Extended suffering, emptiness, or despair as part of the process
The dark night of the soul — extended periods of profound suffering, emptiness, or despair that often accompany or follow major openings. Not depression in the clinical sense, but a process of deconstruction that can feel indistinguishable from it.
Several accounts describe the dark night as more intense than anything before the opening — a phase in which everything that was previously meaningful has dissolved, and nothing has yet arrived to replace it.
It's just heartbreaking how deep people can go into darkness and despair, and especially if they feel it's hopeless.
And yeah, and from everything you hear like all the like dissolving traditions that go in the direction of like emptiness and nothingness, it sounds like this is the end point.
We want to feel the the natural experience of being alive, which does come with a fear sometimes and it comes with sadness sometimes and it comes with ecstasy sometimes and it comes it just but the it's the avoidance or the pushing away or the not wanting to see those that is suffering.
And you don’t ever feel that deep, dark void as it were, the ‘nothingness feeling’ or ‘where am I going?’ – that’s gone, all that disappears.
Experience types that appear most often alongside this.
Other integration challenges that co-occur most frequently in the same accounts.