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Dealing with the Dark Night

the Dark Night: Christian-Buddhist dialogue

I stumbled into the Dharma Overground by an obscure route, picking up on a reference to Buddhist parallels to John of the Cross’s concept of the Dark Night of the Soul in the Wikipedia entry on that. My practice at this point in my life is rooted in the Christian contemplative tradition, though I was something of a prodigal— born into a basic suburban American Catholicism, and clueless about the mystical side of Christianity, I grew dissatisfied with what I was finding there for all the standard reasons and got into Buddhism during high school, mostly a vague sort of Zen, much influenced by Alan Watts (it was the 70s) and D.T. Suzuki. Though I did have a knack for certain experiences and definitely crossed into the country of inwardness, my actual meditation practice was never much more than hit-or-miss until I encountered Muktananda’s Siddha Yoga in the early eighties. That’s its own long story, but the short version is that I spent a couple years in one of his ashrams, in Oakland, and amid everything else (Kashmir Shaivism, Kundalini, the somewhat secret tantrism of that scene, scandal, politics, etc.), I also somewhat paradoxically ended up tapping into The Cloud of Unknowing and John of the Cross, in the ashram library, and so began a process of reassessing and exploring that tradition. A further encounter in 1990 with Fr. Thomas Keating, and the centering prayer practice he was teaching, pretty much convinced me that the thing could be done within the Christian tradition, and though I have inevitably found everything accented by a couple of decades of eastern vocabularies, my practice since then has spiraled in a basically Christian orbit. John of the Cross has been the foundation— i am convinced that he has covered the waterfront of the path to “union with God” better than anyone else who uses the word "God." I have also been much influenced by Bernadette Roberts (another long story there, and her experience of No-Self is its own deep fascinating can of worms; she breaks the envelope in the end, basically, but I have found her treatment of the orthodox stages of Christian contemplation to be as good and accurate and helpful as they come).

Anyway, here I am. I have raced through my first reading of MCTB (and begun my further rereadings; the book has become a friend already in the way that very few do) and been thrilled by its very refreshing no-bullshit tone and by the palpable depth of practical experience that shines through. Daniel’s phrase “Chronic Dark Night Yogi” alone was worth the price of admission for me, as it nails a vast part of my own experience. And I am fascinated by the parallels he draws between the Vipassana Jhanas or Dukkha Ñanas— the Third Vipassana Jhana, in his scheme— and John of the Cross’s Dark Night.

It is these parallels I would like to explore on this thread, if that appeals to anyone. Partly in a spirit of inter-tradition dialogue— I think a lot of interesting insight might come of a closer examination of the night in the light of the Buddhist and Christian approaches in genuine conversation. And mainly because I think the Night(s) is (are) the fire that really gets most of the cooking done, in the end.

For openers, aside from general reflections (always welcome): John of the Cross distinguishes two nights, a Dark Night of the Senses and a Dark Night of the Spirit. (Both of these, of course, presume a viable foundation of virtue, a life conformed to the basics of what MCTB calls “morality,” and what John calls the cultivation of the virtues and the elimination of the vices through mortification and purification.) (He also distinguishes active and passive phases of both nights, but I'm trying to keep it simple on this opening round.) To me, the night of the senses corresponds largely to the transition from world-oriented desires to God-oriented desires; it is fueled by a kind of conversion experience, a “spiritual” awakening— by something much like Daniel’s A&P event, as I understand it— and its fruit is the achievement of a sustainable (basically joyous) prayerful life, what John calls the life of the “proficients.” To try to translate this into MCTB terms, I suspect that this first night and its fruition revolve around what Daniel calls the concentration practices. Its characteristic prayer forms are generally content-based (John of the Cross calls content-based prayer “meditation,” to distinguish it from contemplation) and focus-oriented. I would venture to say that this involves the samatha jhanas.

The Dark Night of the Spirit, in John’s terms, is the transition to infused contemplation, which is a whole different kind of prayer, essentially a pathless engagement with nada; I believe this corresponds to what MCTB would call vipassana practices, to insight.

That seems like enough for openers— it at least baits the hook of discussion. Though one other note: it seems entirely possible to me that the Christian map, as exemplified in its orthodox form in John of the Cross, stops too soon and may have missed a continent. Bernadette Roberts has definitely gone out into the “Beyond here be dragons” part of the map, into something she calls No-Self; I also think Meister Eckhart spent a lot of his career hinting around at this too, while trying to not get condemned for heresy and killed. Marguerite Porete went there, to a large extent, and did get killed. So there is some historical reason for the limited mapwork and general gunshyness. Certainly Bernadette Roberts has raised a shit storm among a certain set of neo-Inquisitors. But if anyone can handle it, she can.

RE: the Dark Night: Christian-Buddhist dialogue
Answer
6/18/11 12:45 PM as a reply to Tim Farrington.
Sorry for rambling a bit here, but got a bit excited emoticon


I haven't seen much dark night related to concentration meditation, except that being concentrated makes it hit lots harder. But it you could be right in trying to fit it with the first A&P, which i suspect requires unusual (for pre-contemplative life) levels of concentration.

I don't know much about the christian concept of the Dark Night, but i think i can distinguish to some degree between two kinds of 3rd vipassana jhana experiences i have had.

There seems to be some sort of shift (note sure about this) between seemingly ordinary emotions (i guess fear through disgust), and then there's the deeply soul-wrenching giving up, casting out for something, anything to help (desire for deliverance, reobservation).
I'm not sure about the mapping, but the second kind of dark night for seemed to arise from directly noticing that there were no place for "me" in any of this, after i had done a concentration meditation to become absorbed in the background emptiness from which phenomena arise (making the impermanence of phenomena very very noticeable in real time).

My impression, and i hope you will correct me, is that centering prayer doesn't actually involve looking closely at phenomena in the same way as vipassana. This fits with my understanding (following Duncan Barford: Handbook for the recently enlightened) that there is another kind of meditation that can lead to the same sorts of awakening - a meditation where you surrender everything you are to a higher power, and keep surrendering until the you isn't there anymore, because everything have been surrendered. Would this fit with centering prayer?

RE: the Dark Night: Christian-Buddhist dialogue
Answer
6/20/11 6:46 AM as a reply to Villum (redacted).
Hi Villum,

Thanks for your fascinating post.

"I haven't seen much dark night related to concentration meditation, except that being concentrated makes it hit lots harder. But it you could be right in trying to fit it with the first A&P, which i suspect requires unusual (for pre-contemplative life) levels of concentration."

I’m not sure about the correspondence between John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Senses and concentration— as I said in my initial stumbling, I have a vague notion that the particular crisis of the Night of Sense might relate to the acquistion and exercise of concentrative states concurrent with an internal realignment having to do with “renunciation” — with the transition from seeking our gratification in “the world” to seeking our gratification “in God.” This is only possible, realistically, after what we are calling here the first A & P, when the possibility of “spiritual” juice has been revealed and the desire for that juice is strong enough to trump our previous conventional desires and motivate us to reorder our lives in the interest of cultivating deep prayer. I am only groping around here at all in the interests of cross-cultural mapping, and because of the fact that John distinguishes so emphatically between the two nights. The conduct required in both of them is basically the same, however; and the deepening cultivation, out of necessity, of the basic virtues of faith, humility, patience, compassion, courage, and so forth, is also largely the same. I think that it is what the nights deconstruct that seems like the meaningful variation.

For myself, i have never really cared whether I am in a “night of sense” or a “night of spirit,” in practice; by their fruits ye shall know them, and it is only in retrospect that i am prepared to see what exactly was “purged” or accomplished in any given round. Bernadette Roberts, whose reports and analyses of experience in this territory I trust to a very high degree, says in her published works that for her the night of sense ran right into the night of spirit; two for the price of one— she bought one and got one free, basically, and good for her, but obviously her books are no help on sorting things out here. Even in correspondence she says that the Passive Night of the Senses and the Active Night of the Spirit “overlap or go on at the same time, I treat them together.” I have definitely experienced multiple major nights, and at least two genuine and distinct emergences from them (and have cycled recurrently through the territory, in a spiral sort of way, on a smaller scale, frequently), so probably there are meaningful distinctions to be made here once the terminology is sorted out (and the guy using the terms is more lucid and informed). But without that lucidity, it might well be a waste of time to try to get too precise on what corresponds to what in what language.

I do think, in practical terms, that dark nights in the strict sense of the term (i mean, in practice— “on the cushion,” as Daniel often puts it) all have to do with the shift from content/state-centered prayer or practice to God-oriented pathlessness in the cloud of unknowing, roughly speaking— from meditation to contemplation, in Christian terms, and from concentration to insight, or from samatha jhana to vipassana jhana, to try to speak DO here (and one of my main interests in this thread is in fact learning the MCTB/dharmaoverground language, in the interests of discovering the range and limits of meaningful translation and its potential to deepen practice, and also, at the very least, making more fruitful conversations possible, if only in my MCTB pidgin, in the courtyard of the Contemplative Tower of Babel).


"I don't know much about the christian concept of the Dark Night, but i think i can distinguish to some degree between two kinds of 3rd vipassana jhana experiences i have had."

John’s second night, the Dark Night of the Spirit, to me, corresponds clearly and fairly precisely the 3rd vipassana jhana, and it seems like that is probably the most promising tentative translation to make here, as it seems like we’re on solid common ground with the experiences and in the same ballpark with their interpretation.

"There seems to be some sort of shift (note sure about this) between seemingly ordinary emotions (i guess fear through disgust), and then there's the deeply soul-wrenching giving up, casting out for something, anything to help (desire for deliverance, reobservation).
I'm not sure about the mapping, but the second kind of dark night for seemed to arise from directly noticing that there were no place for "me" in any of this, after i had done a concentration meditation to become absorbed in the background emptiness from which phenomena arise (making the impermanence of phenomena very very noticeable in real time)."

Amen! This is the territory, whatever map we’re using. I agree that the conditions of the dark night seem to arise from the dissolution of our stabilizing concepts in prayer/meditation/life. The Christian way is what Daniel calls a “True Self” path, and the Buddhist way is a “No Self” path, but in both cases i think what the dark night reveals is in large part the emptiness of whatever self we’ve been assuming we were, or had; and that the gist of the work of the dark night is making peace with that. For the Christian, another aspect, in addition to the Incredible Shrinking Self is the dissolution at increasingly subtle levels of our constructions of “God.” All the handles fall off the divine, even as the hands fall off the self that was grasping for those handles.

"My impression, and i hope you will correct me, is that centering prayer doesn't actually involve looking closely at phenomena in the same way as vipassana. This fits with my understanding (following Duncan Barford: Handbook for the recently enlightened) that there is another kind of meditation that can lead to the same sorts of awakening - a meditation where you surrender everything you are to a higher power, and keep surrendering until the you isn't there anymore, because everything have been surrendered. Would this fit with centering prayer?"

The centering prayer thing is in many ways a can of worms, or a truck full of cans of worms, worthy of its own thread at least, starting with all the trickiness of it being “Centering Prayer,” a distinct brand name; and moving on through the politics and ecclesiastical politics of that; the history of the movement, as a distinct impulse of contemplative renewal within the Catholic tradition; the developments and strengths and weaknesses of the specific brand name itself; and the issue of Christian “mantra” practice in general. (The Centering Prayer folks are at great pains to distinguish what they call a “Sacred Word” from “mantra,” for various reasons, mostly in my opinion having to do with covering their ass with various Christian elements (necessarily, for the most part: again, this level of stuff is complicated socially and culturally). There is a species of Christian meditation developed by John Main that does call their mantra a mantra. The invoking of a whatchamaycallit as a prayer technique goes back at least to the desert monks of the third and forth centuries, and from there moves in a basically uninterrupted line with the hesychasts into present-day Eastern Orthodoxy, which thus needed no Centering Prayer movement and its complications just to start simply praying again. But I digress.

A very short answer to your question, in the spirit in which I think you are asking it, is that in the basic “technique” of centering prayer there is in fact no element of close examination of the passing pheneomena as there is in vipassana. The CP thing is simply to notice what comes up and let it go as it is noticed, with no emphasis on analysis or seeing-through or “noting” in the more technical sense of MCTB. The “orthodox” Centering Prayer differs from a lot of mantra work in that it says to only invoke the sacred word when distraction is noticed, when you’ve gotten caught up in something, sensory, emotional, ideational, etc. The use of the prayer word is thus, as you say, a kind of surrender of everything else and you “keep surrendering until the you isn’t there anymore, because everything has been surrendered.” At that point, “not I, but Christ in me” is left, theologically speaking.

RE: the Dark Night: Christian-Buddhist dialogue
Answer
6/19/11 1:52 PM as a reply to Tim Farrington.
Quick reply for now:

First, do you have a good and readable source to Centering prayer you can refer me to. Preferably online, but if you know a really good book, that would be ok too.

I'll try to read some St. John when i get the time to see if i can recognize the experience.

RE: the Dark Night: Christian-Buddhist dialogue
Answer
6/20/11 6:44 AM as a reply to Villum (redacted).
good intro books to centering prayer are Basil Pennington's Centering Prayer and Thomas Keating's Invitation to Love and Open Heart, Open Mind. no online texts of these that i know of. the main CP website, http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org , has a number of articles and intro material.

John of the Cross's works are available to be read online. The Dark Night is at http://www.karmel.at/ics/john/dn.html
I'd recommend going straight to Book I, Chapter 8, for the best chance at getting a sense of his dark night teachings without going into hyperglycemic shock at the density of his 16th-century theological language.

RE: the Dark Night: Christian-Buddhist dialogue
Answer
6/20/11 5:10 PM as a reply to Tim Farrington.
Tim Farrington:
good intro books to centering prayer are Basil Pennington's Centering Prayer and Thomas Keating's Invitation to Love and Open Heart, Open Mind. no online texts of these that i know of. the main CP website, http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org , has a number of articles and intro material.


I found this, which seems a good introduction and overview: http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/site/DocServer/MethodCP2008.pdf?docID=121
From trying out the approach, as i understand it from the text, i really like the method, and it does seem very likely to produce insight. I don't know if the kind of faith i have works with this, but i tried it with a using a personal symbol of the undefinable Absolute (seemed appropriate, as you described the practice as a via negativa).
Will be trying out my approximation of this practice over the next week, to see how it works for me emoticon I don'ẗ imagine it will really correspond to the christian practice when it is infused with strong faith, but it's seems interesting and powerful practice anyways, at least on first look.


Tim Farrington:
John of the Cross's works are available to be read online. The Dark Night is at http://www.karmel.at/ics/john/dn.html
I'd recommend going straight to Book I, Chapter 8, for the best chance at getting a sense of his dark night teachings without going into hyperglycemic shock at the density of his 16th-century theological language.


I've just looked at it cursorily, it indeed seems a very very nice work - recognizable descriptions of experience, seems very good for helping to make sense of it all and persevering and also provides some, in my experience, very useful advice for the Dark Night/Knowledges of suffering. It also, on first look at least, helps a lot in making sense of the centering prayer.

some quick comments and crossmapping:

John of the Cross - The Dark Night, book 1, ch 8, 3:
. For it is through the delight and satisfaction they experience in prayer that they have become detached from worldly things and have gained some spiritual strength in God. This strength has helped them somewhat to restrain their appetites for creatures, and through it they will be able to suffer a little oppression and dryness without turning back. Consequently, it is at the time they are going about their spiritual exercises with delight and satisfaction, when in their opinion the sun of divine favor is shining most brightly on them, that God darkens all this light and closes the door and the spring of sweet spiritual water they were tasting as often and as long as they desired. For since they were weak and tender, no door was closed to them, as St. John says in the Book of Revelation [Rv. 3:8]. God now leaves them in such darkness that they do not know which way to turn in their discursive imaginings. They cannot advance a step in meditation, as they used to, now that the interior sense faculties are engulfed in this night.


That's seems to correspond very strongly with movement from the height of Arising and Passing Away to the 3rd Vipassana Jhana (almost wrote Dark Night, but that would have been silly ;) )

John of the Cross - The Dark Night, book 2, ch1, 1:
If His Majesty intends to lead the soul on, he does not put it in this dark night of spirit immediately after its going out from the aridities and trials of the first purgation and night of sense. Instead, after having emerged from the state of beginners, the soul usually spends many years exercising itself in the state of proficients. In this new state, as one liberated from a cramped prison cell, it goes about the things of God with much more freedom and satisfaction of spirit and with more abundant interior delight than it did in the beginning before entering the night of sense.


Dark night yogi? Even though there are some discrepancies, the overall picture fits, especially on reading the next section. Interesting when added to his comment that there are many people who enter the first dark night (book 1, ch8, 1). Seems to recognize being a dark night yogi as a quite common phenomenon, but does provide some comfort it as a sort of (limited) blessed state. The dark night does tend to turn on my spiritual-seeker instincts, so this seems to fit as well.

RE: the Dark Night: Christian-Buddhist dialogue
Answer
6/21/11 4:26 AM as a reply to Villum (redacted).
From trying out the approach, as i understand it from the text, i really like the method, and it does seem very likely to produce insight. I don't know if the kind of faith i have works with this, but i tried it with a using a personal symbol of the undefinable Absolute (seemed appropriate, as you described the practice as a via negativa).


As far as methods go . . . It definitely eases along the via negativa, and the more so the deeper you get and the more discerning you become of the subtleties of what arises. There is a point for me where any invocation of the prayer word, however gently and subtly (Keating recommends invoking it as "lightly as a feather"), just ends up splashing too much, so it goes to a fairly pure insight practice of attending to the impermanence and unsatisfactoriness of the arisings as they come and go; and in practice this amounts to a no-self meditation as well, as every effort and movement of "self" is seen as anicca and dukkha. Which is really not so shocking to Christian orthodoxy as one might suspect: the transience and unsatisfactoriness of all created things is a constant theme among in the works of pretty much everyone you'll find along the path.

Will be trying out my approximation of this practice over the next week, to see how it works for me emoticon I don'ẗ imagine it will really correspond to the christian practice when it is infused with strong faith, but it's seems interesting and powerful practice anyways, at least on first look.


Faith in the Void and the groundless emptiness of all things will probably do just fine here. I'll be interested in how it plays for you.

some quick comments and crossmapping:

John of the Cross - The Dark Night, book 1, ch 8, 3:
. For it is through the delight and satisfaction they experience in prayer that they have become detached from worldly things and have gained some spiritual strength in God. This strength has helped them somewhat to restrain their appetites for creatures, and through it they will be able to suffer a little oppression and dryness without turning back. Consequently, it is at the time they are going about their spiritual exercises with delight and satisfaction, when in their opinion the sun of divine favor is shining most brightly on them, that God darkens all this light and closes the door and the spring of sweet spiritual water they were tasting as often and as long as they desired. For since they were weak and tender, no door was closed to them, as St. John says in the Book of Revelation [Rv. 3:8]. God now leaves them in such darkness that they do not know which way to turn in their discursive imaginings. They cannot advance a step in meditation, as they used to, now that the interior sense faculties are engulfed in this night.


That's seems to correspond very strongly with movement from the height of Arising and Passing Away to the 3rd Vipassana Jhana (almost wrote Dark Night, but that would have been silly ;) )


Exactly! Fearfully, miserably, disgustingly true. It's really the primo way to generate critical mass in the desire for deliverance.



John of the Cross - The Dark Night, book 2, ch1, 1:
If His Majesty intends to lead the soul on, he does not put it in this dark night of spirit immediately after its going out from the aridities and trials of the first purgation and night of sense. Instead, after having emerged from the state of beginners, the soul usually spends many years exercising itself in the state of proficients. In this new state, as one liberated from a cramped prison cell, it goes about the things of God with much more freedom and satisfaction of spirit and with more abundant interior delight than it did in the beginning before entering the night of sense.


Dark night yogi? Even though there are some discrepancies, the overall picture fits, especially on reading the next section. Interesting when added to his comment that there are many people who enter the first dark night (book 1, ch8, 1). Seems to recognize being a dark night yogi as a quite common phenomenon, but does provide some comfort it as a sort of (limited) blessed state. The dark night does tend to turn on my spiritual-seeker instincts, so this seems to fit as well.


This is why I do think some manner of distinguishing between the nights is useful: there are more than one, for sure; they recur, in a spiral fashion, very reliably pretty much every time we go through a cycle of practice. And they demand some kind of perfection, some very specific balance of surrender and effort, trust and perseverance.