Darkness and Unknowing

The first five essays in this series could be read as a story of steady progress: one turns, purifies one’s life, takes up a practice, and grows in attention and love. The traditions tell a stranger story. At some point on the path, they say, the progress seems to stop or even reverse. Prayer becomes dry, meditation empty, concepts useless, consolations gone. The seeker feels further from the goal than at the beginning. Many give up here. The traditions’ masters insist that this darkness is not a failure of the path but one of its stages, perhaps the most important.

The dark night§

The classic description is by John of the Cross, the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite, in his commentary on the poem that begins “on a dark night”. He describes two nights. In the night of sense, the soul that has found sweetness in prayer loses it: it can no longer meditate in the old way, finds no consolation either in God or in anything created, and yet is painfully anxious to serve God and fears that it is going backward. These three signs together, John says, distinguish the night from mere lukewarmness or illness (Cross, I.9).

In the deeper night of spirit, the soul’s very ways of knowing and loving are emptied out, and it feels itself abandoned by God. John’s explanation is the key to the whole teaching. The darkness is not the absence of God but the excess of his light, which the soul is not yet able to bear, as an eye too weak for the sun sees only darkness when it looks at it (Cross, II.5). What feels like loss is the purification described in the fourth essay of this series, now carried out not by the seeker’s efforts but upon the seeker.

The Imitation of Christ, two centuries earlier, had already named the trial. It is no great thing, it says, to despise human comfort when divine comfort is present; it is a great thing, very great, to bear the loss of both, and for the love of God to bear the exile of the heart.¹1 Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, paragraph 2.9.1, translated by William Benham: “It is no hard thing to despise human comfort when divine is present. It is a great thing, yea very great, to be able to bear the loss both of human and divine comfort; and for the love of God willingly to bear exile of heart, and in nought to seek oneself, nor to look to one's own merit. What …” Read in context From the chapter “Of the lack of all comfort”, in William Benham’s translation. Tagore’s Gitanjali gives the same experience its most human voice: clouds heap upon clouds, it darkens, and the lover is left waiting outside the door alone.²2 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 18, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “Clouds heap upon clouds and it darkens. Ah, love, why dost thou let me wait outside at the door all alone? In the busy moments of the noontide work I am with the crowd, but on this dark lonely day it is only for thee that I hope. If thou showest me not thy face, if thou leavest me wholly …” Read in context Tagore’s translation.

The cloud of unknowing§

A second form of the darkness concerns knowledge rather than feeling. The fourteenth-century English author of The Cloud of Unknowing tells his reader that between the soul and God there will always be, in this life, a cloud of unknowing that no thought can pierce. Only love can reach God; so the contemplative must put everything else, even good and holy thoughts, beneath a cloud of forgetting, and beat upon the cloud above with a sharp dart of longing love (The author of The Cloud of Unknowing 1912, ch. 5–6).

The Cloud’s author drew on a much older teacher. The writer known as Dionysius the Areopagite, probably a Syrian monk of around 500, taught that God is beyond every name and every negation, and that the mind which would be united with him must leave behind the senses and the intellect and enter the darkness beyond light, as Moses entered the cloud on Sinai, knowing by unknowing (Areopagite 1920, Mystical Theology 1). This is the root of the apophatic, or negative, way in Christian thought: God is known most truly when every concept of him has been surrendered.

Not this, not this§

The Upaniṣads arrived at the negative way centuries earlier. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka describes the self by a double negation, neti neti, “not this, not this”: whatever can be pointed to, it is not (Müller 1884, Bṛhadāraṇyaka II.3.6). Every description is set aside, because the self is the one who describes.

Nāgārjuna carried negation further than anyone. Everything, he argued, is empty of an intrinsic nature, because everything arises in dependence on other things; and emptiness itself is empty, not a hidden essence behind things but only a way of seeing them. He warned that those who make emptiness into a view, something to hold, are incurable (Nāgārjuna, 13.8; 24.18). The darkness here is not emotional at all. It is the collapse of every conceptual handhold, including the one that says “there is nothing to hold”.

The great doubt and bewilderment§

Zen gives the darkness a name and a method. Hakuin taught that at the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening: the practitioner pours everything into a kōan until the doubt becomes total, and only when that doubt breaks does seeing break through (Ekaku 1971). The Chinese master Wumen, centuries earlier, compared the state to having swallowed a red-hot iron ball that can be neither swallowed down nor spat out. The darkness is cultivated deliberately, because the ordinary mind will not let go of itself any other way.

In ʿAṭṭār’s Conference of the Birds, the birds who set out to find their king cross seven valleys, and the sixth is the valley of bewilderment, where the traveller no longer knows whether he exists or not, whether he is inside or outside, mortal or immortal (ʿAṭṭār 1984). Only after it comes the valley of poverty and annihilation, and then the meeting. The Sufis did not regard bewilderment as a failure of faith. Some of them prayed for it.

Darkness in ordinary practice§

The great descriptions of the dark night concern saints, and most readers will not meet the darkness in that form. They will meet a humbler version: the day when the practice that once brought peace brings nothing, when prayer feels like talking to a wall and meditation like sitting in a waiting room. The traditions’ advice for this ordinary darkness is consistent and unglamorous. Keep going. Do not judge the practice by how it feels. Teresa of Ávila, who spent years in such dryness, warned her readers above all not to give up prayer because it had become unrewarding (Ávila). Tagore gives the attitude its image: if the beloved speaks not, he will fill his heart with the silence and endure it, keeping still like the night with its head bent low, until the morning comes.³3 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 19, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil and its head bent low with patience. The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky. Then thy words will take …” Read in context Tagore’s translation.

The Theravāda Buddhist tradition maps a similar passage in the practice of insight. Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification describes a series of insight knowledges through which the meditator passes: after the arising and passing of phenomena become clear, the meditator sees their dissolution, and then comes, in turn, to the knowledges of fear, of danger, of disenchantment and of the desire for deliverance, before reaching equanimity about all formations (Buddhaghosa 1923, ch. XXI). Modern teachers in this lineage call the painful middle stages, informally, the dark night, borrowing John of the Cross’s phrase. The map is different, but the lesson is the same: a stage that feels like going backward may be a sign of going forward, and a teacher who knows the map can tell the difference.

Why the darkness comes§

The traditions give a consistent reason. Everything the seeker has used so far, concepts, feelings, practices, even the sense of progress, belongs to the self that is to be transcended. The turning, the purification and the practices were done by someone, and that someone tends to make them its possessions. At some point the means themselves have to be let go, and letting go of them feels like losing everything, because from the old point of view it is. The darkness is the experience of the self’s instruments failing before what they cannot grasp.

Counterfeits and dangers§

Precisely because the darkness is real, the traditions are careful about its imitations, and modern readers should be more careful still.

Not every darkness is the dark night. Depression, grief, burnout and illness can look like it from outside, and John of the Cross himself offered signs to tell them apart; a modern reader should add a doctor’s judgement to his. To treat clinical depression as a spiritual stage is to leave someone without the help they need. The traditions’ language of darkness is not a reason to endure what can be treated.

The darkness also has false exits. One is inflation: the seeker who has glimpsed the emptiness of concepts decides that ordinary morality is one more concept, and that he is beyond it. Every tradition has seen teachers fall this way, and every tradition condemns it; the fruits by which the first essay said this knowledge must be judged do not include contempt for others. Another is the confusion of a vivid breakthrough with the end of the path. The Zen masters spoke of many small awakenings, and warned against stopping at any of them.

This is why no tradition expects anyone to pass through the darkness alone. The Christian has a spiritual director, the Sufi a shaykh, the Zen student a teacher who tests each insight in private interview, the Tibetan practitioner a lama. Their task in this stage is less to explain than to recognize: to tell the seeker that what is happening is a known part of the way, or that it is not, and something else is needed.

What lies on the other side§

The traditions speak of the far side of the darkness with great reluctance, and the reluctance is itself part of the teaching. John of the Cross says that the night is a guide more lovely than the dawn, because it unites lover and beloved. The Cloud promises that God will sometimes send out a beam of light through the cloud. Hakuin’s great doubt breaks into great joy. The birds of ʿAṭṭār’s poem find their king. The next and last essay in this series turns to what the traditions say is found there, where they agree, where they differ, and what follows for the one who returns.