Spirituality of The Deep, Part 2

Dark Nights of the Soul
by Thomas Moore, Ph.D.

(Page 8 of 8)

Anyone may feel an inner urgency that goes against all that is reasonable and intended. It's not unusual to see a person craving something for himself, and at the same time something inside desperately wants just the opposite. In his early years, John Keats wanted badly to become a doctor, but the daimon poet in him won him over. Marilyn Monroe wanted to be a serious actor, but the spirit of sexiness and physical beauty got in the way. Today she is still, for the older generations anyway, a figure of cultural myth, a "goddess" more than an actress.

Heraclitus said that daimon is fate. That spirit in you that often moves strongly against your will may be the force that leads you to your fate. Keats and Monroe may have settled for their own vision of who they could be, but something more powerful inside them gave them a much greater presence in the world. The same is true for all of us: the hopes and plans we have for ourselves may be nothing compared to the possibilities. We have to allow this other self to have room to make us into who we might be.

The daimon also plays a role in relationships. In therapy, sorting though love triangles and difficult partnerships, I thought I saw something much greater at work than relationship. The issue was not, how can these two people be together happily, but what are they fighting? What is their fate, in the largest terms, that they are trying so desperately to avoid? I could see in their marriages the validity of Heraclitus' comment. They were avoiding the daimonic, which was showing itself dramatically in their lives together, and therefore they were saying no to their fate.

Today people often seek the right and healthy way to be in relationship, and they forget about the importance of their individual callings. They try to blend their lives together rather than live shared individual destinies. I knew one young man who spent years trying to be married successfully. In the meantime, he neglected his talents and wasted his life away at jobs far beneath him. He would come to me in times of distress, when yet another marriage was heading for the rocks. Finally, in his mid-fifties, he made the radical decision to finish his education and launch his career. Miraculously to him, his current marriage grew strong and happy. He had a life of his own, and therefore he could be in a shared relationship.

Consciously a person might insist that a certain marriage or partnership take place, but another will, from within the same people and couple, may want otherwise. This struggle against a deep inner urge is responsible for much of the distress and many of the dark nights associated with love and partnership. You think you know what is best and what has to be, but life itself, more mysteriously, works in a different direction. The prolonged struggle, which usually has both interior and external dimensions, becomes a dark night.

A dark night of the soul may involve a long, difficult contest between one will and another will, both of which act within the same person or the same couple. Even when the outer life is settled, and the couple get married or settle down, the battle may continue. You may learn that this incessant argument is not necessarily destructive and in fact gives life to the relationship. And, as Jung says in his essay on marriage, you may learn that you have married your partner's daimon as well as her person, and she has linked her fate with your inner self as well. It all makes marriage and other partnerships fascinating, but not easy.

A Vocation for Transcendence

You may be blind to the very thing that will make your life feel worth living. You may be repressing the very source of your deepest satisfaction. You may be gullible, taking in the world's insidious lessons in superficial satisfaction. Therefore, you have to dig deeper. Discover who you are and who you want to be. Don't be dissuaded from that objective by the illusory promises of commercial life. Instead, be yourself.

That is the point of the night sea journey - to be born into yourself. There, you are in the amniotic fluid, in an alchemical substance once again. You are journeying toward your own life. You are preparing for your fate. The promise is exhilarating, but the dangers are extreme. You have to avoid being just one of the crowd and instead take the chance of being born an individual.

Jonah didn't think he had it in him to realize his destiny. He tried to escape it by boarding a ship headed away from his God-given orders. But this ship took him out to the environs of the whale, which would prove to be the uterus of his becoming. His escape turned into his vehicle of self-realization.

Look deeply into your fears. Take serious note of your defenses. See where and how you elude the demands of your existence. Maybe now you will see the cosmic wisdom in your dark night. You have to change course and rediscover your own direction. You have to surrender to the steaming motion of your self-realization.

Jonah was called by God to speak on his behalf, which is a point of view directly opposite the one explicitly or subliminally presented in all forms of media forced on you today. Your dark night is preparing you to be yourself. It is reenacting your birth as a person. It is offering you an alternative to absorption in your manipulative culture.

Your dark night is forcing you to consider alternatives. It is taking you out of the active life of submission to alien goals and purposes. It is offering you your own approach to life. You can sit with it and consider who you are and who you want to be. You can be fortified by it to stand strong in your very existence. You can be born again, not into an ideology that needs your surrender, but into yourself, your uniqueness, your God-given reality, the life destined for you.

Needless to say, by emphasizing self-realization and individuality, I am not speaking against fellowship and community. A community thrives when it consists of true individuals, accepted for their own contributions and ideas. You are in the belly of the whale to get to Nineveh, to become part of the world, to add your important voice to its song. The people are waiting for you to be offered into society. They need you, and you need them. But you have to be prepared by your dark night, which is both your pain and your deliverance. It is the great obstacle to getting on with life, and yet it is the best means of entry into what fate has in store for you.

Copyright © 2005 Thomas Moore

About the Author

Thomas Moore, Ph.D., wrote the phenomenal #1 bestsellers Care of the Soul and SoulMates as well as many other successful books. Moore was a Catholic monk for twelve years and later became a psychotherapist, earning degrees in theology, musicology, and religion. Moore now lectures extensively throughout North America.