In spiritual circles of conversation, occasionally the topic of the dark night comes up.

The dark night is described as a spiritual hardship experience that is a transformational journey.  It was first named by St John of the cross in the 16th century.  I like to use the analogy that if you are awake at night time, you may have to wait a very long time (several hours) with not much to do, while the sun comes up.  It’s characterised by generally having a bad time, maybe having a hard time, a dark time, a heavy time, a lonely time, a confusing or scary time.  There’s a lot of elements that people throw into the buckets of the dark night and I started to wonder if they were always talking about the same thing.

It seems like there are two camps when describing the dark night: 

1.The people who know the dark night deeply from personal experience.  

2.The people who are trying to figure out what it is. Have they unknowingly experienced a dark night before? If not, what is the experience like?  Is there a way to prepare?  Etc. 

I think there’s one primary type of dark night that is generally mentioned in the old books, I call it “The Dark Night Around Suffering”, but I also believe I’ve found other types of dark nights.  Your dark night will depend on you as a person, the objects you are fundamentally more attached to, the clinging, craving, aversion, assumptions, in your consciousness, and more.  

It’s important to note that the defining features of the dark night are both the depth of the suffering as well as the duration.  One bad day is almost certainly not a dark night.  One bad week is probably not the deep dark night, but depending on the rest of life’s circumstances, maybe it is for you.  The (externally measured) duration may vary from hours, to days to months and for some people the experience is a period that spans years, (often defined in retrospect, but not during the experience). I say externally measured because there are some rare drug experiences that cause the breakdown of the perception of time, which could feel like a very long suffering moment but only last a few minutes by external time.

When it comes to spiritual phenomena, there’s a difficulty in quantifying magnitude.  How bad is bad?  How much suffering does a person need to be counted as suffering?  How long is the long dark night?  How miserable do you need to be to be really having a dark night?  These questions are subjective and cut into personal experience.  It’s very hard to get an objective measure of subjective experiences.  I would rather that this document is not used to explicitly include or exclude anyone’s experience of being definitely dark night or definitely not.  There’s no award for most miserable suffering.  There’s no prize for being completely okay all the time (adamantly never suffering).  I hope to be able to avoid playing those status games while also giving an approximate view of the clusters that seem to me to be dark nights.

It is my hope that you will read this list and find one or another description of a “dark night” type phenomenon to be familiar.  You may recall a time you felt depressed, alone, isolated, like you were going through a weirdly spiritual process that was out of your control. Perhaps you had kind of an off experience, that you were a little too dissociated to experience fully. I hope that when you do find some familiarity, it comes with some clarity that you were experiencing a spiritual transformation process.  If you find yourself currently in one of these states, I also hope it brings you clarity around what is happening and how you might support yourself to feel better about life and what’s going on for you.

In any case my advice if you are having a bad time is to stop, do less. Let go, surrender if you can and be kind to yourself.  I’m sure someone has a guide for working with your particular type of bad time, but I’ve always found that some combination of friends, rest/sleep, food, water, fresh air, vitamins and enjoyable activities do help.  

One person’s dark night may be a walk in the park for another.  You may hear a friend describe things as lonely and really tough, and you might think to yourself, “I’ve dealt with that lonely phenomena before, it’s not that bad”, despite seeing your friend appear to be really struggling in their experience.  I would encourage patience to anyone wondering how to be a good friend to a person in a spiritual crisis.  To expand on this I can explain some of the different dark nights I’ve seen in myself and in other people.

Here is the short list of types of dark nights, below is the expanded descriptions.

Types of dark nights:

• Impermanence
• Suffering
• No-self
• (their opposites – permanence, non-suffering, self)
• Bipolar down phase
• Cycling 
• Desire for deliverance
• (LSD) No other
• Vastness (j5)
• Emptiness (j7)
• Falling away of meaning.
• When your parents die.
• Existentialism
• Deconstruction 
• Dissociation 
• Fuzz, buzz (j8)
• Cycle of life: “I want to go home”.

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The 3 marks of existence in Buddhism

Generally translated as:

• Impermanence
• Suffering
• Non-self

I believe there is a dark night associated with each one.

Impermanence 

The cowboy meditator dives head first into investigating experiential reality and they crash into a sudden realisation of impermanence.  A light version of impermanence is just, “everything breaks” or “nothing lasts forever”.  But the deeper version of that realisation cuts harder and harder.  

These include: 

• I’m impermanent
• The things I like are impermanent (my favourite coat)
• My family is impermanent (they will die eventually)
• Perception itself is impermanent
  • I can’t even look at something in an enduring way, it always vanishes.
• Everything I look at is decaying and falling apart

You can probably make your own versions.  All fundamentally about how impermanence is there. There’s even a special favourite of mine that impermanence is impermanent (it has some wiggle room around what it is, and if it’s always equally impermanent).

The first deep insights into the nature of impermanence can cause a great deal of suffering for people.  And to other people it can be relieving because impermanence also means impermanence of pain, of the problems in life and of any troubles you’ve been having.  It really depends on the context you were in when you made the discovery as to whether this one hit you hard or soft.

Special mention to “permanence”

On the flip of impermanence, the recognition that, “some things are more permanent than we want them to be” can be a very scary one.  Scars are forever, reputation and karma sticks to you forever, you can make mistakes that you cannot correct.  You can die permanently.  That really sucks.  I’ve never seen this one particularly dark myself but I name it in case you are going through it.

Suffering

In my experience of the path, suffering usually comes after impermanence and I believe “suffering” is the big one that people usually talk about.  The others still exist but suffering really feels like suffering.  It sells itself in the name. 

Think about:

• The waters that quench my thirst is impermanent
  • And even if they did quench my thirst, the thirst would come back, relief itself is impermanent. (impermanence can cause suffering) 
• Everything I love is impermanent, will decay, will break or die, I’ll be so sad when it does.
• I can have a bad time, either on by my own cause or by events out of my control, I can have a bad time.
• I can see people suffering and that’s horrifying to look at.
• Too hot, too bright, too sharp, too cold, too *… any thing that is too much of itself I can feel as a suffering
• Depression
• Some people confuse the 4 noble truths as saying there is suffering, or life is suffering.  That’s not true, it’s absolutely not what they say, (Quoted here: “the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering”) if you believe life is suffering, you have buddhism wrong and also are probably having a really bad time about it right now.  You need to re-examine life (maybe meditate) until you change your conclusions.
• We live in an existent universe that has negative emotions in it.  (damn that sucks from this perspective).
• Part of these phenomena are not just that they exist but that the person who notices them suddenly can’t stop seeing them everywhere, can’t get away, can’t get a rest from all the sudden recognition of suffering.  There were people sick and dying before but suddenly it feels like everyone I know is dying and that feels scary.

This is just a few types of suffering that can be like a dark night.  Generally people won’t be having all of them.  I haven’t even mentioned drug trips or hallucination experiences that feel like they will never end (never ending is its own extra type of suffering).

I could go on but my point is that there are suffering-related dark nights.

The opposite (non suffering)

This is a short bookmark for the opposite of suffering.  There’s other special sufferings for being in strange places where there is no pain.  Where there are no negative things any more.  Where there is no sensitivity to the existence of the dark.  Naivety is its own suffering, one that sometimes people don’t notice when they are in it.  

Some parts of the spiritual path invite you to be able to escape the suffering.  You can meditate, you can achieve Jhanic states of peace.  And then you eventually need to open your eyes and continue about your day.  Non-suffering is a beautiful relief from suffering but it’s also a temporary relief.  The gradual haunting realisation that non-suffering is not quite what you want, can itself be a grief filled experience.  I can have my escape but I realise that I’d rather be in the world and suffer.  But not without grappling with the process and making my peace with the conundrum.

Non self

Out of suffering, often comes the confusion of, “who was experiencing that anyway”.  The confusions of self and non-self experience can be their own types of dark night.  Interestingly, once we have no self, there’s no one doing the suffering, so the “dark night” may not apply the same way, because no one is having a dark night so it can’t be “bad” or something.  But on the inside it can be quite confusing and stressful.

Here are a few of the non-self dark realisations:

• If there is no self, then why do I keep acting like there is one?
• If there is no self then who will get me to my goals, who’s responsible for getting me the things I want? (larger self dissolved, small self experiencing abandonment) 
• If there’s no self, is no one steering the ship of reality/society? (control, power) 
• If there’s no self, then what’s even happening. (confusion, loss) 
• If there’s no self then why do I still get thirsty?  How can I be suffering even when there’s not a self to suffer? 
• If the self is impermanent, changing by the day and by the minute, why do I have to live with myself and my shitty patterns?  Why can’t I just change existence when I want to, however I like?
• Since there’s no self here, I’m just very confused about everything that has happened in life so far and going outside is overwhelming.
• If there’s no self in me then “I” deserve to be treated badly by others. (everything is hell)
• If other people have no self then all these soul-less robot biochemical beings keep being mean to me even though they don’t have selves.  Reality is suffering.
• I don’t exist (scary, bad, fear) 

No fun.  None of them are enjoyable if you are heavy in the realisation of them.  Some of these overlap with the previous marks in content but really if you are having a bad time the advice is to stop doing that, be kind to yourself and surrender to what’s happening for you.

Self

On the flipside of no-self, self also has some sufferings.  Particularly the burn of having a self and also recognising other people as also having selves that are equally as important as your own (to existence, to yourself you are supposed to have personal value that isn’t to be replaced by other people’s selves, which can be a confusion around selves).

When you realise that there is a self, and sometimes those selves have to go take out the trash, or clean the toilet, or get up early or pick the food that you eat, that can be a special type of suffering.  Various forms of slave-capitalism still exist.  There are many selves out there having an existence that they don’t like and don’t know how to get out of.  Animals included.

I’ve never personally had an issue with this but I can see the potential for the “horror realisations”.

On the vajrayana path, there’s a turning towards the parts of reality that burn the most, including the sense of having a self.  There’s an invitation to be alive with a self that burns with the nature of reality, with no respite.  This probably doesn’t end up feeling like a dark night, but it sure does burn and sound scary to approach.

Bipolar depression

I single this out for a particularly familiar type of suffering to me.  The books, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha 2 by Daniel Ingram and Bipolar Awakenings by Sean Blackwell have some really valuable things to say on the topic of the spiritual bipolar path.

For me, the emotional cycling of bipolar strongly matched the stages of insight as described by Daniel Ingram and “manual of insight” of the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition.  

My experience followed a trajectory of, “dissolution”, “fear”, “misery”, “disgust”, “desire for deliverance”, “re-observation”.  There are more stages in the stages of insight but these are the particularly dark feeling suffering ones that I want to highlight as part of a conversation in the different varieties and shapes of dark nights.

These stages of insight that felt miserable to be in.  They were first filled with intrusive memories of any moments of life that previously had the flavours described.  Memories of misery haunted me all day until I learned the skill of surrendering to misery and the next stage arrived and I had to learn to surrender to it as well.  It was rough.  Eventually I ran out of memories to surrender to, and I still had to repeat the cycle a few more times with only the emotional content as the content.  Just a phase of fear, a phase of misery, a phase of disgust etc.  And after that it mostly cleared out.

In retrospect, I consider the whole process a “cleaning house” of negative experiences in my emotional and memory system.  But at the time it was pretty rough to go through.

If nothing else, dark nights teach you to be compassionate to people who are having a rough time. 

cycling

there was a special, extra flavour of hell to the bipolar stuff, which was the hell of cycling.  Feeling like I was just going around and around again.  It wasn’t helpful to also beat myself up about going around and around but usually a recognition of the cycle signalled the “desire for deliverance” phase, that also includes the sentiment, “when will it end”.

Desire for deliverance

One of the big stages in my experience of the bipolar cycle included the “desire for deliverance” from the stages of insight.  The DFD hauntingly says, “you’ve been in doom forever”, independent of how long you have been here.  It says, “when will it end”, “I want it to stop”.  And it even goes so far as to sometimes be experienced as suicidal thoughts by people.  The unfortunate news is that some people have a really bad time with this phase and stress out a lot about “suicidality” or the unconscionable possibility of death.  It’s a stressful thing, it might even be presumed to be a dark night by some people, although I don’t personally see it as that.  I encourage anyone who’s in it, and believes they are in a DK to be kind to yourself and get some rest.

The nice news is that DFD as a stage, comes just before the end of the cycle.  (yes it’s a cycle and will go again, but first the cycle will take a break)

LSD – No other (No self)

This one is a very specific type of dark night that came from a LSD trip.  Sometime after experiencing consciousness as one connected entity, I dawned on a realisation that this meant that other consciousnesses do not exist.  In the existential sense of separateness, I had a pretty rough week where I would go to ask someone else a question and realise I was talking to myself (there was no one else there).  I had to work through a bunch of pure suffering moments while I “forgot” then “re-remembered” the realisation of the unified consciousness.  At the same time I was having plenty of “too hot”, “too cold”, “too much” experiences.  If you’ve done something like this, it makes sense, if you haven’t and you plan to go there, my only advice is to be kind to yourself when going through rough phases of life.  If possible take the pressure off and have as many nice things as you can while the realisation makes motion through your system.

There are going to be more drug-related dark nights but I am myself not yet well informed.

Vastness

Some moments on the path feel open, spacious, and empty.  Kind of like the 5th Jhana of boundless space.  This vastness can be lonely (as per selfhood), can be destabilising, can have a sense of feeling lost.  It can also just be isolating in a not-fun way.  Have you ever felt like a drop in the ocean – it can be scary.  In my experience, this isn’t as “dark” as the dark night, but it sure has its own experiential confusions as you have to work your way through it.  Some ways through this one include going backwards to previous paths and iterating deeper into yourself, reflection on the past, and also just waiting for the next layer of previously hidden conscious experience to make itself known to you.  If it doesn’t last long, you probably think it’s not a big dk, but in weeks and months it would get to be no fun.  As per all DK type experiences, be kind to yourself if you find yourself here.  

Emptiness

If you enter the 7th Jhana, you make nothingness (or emptiness) the object of your concentration.  Not some mysterious, secret, gone-afar nothingness, but the local, ordinary nothingness that everyone can experience when I say, “there’s nothing in the box” or “what are you doing?” “nothing”.  Nothingness isn’t exciting or novel or anything really.  I find it quite boring, but as a consequence of really tuning into the nothingness, it reveals itself to pervade all things.  Including your desires, your goals, even your favourite jacket can suddenly feel like it is imbued with a sense of nothingness.  

Some people find this to be their dark night, as everything they previously cared for is very much now a whole lot of nothing.  It’s weird, it can be stressful, it can be exhausting, it can be relieving (to find your problems as nothing).  As usual, if you find yourself here, be kind to yourself and take it easy.  This too will pass.

Falling away of meaning

If you take your meditation path seriously, a few times along the path you probably have some kind of falling away of meaning, desire, intention or generally a “falling away” of some or another object you were taking to be serious, solid or reliable. 

This one isn’t so dark because “dark” implies something of the dark quality remains when things fall away, but it sure can be thought of as a destabilising experience.  This one can come in the form of a confusion about why I would do this job, or why did I ever want this goal.  

It can come in the form of a whole lot of non-doing.  If a bunch of my tension based self-image suddenly lets go, I might feel a lot like I’m dying, my “self” is fading or I suddenly don’t need 90% of what I was desperately craving for.  Either for you or for people around you, it’s easy to worry about the change.  Especially also when you are in this, waiting for the next stable experience to come up, it can feel confusing and scary if you (or a loved one) are unfamiliar with the spiritual process.  

Eckhart Tolle talks about the “park bench” problem.  For a person who has felt this falling away of meaning, they might be content to sit on a park bench for weeks, months, or years.  Sometimes this will be uncomfortable for your wife, your family or your friends.  I am not you, and cannot judge whether there is a problem or not with the park bench process, but as a clue, if you look at them, and notice they are distressed, you can offer to help them with their distress.  People are a meaningful journey if you pay attention to them.

As usual, be kind, be patient, and consider how you want to relate to the new place you find yourself.

When your parents die

There’s a metaphor of “holding the torch”, where your oldest relative (or friend) is holding the torch of dying and ageing.  One day that person will be you.  I have not experienced this, but I can see how it would be a deeply spiritual place to be.  And how it may be a scary shake up, if you hadn’t already encountered death – that now you await the day that you do.  This one has been reported to me as being a deep and powerful experience.  I’m naming it as part of the set but I don’t fully know if it belongs.

nihilism / existentialism

Strictly with a more intellectual bend, I believe that Nietzsche was going through his own version of dark night when he was writing about nihilism.  I have talked to a person who triggered their own dissociative episode at the time of reading about Nietzsche.  When I talked to him, it was 10+ years after his experience but his description of falling apart deeply matched my understanding of some of the dark night territory.

Deconstruction 

To go with Nihilism as the theme, some meditative and spiritual practices accidentally invite you to rip apart your understanding of your life. The light version of “tear it apart” might be called “investigation”, “insight practice”, “self inquiry”, even body scans sometimes look at a sensation and attempt to see the sensations that it is made up of.  The heavy version of these practices gets to a deconstruction of the reality you find yourself in.  This can be a positive growth-ful journey because many negative constructed experiences get deconstructed in the process of picking up and using the tool of deconstruction.  But being in a constant deconstruction process can be scary and feel like doom and the world is ending.  

If it is a natural spiritual stepping stone to learn to deconstruct, one must also learn to get the hang of using this tool correctly so that they can enjoy just enough of the good stuff and not so much be bothered by the bad stuff.

A simple example of problematic deconstruction is eating food.  Eating is an experience that is very weird if broken apart into its base sensations.  Ideally you want to break apart some of the negatives, i.e. some flavours you don’t like, while also keeping the flavours you do like, and also not thinking about the whole thing very hard (while eating) so that you don’t have to have moments of discomfort if the food is too salty or has a strange texture.  What you are looking for is the eventual “right relationship” to eating food.  Without defining “right relationship” too firmly, I think I want it to be approximately, “food is delicious, most foods taste and feel good to eat.  I prefer eating healthy food to unhealthy food and my experience naturally directs me towards a healthy diet.  I naturally regulate calories and nutrients depending on my body and overall experience.”

If you are deconstructing, try pausing it for a bit.  Try borrowing structures from friends.  Try diving really far into deconstruction for a bit.  In my experience, the bad bit is in the middle, and moving on from the deconstruction can happen sooner or later, depending on your information diet, support structures and practice style.

Dissociation

In many of the previous types of DK, one is quite clear what is wrong.  In a long and enduring dissociated state, it only feels like “there’s something wrong” but I can’t tell what it is because I’m so dissociated that I can’t pay attention to anything.  Part of what is wrong is the dissociation, and part may be a physical pain in the body, but if the attention has deliberately run away from the body then it’s hard to find out what the pain is.  People who are dissociated sometimes don’t know how to get re-associated, and as a consequence can spend a while in the dissociated place.  The solution I personally use is for a smaller scale dissociation and that’s to “do nothing and wait” while meditating and inviting my attention back into my body slowly over a period of hours.  As I send my attention inwards, it first bounces away, over and over, and eventually sticks more and more until I can have my attention in my body and it stays.  At some point I can be more with my body but generally I feel better at that point, even if I don’t feel perfectly connected to my body.

Fuzz (j8)

I highlight this one as a “it’s really bad” experience that I’ve encountered with several people.  Some had long covid and found themselves in some variation of “brain fog” or buzzing cloud of distraction.  Others have tinnitus and find it incredibly degrading to their quality of life and others again just drifted there by accident.  

I would not call this directly a dark night experience, but the relationship one has with the buzz, including the stress, distress, freak out, inability to work as you previously did… All this and more points to an experience of “having a real bad time” and “wanting it to end” which does land in the category of DK.  Mentioned here for the benefit of anyone who is going through it.  In general, despite the opposing recommendations of some sources, I would suggest making it the object of meditation and spending hours or days paying attention to it.  With a bit of luck and patience it will either clear, click, or clarify (by bringing insights about) what’s going on for you.  

One consideration here is that some of the distress is caused by the relationship to it, so a strong aversion is painful to keep up, we can reverse the emotional relationship with it, by deliberately paying attention to it.  When we deliberately pay attention against a negative emotion, we retrain the emotional habit to travel in the other direction, and then we can have a healthier, happier relationship with the phenomenon.

There’s also a possibility that it’s caused by extra inflammation, so going on a short term water fasting diet to reduce irritants may help.  There’s also a possibility that it’s caused by blood pressure so equally, doing nothing, being peaceful, fasting and meditating should help with that.  As usual, be kind to yourself if you find yourself in a bad place.

Cycle of life, “I want to go home”.

One particular type of suffering that is a little more sneaky and not really covered above is the realisation that life goes around and around.  Despite our best intentions for novelty or variety, sometimes it’s possible to conclude, “there’s nothing new under the sun”.  This conclusion comes with its own existential hangups.  If you find yourself here, work on acceptance, work on questioning if it’s really a cycle or just seems like it (search for nuance), work on looking smaller or broader, you might just be stuck at a layer that you’ve finished exploring.  Work on acceptance and patience.  

Endnotes

Some of these types of Dark Night overlap in content and description.  This is because they all have a bit of suffering in them.  They all include a quality of not quite wanting them, not quite expecting them or not quite being in a place of enjoyment in relation to the strange thing you might have found yourself swimming in.

Chongyang Trungpa was once asked, “what do you do if you find yourself in Samsara (suffering)”.  He replied “I try to stay there”.  

One interpretation of what he’s pointing to is the way attention works with suffering.  The usual habit is to get away from the “bad” thing.  This can often make the suffering worse because not only is a bad thing happening but I’m suddenly filled with negative/averse reactions as well.  By reversing the attention pattern and “trying to stay there” we are both changing the negative reactions and changing the stimuli from bad to good.  Any object we deliberately choose, with our attention, to attend to, to amplify, transforms from bad to good.  The more we pay attention, the more we move towards it, and the more we extract wisdom from the visit of this phenomenon.

If nothing else, hardships in life or in spiritual processes are an invitation to deepen, to strengthen and to grow.  If you are in the dark night, know that you’re not the first one to be in one.  Be kind to yourself and try not to implode your life.  

I’m sure someone has a guide for working with it, but I’ve always found that some combination of friends, sleep, food, water, fresh air, vitamins and generally anything I would do that I usually enjoy, do help.  

Some spiritual processes require that harsh leaning-in to scary phenomenon.  Make sure that when you do, you are well resourced for the investigation, and don’t be afraid to take a break if it’s a bit much at the time.

In summary, here are some various types of dark nights:

• Impermanence
• Suffering
• No-self
• (their opposites – permanence, non-suffering, self)
• Bipolar down phase
• Cycling 
• Desire for deliverance
• No other
• Vastness (j5)
• Emptiness (j7)
• Falling away of meaning.
• When your parents die.
• Existentialism
• Deconstruction 
• Dissociation 
• Fuzz, buzz (j8)
• Cycle of life, “I want to go home”.

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If you liked this work, or have questions you can contact me to follow up with your questions.