| | The Dark Night is best judged by the question, "What is reality doing?" In the DN, the center becomes murky and the periphery becomes solid, which gives rise to all kinds of issues, and the vibrations are slower compared to A&P.
This stages gives rise to all kinds of nasty emotional and psychological side effects. Some traditions (Christian, Jungian) judge progress based on these side effects, but the beauty of vipassana is that we can look past the content and judge what is going on at a deeply fundamental level.
In the Dark Night, you can live a life of luxury in paraise and be completely unable to enjoy.
I've had depression and anxiety for most of my life, but I can say with certainty that the Dark Night has exacerbated these problems. As for the presentation of the Dark Night itself, I passed through it about two years ago without knowing what was happening. What is interesting, is that when I think about the individual nanas, I remember the exact moment that I shifted to a new one. I don't remember much else of that time, but I do remember each specific state shift, even though I didn't know what they were.
Fear: I was standing behind my cash register and, all of a sudden, I was worried that a customer would try to rob me, and was worried I would somehow be fired for no reason. I inwardly freaked out for the rest of the day.
Misery: I was laying on my couch, doing nothing in particular, when it hit me, how awful existence was. Not just the current state of affairs, or my living situation, but existence itself. My body felt achy and all I could think about was how much suffering there was in the world.
Disgust: I was, again, sitting on my couch, when I looked over at my kitchen. I could see some fruit flies, and I was filled with, well, disgust. I saw some trash sticking out of the can and some dirty dishes in the sink and it was just disgusting, absolutely awful. I look over at my wife and thought about how gross sex was. Why did I ever want to have sex? It was revolting.
Desire for Deliverance: I became aware of how society was shoddily constructed, able to fall at a moment's notice. This is hard to describe, but it was very profound. I withdrew all my plans to attend college and devoted my time to studying off-the-grid living, building my own cabin, and so on. I found a website of someone who lived in a cave in the Sierra Nevadas for several years and dreamed of doing the same.
Re-Observation: Ah, the ass-kicker! I was sitting on the porch of my apartment complex, looking towards the road. It felt like reality started spinning or screaming or both, and there was just this intense primal frustration with everything. It came and went a few times. I had some very intense dreams that led to low EQ. I actually had nightmares the whole time through the DN, but these were the worst.
A little later I reached low EQ, basked in it a while, and "fell back." I stopped practicing for months and here I am now, hoping to get stream-entry.
The DN sounds terrible and all that, but it just reveals the fundamental suffering that is always present in samsara. Mindfulness grows strong enough to penetrate the core of the selfing process, and this sucks. That is all it is. The emotional and psychological shit that bubbles to the surface can be overpowering, but it's just a side effect. Practice well and it will pass.
Now, as to how insight practice "solves" these problems, I can't speak from experience, but I can offer my thoughts based on descriptions of arahatship and my brief experiences of Low EQ. When 4th path is attained, there is no "self" remaining. Emotions may arise, but they are just impermanent blips with no agency, no perceiver, no self to which these emotions are happening. Thus, they aren't a problem. |