baby out with the bathwater as you collected the pieces of the truth from all the different partially true places. The computer picture 'facet' was another picture that was needed in order to see truth clearer. The polliwog to the frog and puppet to a real boy are pieces integrated with the caterpillar to a butterfly all pictures to describe the mind's understanding of some facets of the significance of the individual evolution, what they are becoming and their new life, taking place in the leap stage of our evolution we call a Dark Night. Added to this is bread not being taken out of the oven too soon, or it falls so the time in the oven or cocoon feels like an eternity in hell. Everyone has pictures that make clearer how the evolutionary process of the mind works and that give someone a life raft to hold onto in the storm. All the pictures become facets to one last big diamond of pictures at the top level where it is seen clearly how they matched each of the levels of evolution. Shifts and paradigms are the vocabulary of evolutionary growth to new levels. The facets are similar but unique.
The technological pictures are part of the teaching language of the next paradigm or clearer belief system. The next big shift involves the evolution of our definition of 'evolution' and the language will describe in a clearer way what is going on and how evolution is transforming us into a human being whose is not only part of the life of the physical environment but whose spiritual layer is fully functioning and has become aware that it is where God is able to talk to Him, spiritual face to spiritual face.
There's a clearer less mystical and more scientific language of the truth about who God is, and who we are, what is going on, and where we are going that could only be seen at this technological time of mankind's history.
And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.
Photo by Buddy8d, Creative Commons