Mysticism: Then and Now
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
Many believe that St. Paul of the first century was one of the first great mystics. His journey to 'become all things to all people" and his experience of "it is no longer I who live, but Christ" began the day that God blinded him and knocked him from his horse on the way to Damascus where he would was continuing the job he thought God wanted him to do which was to capture Christians to be killed. This upheaval of his life sent him into the desert where he relearned everything the Pharisees had taught him. In the 16th century, St. John of the Cross entered what he coined a "Dark Night of the Soul" when his own church began persecuting him for doing what he thought God wanted, which actually was the right thing to be doing. As it was then, it is now. It may not be as dramatic as this, but consistently the mystic journey begins with being moved off your foundation, which is your belief system, and this existential crisis sending your soul to a place where it feels lost, desperately looking for the footing of a world view or the truths which define how human beings live their lives.
Both then and now, in this broken and open, lost state, the process orchestrates your life to systematically rearrange the words in your mind that describe your belief system, adding new words, making more clear what you have that are partially correct, while throwing away what is no longer needed. And you shift from one level to the next on your way to the top level, where you will have a God-view of reality, the truth about everything which you didn't have the ability to see until your mind was "renewed" (Biblical language) or evolved (scientific language) and you become a human being that is operating with their higher human faculties functioning making them a different kind of person.
What is critical to see now is the differences between both St. Paul’s understanding of the experience which was recorded in the Bible and St. John of the Cross’ understanding of the experience which he wrote in his book, A Dark Night of the Soul, to what a mystic can experience today. These differences have to do with living in a more highly evolved world where the interpretation of their two mystical languages becomes more clear.
There is an old joke about a man who kept a Bible in his locker and took it out each day to read it. One day someone said, “Haven’t you finished that book yet?” Behind the Christian’s laugh is the understanding of spiritual growth or human evolution causing a deeper and clearer understanding of the verses in the Bible and any other book with deeper teachings. These words are timeless because they evolve along with the evolution of our minds. God first gave man the Old Testament, and then when he reached a point in his evolution, He gave him the New Testament which was a radical change from the Old, removing sacrifices while retaining and updating what would still be needed and adding new words to give deeper insights into mankind's life as it progresses and becomes more complex.
Mystics over the centuries have added many new words to the experience of spiritual growth to describe more the more advanced states and experiences that have been taking place. Many today are documenting the steps involved, or the places one passes through, that are a part of a paranormal phenomena that is universally being called a Dark Night of the Soul after its roots in the 16th century. The phenomena intensifies life, especially its challenges and trials, which then cause a person to stop an look at what is going on, resulting in a huge leap in their evolutionary growth.
Dark Nights vary based on your original belief system. A very important difference between the 16th century mystics of the Catholic Church and those who are passing through a Dark Night today is the updated understanding of what they call “the negative state.” Many Catholic mystics reported that their primary suffering was due to the feeling that God abandoned them and that the negative words, what they described as "moral dereliction," "lower impulses," "unworthy ideas," "awakened vices," "sinful suggestions," "torment by visions of fiends," "obscene words and gestures inviting you to lust" — all of these made them think God was upset with them and they felt humiliated for being so sinful when they had been so holy and so useful to the Church. They attributed much of it to Satan saying, “the devils make a football of the soul.” Because of where their minds start, their desire in a Dark Night is to find the feelings of God’s presence and form a “union with the Absolute” or the “Infinite Will.” This is as far as they go, and as far as they can make the leap with the partial truths they are holding on to. The process is more evolved now for those who let go and are open to another even more radical human change.
For anyone in a Dark Night, the pain of the negative circumstances of your life and the negative words in your mind can make you want to be dead even if you don’t believe that God has abandoned you or that He’s angry. You don’t even need to believe in God to find yourself in some level of the unimaginably miserable Dark Night of the Soul. We’re all human with the same human feelings regardless of our belief systems. The pain of guilt and humiliation for not being the person you want to be doesn't have to have anything to do with what God thinks. It's enough pain all by itself. The Dark Night phenomena that evolves humans is an onslaught of negative things coming from all directions that changes you into a person who is more loving and caring and who wants a life that is meaningful. It’s a “negative state” for everyone that involves life not working so that you stop and look at it and ask deeper questions and find answers. It “purifies” everyone beliefs about life and what’s important. If allowed to progress, the process can become so paranormal and extraordinary, you will know that God is taking you through a extraordinarily brilliant and precisely orchestrated process. This isn't becoming religious. It's a scientific fact of the evolutionary process.
It’s the fundamental nature of evolution to experience having problems, making poor decisions, going the wrong way, and undergoing a lot of stress and the discomfort of growing pains, in order for your mind to evolve and have the ability to find the right way. Most people know this but it takes passing through a Dark Night of the Soul, making this quantum evolutionary leap of the mind, to clearly see the full evolutionary story from the beginning to the end. We are living in the time now where we can complete the process. There is no more deliberate, self inflicted masochism of religion. The process has become effortless. It's no longer about doing something to get it started. You can be drafted and dragged through the ordeal with no say so as to how it starts and when it ends. Life is being removing from people like a thief in the night (2 Peter 3:10). We do not need to live in a monastery, separated from the world so there is no distraction from focusing on the path. People are now paranormally removed from the world a more sophisticated way and finds that far more growing pains are felt by being paranormally emotionally separated from people while trying to navigate this increasingly complex and crazy making world that was already difficult but is now being paranormally intensified to get the job done. It’s no longer a small group of people here and there. The dark nights of the past were only a foreshadow of this time when the the world is systematically becoming a global Dark Night.
You will feel the same guilt and humiliation that the 16th century mystics felt but you did not make the plan and you do not have control. Ego needs to surrender and let the negative words do what they have to do. There are "oscillations between states of pleasure and states of pain — an orderly movement of the whole consciousness toward higher centers..." The "negative state" raises your frequency using negative and positive words coming into you following each other one after the other, over and over, and after the major storms are over, you find a place of balance.
The "rapid oscillations" of "the negative state' where the "devils make a football of the soul" is an evolutionary state of dis-equilibrium that will raise your frequency and bring your being into balance in a higher spiritual state. This change is not an intellectual choice to be different. As you find yourself living through an intensified, out of balance life — one extreme to the other — that is out of your control, you see clearer and clearer what you are spontaneously becoming a higher human who is effortlessly navigating life more perfectly. As part of the being of God, we grow up and are reprogrammed to operate as perfectly as God would. The past mystics were aware of something paranormal happening to them but it was not a time when a mind could have the ability to see the evolutionary significance of what was happening to them as part of the being of God. We change from a lower self that is making a lot of mistakes and is self-centered and proud and defensive and needs to win, and points out other's weaknesses and mistakes, to a higher self that is humble, no longer needing to be right or have its way and put others down. And this humble and wise higher self navigates life as God would. People transition from an abberated negative life to a divine positive life as their minds learn the truth and escape the illusion belief systems.
We've never been separate from the being of God. Our minds change but we remain a person in the exact same location as part of His being. There's no space. We don't move towards God as if we were walking across a room and closing the space between our beings. We make an organic spiritual connection to His being right where we are. The picture of searching or being on a quest or a path or a journey is just a school of the mind progressing, from one level of clarity of truth, to the next level where it becomes more clear. Our outward circumstances involve moving around. Our spiritual layer does not move positionally. It changes, grows up. We are already in the presence of God as much as we will ever be but our eyes are closed and our other faculties that need to function in order to be fully a part of Him are asleep. "Reaching" for or "finding" God is something spiritual. The mystic's "Union with God" is something we mentally and emotionally experience that involves the development of the rest of our minds and the rest of our human abilities we are clueless about until it happens. First our minds must know the truth and we are on the same page as God in terms of this reality. You learn how to communicate with Him in a Dark Night. All the new senses are something you have to be used to and be trained to use. When we physically grow up, we are able to have an adult relationship with the people around us. During the process of the Dark Night, our higher faculties begin to function and we are able to understand truth so we can have the fully matured relationship as and with God. We function as part of Him the way the DNA of humans are designed to ultimately make humans function. We can talk to Him and work together and do what needs to be done for the planet unlike anything anyone has imagined they have the potential to do. This is something very paranormal feeling. To try and be a more highly evolved human is not something you can imitate. For an ego-self to try to appear to be a god-self is dangerous to others. Their navigation of life and guidance and teachings will be off.
When every man is on same page as far as the truth about ourselves and God and what is going on, we will be able to be in a relationship with everyone, a union with all people instead of at war with each other. All the nonsense of the false illusion thinking concerning reality, controlling, judgmental, defensive, proud, self centered and self preserving, needing its own way lower self, ego, will have faded away as the truth thinking, humble, wise, divine and powerful higher self takes over one incremental step after the next. The condition of being ego-self is a false self. As long as a person thinks they can follow mystical exercises and evolve themselves to the highest level, they are not who they really are. The real self knows it has no control and it lets go of that concept and instead finds itself observing the changes happening to it. This is not just a knowing or an awareness. It is an experience of being. An experience of how you operate. The belief system of the false self disappears as we grow up along with the mistakes we make as a result of that inaccurate thinking which no longer serve to rewire our mind with a higher level view of the way to the top level where truth matches what is in the mind of God.
Humans learn what the ultimate life is and they change into a person who can live there by experiencing what is not right or good. Whatever negative words are coming into a person's mind and that make up their negative environment are literally, organically, changing (growing up) that person and their life into the opposite of them, where we ultimately belong. The environment today enables us to see very clearly everything we don't want. The faster and more intense the oscillations in a Dark Night finish our transformation from living life as self-righteous ego to operating as our divine higher self. It's in the dark that your eyes are opened and you see the difference. In the Night you learn what it means to be the higher divine acting self so you spontaneously become it, experiencing what feels like picking up a magic wand and waving it over your life and fixed everything and making dreams come true. As you know, you become. Waking up and becoming more conscious and clear about this truth concerning what we are is how human selves transform from child like separated ego-selves to the harmonious mature god-selves.
This is a list of some of the very sophisticated oscillations that are taking place that incrementally reveal to people the evolutionary changes that are happening to mankind as we see that everything is God and have our minds rewired with the truth so that we think like Him.
- The rug is pulled out and there is an existential crisis of your beliefs concerning how life works. They fail to answer what is happening to you causing a fundamental breaking, humbling and hunger followed by the development of the function of your spiritual eyes with an ever-increasing ability to see glimpses of the truth as pieces are brought together from everywhere.
- Being in the illusion, living life according to a belief system that is not correct, followed by getting out of the box an looking at what just happened with the eyes of one who is learning the truth about what is really going on.
- One step forward, feeling secure and thinking you have found the end of the path, followed by two steps back, losing your footing again, and a feeling of the loss of everything you know and wanting to be dead because you can’t do through it anymore.
- Restless and in a hurry followed by a paranormal experience of never-ending waiting for what feels like an eternity that hurts so bad it makes you want to be dead. Another mystical death in hell to reach the state of being in heaven.
- Excitement about the extraordinary thing going on and the illuminations, followed by dullness of feeling and indifference.
- Anger and bitterness followed by resignation and letting go.
- The Dark Night is one long battle with smaller battles or storms, each followed by rest. As Jacob struggled with the Angel all Night, you struggle with your mind and heart to survive physically and emotionally, facing death again and again, followed by a breaking of ego, a surrendering and letting go of all needs as well as the triumph of finishing the ultimate race against death and receiving its prize.
- A paranormal confusion followed by paranormal clearer knowing and understanding as you experience what the organic change did to your mind.
- Torment by onslaughts of negative things happening and negative thoughts replaying over and over followed by absolute stillness and silence. A whirlwind of activity and lessons being learned followed by "aridity" and waiting which is very painful.
- Misperceptions and wrong concepts followed by higher and broader more meaningful insights.
- Not being able to trust your opinions, being a doormat and afraid of what is going to happen to you followed by confronting people and the world knowing you are on the road to having certainty and being commanding, making less and less mistakes and more and more Divinely strategic moves and wise choices.
- Instead of the separation from the world being in a cloister on a hill, the modern mystic lives among society where his the condition of his soul marginalizes him. It's a paranormal experience. As you emerge from your cocoon, the separation and aloneness that caused a unique stress that was needed to evolve you, is followed by feeling needed more and more by others until it’s not about you anymore, and you become something valuable to the world as it enters the Global Dark Night or “Great Tribulation”. Utter humiliation followed by great respect. Feeling lost, detached and unable to connect is replaced by finding the feeling of being home and belonging.
“'None can come to the sublime heights of the divinity,' said the Eternal Wisdom to him [Suso] in one of his visions, 'or taste its ineffable sweetness, if first they have not experienced the bitterness and lowliness of My humanity. The higher they climb without passing by My humanity, the lower afterward shall be their fall. My humanity is the road which all must tread who would come to that which thou seekest: My sufferings are the door by which all must come in.'”
- The insanity of the illusion where you don't know what's really going on followed by an ability to climb outside the box and look at all the craziness going on in your life and in the world, with a mind that can see what's really going on, in your life and in the world, and is more sane than you ever could have imagined.
- Oddness and aberrative behavior followed by incremental steps toward a higher 'normal' and healthy interaction. You are shown where you are going — not being judgmental, being in the present, politeness and all proper manners, graciousness, attentiveness, kindness, thoughtfulness, being wise and fair and righteous, taking care of yourself, dressing in a way that is best for you, saying and doing the right thing — by experiencing not being what you want and having your unevolved condition magnified. You experience the pain of not functioning right and it causes you to desperately reach to become all the things you are being shown through the manifestation of the opposite of them. This reaching organically changes you into a person with the qualities you want to have and how you want to be among others that will make everything go well.
- Aberrative reactions to life followed by increasingly more appropriate responses as you learn truth through the process of looking at and healing your past. You figure out that the process is showing you what is wrong with life and the world, and the thoughts in your mind concerning reality are put in order as you observe it.
- The intensified state of the Night making you ultra-sensitive to everything causes a physiological change in your body, a chronic stress condition. Stress sends the body into flight or fight mode and while the body is busy putting its energy into this, the immune system is suppressed. So in addition to the horrendous battle to get through the day with so much going wrong, with these defenses are down for a long time, sickness and disease can invade your body. Stress also depletes the body of nutrients. You have to eat really well and take very good care of yourself during a Dark Night. You learn a great deal about health if you are in a Dark Night for a long time and this is a big piece to the puzzle of figuring out the answers to the deeper questions of life.
Being in pain and angry and having to hide and repress it also suppresses the immune system. Being happy and in love gives long life.
During the Night you express your anger and your pain because the intensified stress forces it out of you.
Seeing clearly in the Night, you have learned about nutrition and how to confront people, building the right walls on the inside and on the outside to keep everything out that would destroy you.
Mystics have health issues that add to everything going wrong during a Dark Night. Health is restored after the storm because the intensified state calms down to normal.
- Weakness followed by paranormal strength and abilities.
— Searching for someone to show you the truth followed by abandoning all spiritual leadership and learning how to go down the path on your own lead by something within getting you to the right place to be next. You look like a rebel. You look like a fool. You are broken through this aloneness and humiliation and this is how you become the higher self who supernaturally walks divinely. This state is only attained to by utterly being destroyed so that ego can no longer rise up and get in the way.
- Mistrust of the process, because you do what you are told and let go and it leads you into pain, followed by trust as you understand how it works and you have no choice but to surrender and be dragged through it.
- Self-occupied followed by the higher ability to be all things to all people and meet their needs.
- Ego demolished by humiliation and dismantling followed by being humble and respected and the ability to have the best relationships.
- Murphy’s Law followed by something being fixed and made better than it would have been had it not gone through the Night and eventually all of life becoming better than it ever could have been.
- Disconnection, becoming useless and impotent, social anxiety, insecurities and abnormal fears of life and not doing something right, down to the smallest silly details, many of which make no sense, feeling damaged and ruined by all the storms — followed by full engagement with life, full comfort in your own skin, being authentic and fully present, paranormal courage, strength and power and being very compatible with others, capable and successful.
- Judging everyone, noticing all the flaws all around, comparing yourself to them, and having these words make you feel guilty and a like a bad person followed by those words fading with the death of ego and more words of patience, understanding and love.
- Constantly comparing our ways to others and criticizing how they do things followed by those words no longer coming in and having the peace of not having them anymore. An example would be the struggle of be clean, neat, orderly person and being around someone who is not. Everyone who passes through the more intense dark night of these times has to do all things decently and in order, cleaning their environment so that positive words come in. In the meantime, they have to finish using up their portion of negative words. It's necessary for them to be that way. This truth will eventually stop the internal criticism as a part of knowing all truth clearly is towards the end of using up your portion of negative words
- Taking everything personally, people pleasing, perfectionism — so many things you do to make yourself crazy followed by letting things bounce off of you, saying no when you need to and not caring so much about everything because you're done, it's over, the heat has been turned off and you're back to normal.
- Weird eating patterns followed by more and more balanced ones.
- OCD behavior is anxiety that stresses you which causes you to evolve and is followed by the programs shutting down and becoming very balanced at prioritizing and keeping things in order.
- Things breaking and unfinished and relationships not working followed by your house being put into greater order after the storms.
- Blindness, asleep and lost in the illusion life, followed by awakening, awareness and consciousness, the truth about everything that is going on.
- The intensified state, hypersensitive, over reacting and over thinking is followed by nothingness and a deathly state, leading in the end to balance and peace.
- Feeling as though you are losing your mind as it transforms into a mind able to understand the truth.
- An onslaught of words with the pain of evolving and building up your capacity to handle a lot followed by being able to do a lot effortlessly and painlessly.
- Timing always being off followed by everything timed just right as part of everything happening efficiently down to the smallest detail.
- Being caught in the drama and the game followed by getting out of the box and looking at it and being upset about being caught again and not acting according to what you know is going on and the way you want to be. St. Paul said 'I do the things I aught not to do and I don't do the things I aught to do.'
- Being anxious and desperate for something to happen followed by being in the present and forgetting the mysterious words coming into your soul and causing the pain.
It's very painful and tormenting not to be what you see that you are becoming. It's tormenting to have glimpses of what is ahead and not be who you are and where you belong.
Madame Guyon said it is 'a thousand deaths' after which the mystics said 'the butterfly emerges from the cocoon.' You become much more than the human you were, finding yourself living life more and more as God would live your life.
- Needing others to care for you, being the 'me generation' and self-serving, followed by serving others. Once you are past the desperate survival mode of the Dark Night, you are available to help others get through it. This is following Jesus through the cross. This is what Jesus was showing the world about the meaning of life. Becoming holy or set apart from life to do the work of God is more than ministry and charity. Man will have everything taken away from him to come back to man and help one another get through the difficult evolutionary process of the global Dark Night.
- "Working out your salvation with fear and trembling" or in evolutionary language, a paranormally intensified anxiety about everything — money, health issues, relationships — causing ridiculous stress to evolve your entire being, followed by piece and quiet in your mind and body.
— Feeling condemnation and guilt spontaneously attacked by words of truth and reality speaking back at them saying that only God is responsible for any words that come into man. The concept of sin is an illusion that breaks us. In the end the battle for truth in the mind causes all negative illusion words to disappear and never arise in the mind again and be utterly forgotten.
- Seeing something up ahead that you are becoming but then losing sight of it and feeling lost again and upset, changing into a clearer seeing of what you are becoming and what is going to happen and the closer you get to the clearest picture the less time you spend feeling lost and upset. It's not taking as much time to evolve you so that you can see clearer. The ancient mystics never got this close and never saw the intricacies of the evolutionary process as it is broken down to such incremental steps.
- Fuzzy mystical language evolves into scientific and technological language as it becomes less fuzzy and you see what is going on as a very sophisticated computer program.
- Being emotionally caught in what is there physically, in the rules that have been operating during this time that have reinforced the illusion that there are set patterns, changes into a clear seeing that anything and everything can change in a moment. There are no rules. A cancerous tumor can disappear. The sky and grass can become a different color. This truth revolutionizes how you emotionally react to problems that would have gotten in the way of being able to move you by faith when its time to walk on coals. You transition into a world that operates differently when you have reached this point in your evolution. Mankind is getting to this place now.
- Undergoing the paranormal experience of being in hell for an eternity, being in the illusion with the mind thinking it will never end and these words feeling very real, transforming agonizingly incrementally, phase by phase, into a life that works the ultimate way, the reality that you are moving into heaven on earth that really will go on forever.
- Living through hell on earth as you undergo the surgery to have the technical ability in your mind and heart to make heaven on earth.
- Not being present. Being distracted and absent-minded and restless to be somewhere else because getting down the inward path is taking all your attention, the spiritual school has kept your mind in an introverted condition, and the pain has made you self focused and desperate to do what's next to escape it, follow by being engaged in every moment of your outward life and doing it all right.
- Scrambling desperately and hopelessly to survive emotionally and physically followed by glimpses of a powerful higher human ability to live life as God would if He was living it, with things in life, you didn't think of, feeling like they are magically falling into place. The new effortless living happens spontaneously as the result of the evolutionary level your being has arrived at. Before you could only see results of your effort, now you see what you need and want magically happening.
- Seeing the illusion life as real and how our ego selves have been living it, transforming into our higher self living another real life, navigating through it, operating as God would. The substance of both lives is exactly the same. Illusion does not mean imaginary as if it were a mirage. It means not knowing what is really going on. It means that we have been living a life that has been running according to where our minds have been, our inaccurate belief systems, sustaining us until we reached the level where we could be woken up and it could start running according to the truth.
- What is being let go of is more complex and deeper in this modern world where we have so much more and we are so independent. In the updated version of a Dark Night, one of the exercises is to you give up your needs and what you want to do and let life drag you around while you wait to be set free in all the different ways you've been shown that being free and happy means. And while you stop struggling to have your own life, you can see that it was mixed with a lesson in creating boundaries so that you are not controlled by narcissistic people. You will observe yourself being both under the control of the circumstances and making demands as you set boundaries both at the same time. It will be too complex for you to figure out when to do which one. You will just be watching yourself navigate through the situations that have been set up to train you to see how you are being evolved at this moment to stop walking like a baby ego with your own agenda as well as recognizing narcissistic behavior causing harm to you that you need to be healed from and avoid in the future.
- Meditation, prayer, journaling, getting angry with God and demanding of Him — all forms of 'doing' to get down the path and struggling to get down off the cross. Then you transition into just 'being' and waiting for your life to spontaneously change. When you see everything as God does, you've completely grown into your full potential and it's time to emerge from the Dark Night cocoon. There's no more wishing or hoping that your life would get better and your ship would come in. Having a life that is the opposite of the Murphy's Law life is a given. There is no other possible outcome. Your frequency has been raised and your environment must match it. It's the scientific result of having passed through the Dark Night process that organically altered you and how you operate.
- In the Dark Night process you are moving up through levels with new rules as to how life works in each new level. You gain a profound awareness that life was working according to a set laws to keep you feeling secure until it was time to grow up and learn a new way to be secure with any kind of change taking place no matter how impossible it looks.
It begins first by leaving an illusion belief level where religious doings work and entering a Dark Night level where everything is going wrong and prayer no longer works to make you feel okay. Then you find something else to do that gives you a life savor in the storm but then that is abandoned too. Just like prayer is for the religious, meditation has been huge in the mystical practices. At a higher point as you leave a level and shifting to another, meditation no longer works and you find yourself in a new way of thinking and operating in a level beyond where ancient mysticism could not reach because modern life provides a stage with tools for deeper and more sophisticated and complex training not available to them. It's a scientific and technological view of awareness of your level of evolution. You understand that you can't stop or alter the process by prayer or meditation. You give up because you see the futility. You are powerless. It's just happening. Prayer or meditating doesn't make sense anymore. You look at it as something you did as a child. Now the rule is to go back to your outward life and wait for it to get to the place you want
You’ve been looking at every detail of everything going wrong and learning from doing it. But you make another shift and how it works changes. There is a new way to life, a new set of laws that are how it works in the new level. Now you expect life to work the new way just as you expected life to work a certain way the rug got pulled out from under it sending you into a dark night. Each level is a new set of laws, a set of how it works in that level. In the lower levels of school you were supposed to look deeply in to how Murphy's Law was working in your life to show you what you didn't want. For many mystics this was a time of tremendous quilt and repentance. If they remained in religion, they didn't progress any further in the process. At a higher level where there is clearer understanding of truth, you aren't supposed to look at what's wrong anymore. Now bad things happen or you are looking at something messed up and you tell yourself it doesn’t matter. Fear, depression, shame and guilt are finishing their evolutionary work and fading away. The life where these things were an issue causing pain is passing away.
As you look at yourself destroyed, physically and psychologically, by the process that brought you to that point, you practice speaking back to words coming in saying that you are finished and life is over and you are just going to die now like normal. As with each level, you have your final exam to fight the old thinking words with the truth that you finished the extraordinary school and the surgery and you are like a butterfly waiting to be released, waiting for everything to change and become a very different human life that has never been known by man before. The words coming in are nonsense. Whatever you are looking at that seems to be impossible is not an obstacle to happiness. Life will not stay the same with you having gone through the excruciating paranormal death for nothing. There can be no other explanation but something extraordinary happening to you and your life that will defying all the laws.
- The word 'faith' has evolved. To many Christian mystics it means not losing your faith in the truths you believed concerning God and yourself, and that faith becoming stronger during the Dark season when you pray and it feels like you are praying to a brick wall because nothing happens to help your pain. This is a very micro and limited experience of the Dark Night of the Soul process. When the experience becomes more macro and it's not just about you and what's happening to you personally, the experience is much more dramatic and you see the big picture of the evolution of mankind and where we are going. The truth or your understanding of God and us changes. The experience of faith then is seen as faith in the evolutionary process God's being is putting us through. This level of the understanding of and the experience of faith is needed to survive the higher levels of training. So much more is taken away. So much of what you see looks impossible. Ego is utterly destroyed like it was never done in the past centuries. You need this higher, clearer definition of faith in order to make it through this level of intensity of the Dark Night evolutionary surgery.
The more intense Dark Nights that last longer will be seen in two distinct but interwoven stages. The negative feelings connected to the negative things happening and the negative words coming into your mind reveals everything to you, makes you aware of everything about living in hell. The second stage is when the negative words begin to fade as you transition into the experience of the positive words and everything in life becoming heavenly. After decades in the negative part of the path, when you are on this part of the path you begin to feel the end of the path coming involving far less years of the incremental steps of growth before you are there.
The experiences of the most up-to-date Dark Night process is far more intense, and we see clearer, than the earlier less evolved versions of the past. We are much closer to the life the process has been showing us mankind is moving towards. We see the big picture not the individual one. The significance of the process is far beyond what the ancient mystics saw. There goal was a 'union' involving having the hands and feet of God as Mother Teresa of Calcutta did. They did not know mankind was evolving into higher functioning human beings who have not only His hands and feet but a mind that matches the truth in God's mind. Today's darker nights are primarily focused on this ability. It means having the greater ability needed now to walk as God would to complete the work of the evolution of everyone and everything. The past mystics would have said that to think we really are made in His image with the potential to understand the mysteries and live their lives flawlessly — literally as He would — is heresy. They did not see that earth becomes heaven. God and heaven being in another place was our concept then. Heaven being our future life here, steps away from us, is now. The Spirit comes in today's dark nights and shows us the truth clearly.
For quotes see Evelyn Underhill's article on this website.