I do not know whether you are familiar with this state in which earthly life feels so heavy that you would gladly leave your body, if it were not for your sense of duty and your determination not to give up. It is a state in which the outer world has no pull at all, and the only thing that attracts you is death, with its promise of rest.
I know what this looks like. That is why, when I came across Michael Tamura’s description of the spiritual path as a movement from the “unmanifest God” to the “manifest God,” an important piece of understanding about the meaning of the “dark night of the soul” fell into place for me. For it is precisely the understanding of this meaning that most helps us to endure the challenges of this advanced stage of spiritual transformation.
What Tamura shares is that if we have not completed our path as individuated aspects of the Divine Whole, our merging with the Absolute would be nothing more than a sinking back into the sea of unconsciousness that constitutes unity with the unmanifest God. And the manifest God—that is us, once we have completed our long path of incarnations in the world of matter. Our return to the Source then becomes a return as a “completed consciousness capable of being conscious of itself.”
This is a passage from his book You Are the Answer, in which, through an “out-of-body” experience, he comes to understand what the ego is and what the stages of its formation are:
“After being in that space of pure awareness, energy, and essence, in which there was no sense of a separate I-consciousness, I now understand why the primordial soul-ego, in its I-consciousness, separates from the Unity and does not recognize it. In this expansion of awareness there is no time or space and therefore no memory. Without the ability to ‘remember,’ when the spark of consciousness flies in the ecstasy of existence, it ‘awakens’ to its essence with no memory of ever having been part of anything else. From its very beginning, it starts to explore its essence and to perceive everything else as ‘other.’
Through this part of the experience I realized that if the human soul were to merge with the Absolute without having completed the formation of its immortal body of wisdom, it would be absorbed again and would cease to exist. We incarnate in a physical form made of nature so that we ourselves may learn to manifest this form in spirit.
Without building our immortal body of light with which to return to God, we cannot fulfill our destiny of absolute freedom. In a sense, we will dissolve again into unconscious unity, instead of evolving into a fully conscious creator. In order to do this, we must have memory; and in order to build memory, we must have a perception of time, space, and sensation.
In other words, we must incarnate in the physical world.” (p. 136)
The above makes profound sense to me, because in its essence the “attraction to death” is, in its core, a “longing to return to the Source.” If we do not use incarnation in an earthly body to build the immortal body of wisdom/light, this attraction to death turns into a desire for oblivion—a being reabsorbed into the sea of unconsciousness. In this way, the process of spiritual awakening begins to move in the wrong direction. Oblivion deprives us of the memories that are necessary in order to build the continuity of our individual Self.
Here lies the irony: it is precisely the experiences of the dark night of the soul that provide, to the greatest degree, the material from which the immortal body of light is formed. The feeling of alienation and separation from life here is brought to its extreme, and for this very reason it is closest to the point of reversal. In the language of Jungian analysis, this is the moment when the opposites within us are united, and the result of this union is the birth of the “indivisible Self.”
“The darkness corresponds to the alchemical nigredo, which comes after the coniunctio, when the feminine has accepted the masculine within itself. From the nigredo the stone arises, the symbol of the immortal, whole personality.”
— C. G. Jung
I have learned to respect the impulse toward death as an expression of spiritual awakening. Used rightly, it urges us to seek that which does not die. In the process of this seeking, we descend into the realm of Ereshkigal, and with every step downward it becomes more difficult. When we finally reach the queen of the underworld and look her in the face, we discover that she is our own soul—a small spark of consciousness, immersed deeply in the world of matter in order to give birth to “self-awareness,” so that the unmanifest God may come to know itself.
And so, our immortal body of light is born in the deepest possible darkness. This is something very, very important to be known by those for whom the descent into the underworld has begun. It gives meaning to the ordeal they are going through—and that meaning is that self-awareness is this very light.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
Note: The quotations are translated from Bulgarian and are not presented as verbatim citations.
