'I Am Nothing', Suchness

Dark Night of the Soul
by Saint John of the Cross, Mirabai Starr

(Page 5 of 7)

"I Am Nothing"

In a Western world busy recovering from a legacy of shame and blame, John's continual declaration that "I am nothing" (and the implicit suggestion that we, too, are nothing) may set off alarms. But these would be false alarms. The radical humility John speaks of has little to do with the pathology of self-deprecation. It is a state of blessedness, where we let go of identification with the small, separate self so that we can rest in our togetherness with the Beloved. To be truly humble is to feel a tender acceptance of all reality just as it is, which includes compassion for ourselves just as we are. This kind of humility is a surrender of our whole being to the simple truth of love.

In the dark night, says John, the secret essence of the soul that knows the truth is calling out to God: Beloved, you pray, please remind me again and again that I am nothing. Strip me of the consolations of my complacent spirituality. Plunge me into the darkness where I cannot rely on any of my old tricks for maintaining my separation. Let me give up on trying to convince myself that my own spiritual deeds are bound to be pleasing to you. Take all my juicy spiritual feelings, Beloved, and dry them up, and then please light them on fire. Take my lofty spiritual concepts and plunge them into darkness, and then burn them. Let me only love you, Beloved. Let me quietly and with unutterable simplicity just love you.

This humility is not fatalism. It is active and impassioned. John would likely distrust some of today's self-proclaimed spiritual teachers who make a living preaching a path of comfort and ease, who declare themselves perfected beings, who make of enlightenment a commodity accessible to the privileged, who adopt spirituality as a style, who claim that there is some pot of gold to be collected at the end of the rainbow. The true teachers are often the invisible ones.

The dark night is not an abstract notion on some list of spiritual experiences every seeker is supposed to have. The dark night descends on a soul only when everything else has failed. When you are no longer the best meditator in the class because your meditation produces absolutely nothing. When prayer evaporates on your tongue and you have nothing left to say to God. When you are not even tempted to return to a life of worldly pleasure because the world has proven empty and yet taking another step through the void of the spiritual life feels futile because you are no good at it and it seems that God has given up on you, anyway.

This, says John, is the beginning of blessedness. This is the choiceless choice when the soul can do nothing but surrender. Because even if you cannot sense a shred of the Beloved's love for you, even if you can scarcely conjure up your old passion for him, it has become perfectly clear that you are incapable of doing anything on your own to remedy your spiritual brokenness. All efforts to purge your unspiritual inclinations have only honed the laser of attention on the false self. Unwilling to keep struggling, the soul finds itself surrendering to its deepest inner wound and breathing in the stillness there.

"The central paradox of the spiritual path," says Tim Farrington, author of Hell of Mercy, "is that in striving to transcend the self, we actually build it up. Our holy solutions invariably calcify into grotesque casts of ego. The dark night is God's solution to our solutions, dissolving our best-laid constructions anew into the mystery of grace. It happens in spite of our best efforts to resist it. But thank God it happens."

The only action left to the soul, ultimately, is to put down its self-importance and cultivate a simple loving attention toward the Beloved. That's when the Beloved takes over and all our holy intentions vaporize. That's when the soul, says John, is infused passively with his love. Though his radiance is imperceptible to the faculty of the senses and invisible to the faculty of the intellect, the soul that has allowed itself to be empty can at last be filled and overflow with him.

Humility, then, is not a matter of beating ourselves up. It is not a question of judging ourselves as stupid or sinful, as hopeless and bad. Who are we to judge these things? Humility, for John, is the gentle acceptance of that most tender place inside ourselves that throbs with the pain of separation from the Beloved. It is that deep knowingness that identification with the false self brings nothing but further separation. It is an initially reluctant dropping down into the emptiness and an ultimate experience of peace when we stop doing and rediscover simple being. It is the Sabbath of the soul when we heed the call to cease creating and remember that we are created.

Suchness

The emptiness of the dark night is a yielding emptiness. It is an emptiness that gives way to the fullness of all possibility, which manifests as limitless diversity, which circles back to emptiness. It is the impossible-to-translate sunyata of Buddhism. It is the living substratum of all reality. It is rooted in quiet.

"God spoke only one word for all eternity and he spoke it in silence," says John, "and it is in eternal silence that we hear it." Plunged at some point into the darkness of the spiritual journey, where all preconceptions of holiness are obliterated, we have nowhere to go but into the silence where the divine reality secretly reveals itself to a consciousness cleared of the ongoing chatter of the false self. What the Buddhists call the "monkey mind" eventually settles down so that sacred truth can speak itself.

This is where contemplative practice bears fruit. The contemplatives show us that by learning to be in stillness, we can access "the divine word spoken in silence," the secret word that sets up the vibration from which all creation issues. By sitting quietly with the breath, the blessed "no-self" begins to emerge.

In an article on Carmelite prayer, Fr. Iain Matthew says that contemplation "commits a person to complete confidence and trust in the love of God who is continually breaking into our lives. The contemplative stance is an openness to that love and the demands it makes on us to change. To be a contemplative is to be a watch in the night for the approach of Mystery. And it is a readiness to be transformed in an engagement with that Mystery."

Fr. Thomas Keating, known for the practice of "centering prayer," says that when John talks about being nothing, what he means is that by relinquishing any fixed point of reference for the false self, we can let down into an ever-deepening identification with God. Far from reflecting the shame of our own unworthiness, this detachment from our individuality allows us to see that having been created in the image of God is to be perfectly beautiful and perfectly good. In contemplative stillness, attachment to our own limitations begins to fall away so that we can participate in the unspoken holiness that gives rise to all that is.

If all your spiritual activities have grown empty and you are compelled to walk away, says John, tie yourself to one practice only: contemplative silence. Abandon discursive prayer if it has become mechanical and meaningless. Let go of holy images if they no longer evoke the sacred. Refrain from spiritual discourse if it tastes like idle gossip in your mouth. But do not turn away from the silence.

It's tempting to give up the spiritual journey when the darkness falls. It's easy to get bogged down by cynicism and cease reaching out for the Beloved. But contemplative practice, Fr. Keating points out, keeps us alert to the movements of the false self and makes a small space for us to hear the invitation to enter into the ultimate reality, which is nothing other than God's love for us. "This whole thing is God's idea!" Fr. Keating exclaims. John would agree.

This is a path of annihilation of the ego. But we must first be brought home to ourselves before we can bear to see our nothingness before God. It is not an optimal journey for the seeker whose selfhood has been so badly wounded and diminished that the only sensible course is one of healing and building up a strong ego. It is not an appropriate teaching for those who suffer from a chronic need for affirmation. It is less for those who are struggling to find themselves than it is for the ones who have a clear sense of self and are ready to purify it. Radical humility, John teaches, is not a malady requiring a cure but the blessing of the "yes" that rises from the very core of the soul in love with God.

And yet neither is the dark night reserved for some spiritual elite whose personalities are so strong and intact that they can afford to blithely cast them into the flames of union. Someone who is broken, says Fr. Matthew, who has struggled all his life with some intense deficiency, may have a uniquely powerful relationship with God. Fr. Matthew suggests that these teachings can throw out a lifeline to all who suffer. This is a path for those who use their suffering as a tool for transformation. In the dark night of each soul, we are simultaneously annihilated and immeasurably strengthened.

Copyright © February 2002, Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc. Used by permission.

About the Author

Saint John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz) was a major figure in the Catholic Reformation, a Spanish mystic and Carmelite friar born at Fontiveros, a small village near Ávila.

Mirabai Starr is a professor of philosophy, religious studies, and Spanish at the University of New Mexico who has studied a wide variety of religious traditions including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Mirabai is an accomplished translator and fiction writer who brings the sensibilities of both seeker and scholar to her translations. Her most recent work is the translation of St. John of the Cross's mystical writings, Dark Night of the Soul.