William Meader: The Dark Night of the Soul

[Music] hello everyone my name is William meter and today I'm here to do a presentation on the dark night of the soul and the goal of this particular talk is to help you understand how the esoteric philosophy looks at this subject of the dark night experience and it's interesting too because often we think about it is a very negative thing and it would appear at face value to be negative but in fact there's some real positivity underlying the dark night experience so my goal is for you to see that and to put it in the context of your own life and your own journey the dark night is inescapable and it's one of those things that we have to understand is just built into the fabric of walking the spiritual path you know it's interesting because it was originally coined the dark night of the soul experience by Saint James I'm sorry Saint John of the Cross he was a monk back in the 16th century Carmelite monk actually and so he he in his work began to coin that term and it represents a kind of darkness that seems to overcome us and we feel disconnected from the soul or God or the greater life that we have in the past felt connected to often there's a sense of feeling a bit deserted spiritually and yet it's understood that these are major transitions in consciousness they represent an undoing process there's a bit of an undoing to it but it's an undoing as a function of stepping into the next phase of your development of consciousness you could say it's an unfolding while at the same time and undoing and so so if you look at history though you find that you know the darknet experience has been discussed or mentioned in much of the literature from different theological backgrounds and the great teachers of the past have had a dark night experience probably more than one look at the Christ for instance the Christ 2,000 years ago went through the Garden of Gethsemane crisis which was a bit of a dark night experience if you recall or we might look at the Christ on the cross when fell feeling abandoned said father father wanna have their sake in me and so obviously that's a fairly significant dark night experience if we look at prometheus in the ancient the European literature we find the Prometheus who was an agent of God felt disconnected and was actually chained to Iraq and vultures were permitted to peck his liver which is just a it's a story about Prometheus being expelled from God's favour in connection then you had Mohammed who spent so much time brooding in the desert at times of trying to reconnect and understand his relationship or the or the Buddha who spent time under the Bodhi tree insisting that that the enlightened realization and the connection with divinity must come under that tree and and so we see that if this whole idea of a darknet experience belongs to the very depth of the religious spirit there's always going to be times when you feel disconnected and then later reconnected and so what am i wanting to do today is I want to go through seven major points for you to understand how this philosophy looks at the nature of the dark night experience and so I'm going to have a slideshow and we'll talk about each of these points one by one so let me get that available for you to see okay so hopefully you can see that now and we are going to look at the very first point and that is this that if it says key points about the dark night experience or the dark night of the soul experience the first point is that it is first encountered when the person has entered onto what we call the probationary path so let me explain what I mean by that these terms sometimes can throw us off if we're not familiar with it the probationary path is is a part of the journey that happens after what we call the awakening when for for thousands of lifetimes an individual is living their personality life they're living there their lower nature and developing their ego and personality and although the soul is present it's in the background and the individual can't really consciously sense the soul at all and for countless incarnations the whole life is oriented toward building that outer garment that is what we call personality and there isn't there is no real such thing as a dark night of the soul experience at that point because at that point the individual hasn't yet had a conscious realization of the soul so so what I guess I'm trying to say is that it's only it's only when we are when we are a finally awakening to a higher impulse within us when we are awakened to a higher kind of love within us that we are awakening to the the soul itself for the first time we're something we call the causal body which is the container that is holding your souls consciousness but as I say for countless incarnations the individual the personality is not conscious of that it just simply is being personality and ego and cultivating a more integrated ego expression in the life so that's point number one you a person has to be on the probationary path to feel to start having moments of feeling abandoned by the soul in fact it's very interesting you know it is said that when a person has their first awakening that often that awakening is fleeting it's a sense that something divine took place deep inside of flashing forth their awakening to the causal body the soul for the first time but it is fleet and it goes and then an individual struggles to find out how to recapture that experience so right at the very beginning the very first inkling of the soul deep within is he is followed by and sort of an immediate dark night experienced so that's point number one you have to be on this on the path to awaken to the soul because it's not in tattoo to feel a dark night experience because it's on the path where you've had an awakening to the soul and therefore when it it vanishes at the dark night moment you realize something's missing the second point is this it creates the feeling of being abandoned or forsaken now what's important to think about in this context is that although it does hold that feeling about it I think it's important to realize that it's an it's an illusion that you're really not disconnected from divinity at all you're not at all it is a time of forcing an individual to turn inward to look at themself with greater honesty with greater a greater sense of of Who am I and am I really doing my best to bring my best forward in a way a dark night experience creates a sense of disconnect with divinity in a way that kind of forces us to begin to really think more about how how can I be a better person but it's difficult admittedly because you know you feel like you feel like you're you had something and then you lost it and it it kind of makes it when when a person's going through a dark night experience and feels that sense of forsake in this there's a there's a sense that no matter what you say to them to the to it encourage them there's always going to be this sense of doubt that that that any kind of reassurance is often the personality will doubt the value of that because it's not they're a media experience but nonetheless it will certainly come back so it always creates this feeling of abandonment and a sense of doubt that it'll reappear now one of the things that I'd like to share with you about this is that and how to put this wonder that there's many reasons why the dark night experience occurs but one of them has to do with the idea that there are times when the soul creates the dark night experience to quote arrest the hastening personality and that's a really really important concept to arrest the hastening personality what do we mean by that what I mean by that is that when you're on the path your personality is being inspired by the soul at various times you feel like you're you're really moving forward with your spirituality and you sense that you're evolving in your consciousness in a very serious real way but oftentimes the personality the lower self that's enthused about living a spiritual life that personality sometimes becomes you shall I say over enthused or it becomes it wants enlightenment now it doesn't realize that it has to go through some real transformational processes so if there are times when actually the soul will create the darkened experience to to to stop that personality from charging forward prior to it doing the deep work of transforming itself in order to earn your way in because you know what if you know the truth is that you have to earn your way to enlightenment we all do we have to you know faith just sort of takes you to the beginning of the path in a certain sense but then there's the hard work of transforming the personality so that it becomes the rightful servant of the soul and as that personality becomes Mork believing that there is a soul trying to inspire it it-it-it sometimes wants the fast-track wants the fast-track to enlightenment and there are times when the it has to be put down by creating the dark knife experience and so I hope that makes sense so having said that let's go to the third point as it says here it results in a feeling of losing one spiritual direction so it's not just that I feel like I was connected to something sacred and now I'm not but it also puts a whole different coloring on the question of what is my purpose where am I going what is the correct spiritual direction to follow you might have thought you know you might have thought that you have it and and and now it's all put into question now the thing to keep in mind is when we talk about spiritual direction we're really talking about the soul's purpose really and the the subject of the soul's purpose can be approached in many ways for instance the soul one of the clues to understanding the soul's purpose has to do with what is called the trend of one's thinking you know how the idea here is that look at the trend of your interest the trend of your passion and it is it is believed a great master once said this that look at the trend of your thinking and sin and see that trend and the golden thread underlying that trend because that golden thread is very much related to what the calling is of the soul and so one of the ways to start to recapture that sense of direction is to recapture in your mind what it is that fascinates your mind what engages your consciousness what gets you back into a thought process that really makes you feel like there's a reason for your being keep in mind that your soul your causal body is found on the higher mental plane so the soul has a tendency to to launch trends of lofty thought so one of the things to always remember particularly when you feel like you've lost your way directionally on a soul level is to ask yourself what do I like to think about what has to historically been the thing that is just constantly my mind wants to go back to over and over even though right now I'm in the dark night experience and I my mind isn't there at all what has historically been that because that's really important and and and and so nonetheless in the dark night there will be a tendency to have this sense of loss of direction you know it's very interesting when I think about this subject I always think about the sign of Sagittarius you know in astra in esoteric astrology Sagittarius is all about direction you know the archer who's shooting the arrows you may not know this but the arrows he is shooting have a name in mythology they're called the arrows of aspiration so always Sagittarius is about aiming at visioning of striving toward or aspiring toward and even though we might not all be born in Sagittarius the truth is we all have an arrow to aim we all have a sense of where am I putting my life and we want to aim that ly to to the extent that it's not just a steady aim but it's almost as if you become the arrow itself and ideally that's the goal we want to strive we want to commit our lives to the vision we hold and yet during the dark night experience we might feel like we've lost it or we were in air somehow and we thought we understood it and now we don't but always the solution to this is time to give yourself enough time and to allow the process to work it through remember it's it's really in a way that it's about darkness as a prelude to new light it's always darkest before the dawn an hour and in a way that's a very fundamental principle in the study of the dark night of the soul experience it's always darkness before the souls dawning our let's take a look at the fourth point the fourth point the dark night of the soul experience will differ according to one's ray and his or her point in evolution so that's quite important to keep in mind because just to reacquaint some of you with this it is said that there are seven types of souls in the world today seven think of a ray as being a lens a lens through which life looks out and that lens is a lens that or it's sometimes called an organizing principle of consciousness it organizes perception it organizes patterns of perception and action and reaction and even defines the tendencies of your interests so there are seven types of lenses you might say or rays and that your soul is found upon one of them and that in and that's why in this philosophy it's understood that there these seven types of souls will seek to it to serve humanity and vastly vastly different ways for instance a first race soul which is called the ray of will and power will tend to serve humanity through executive tendencies often is attracted to leadership opportunities as well as it is the Ray that governs the whole institution of government within any society so there for instance there would be a disproportion a number of first ray souls working within what we call the department of government regardless of the country or the type of government the second ray types are second ray souls are people that are it's called the ray of love and wisdom people along this line of consciousness are often inclined to see life through the lens of or wanting to serve I should say through the lens of of teaching or of the healing arts or many of the helping tendencies or professions of life a third ray soul is very much related to serving humanity through systems thinking and often they find themselves in sometimes technical or or actually the business world and economics is where you find a lot of third ray souls fourth ray is the ray of that had sometimes it's called the ray of harmony through conflict but it's also called the ray of beauty it's the Ray that governs culture and the arts and mediation tendencies and so sometimes people with a lot of 4/3 in their life would see spirituality and want to bring it forth often through culture and the arts within a society v ray people are people that see life through the lens of science it's called the ray of concrete knowledge and science and so their inclination desist to serve in that way 6th ray people are often it's called the six race called the Ray of idealism and devotion that type of soul is inclined to serve humanity through religious endeavor it's the sixth ray governs all theology around the world but it also is the ray that has a lot to do with causations for instance to fight for a cause to save the whales for instance that kind of passionate conviction toward a an avenue of service and a set of ideals is very much a 6-3 thing and the seventh ray is called the Ray of ceremonial order in magic and this protect particular type of soul would be much more inclined to want to bring heaven to earth they're sometimes called the practical mystics they want to repattern the way things are in the tangible real manifestation of humanity in our culture and how we do things how we build social structures and to redesign things so that the best of the human spirit can find a more adequate container to be expressed through all of those are that's just a very very quick overview of the Ray's but my point is that I'm trying to share with you is that that the kind of dark night experience you have will have some bearing offing often on the Ray that you are so for instance let's say a second ray soul a second ray sold and let's say that as a person that's very much committed has been committed to feeling that their purpose in the world is to be a teacher of some sort which is very common with second race all types and incredible an incredible function of service but when they write when they go into let us say a dark night experience that pulls them back and they might a lot of the dark night might be colored by the perception that they're not good teachers or it was I I was off and I never really understood what I was teaching or you know they'll question their own their own passion their own interests their own skills they'll question that they'll doubt it and that would be true of all the Ray types that there will be a tendency to doubt to question something that is so fundamental to who you are for instance a sixth race hold is governed by the ideals a sixth ray person is a person that says aim and an ideal and that ideal is the way to God and live your life from that idealistic perspective and there is truth to that by the way there's particularly 4-6-3 people that's the way in but you might get the person that who goes through the dark night who's on the sixth or a line and that person is now recognizing or believing usually falsely that their ideals have failed them and that the the ideals they were living by are superficial and not real at all and so they doubt them so I won't go through all seven but I'm just trying to give you a sense that you think the nature of the darkness that is often evident in a dark night experience is very much qualified or leans toward something pertaining to the very ray that you are on ok let's go to the next one number five often is often that the darkness before the dawn hour now this is a really important concept I briefly stated that earlier as well one of the things I'd like you to keep in mind when thinking about this is this idea that one of the things that is very strong in this philosophy is the subject of initiation you know we go through these periods where major transformations take place initiation x' and it's a huge subject in its own right what is initiation how do we understand it that sort of thing but it is in many cases and certainly not all cases but in some cases the dark night experience can be a prelude to a spiritual initiation it often blindness does precede an initiation and this this is true of regardless of which initiation we might be talking about like for instance let's go back to I mentioned Jesus of little earlier and I mentioned that Jesus had a dark night and experienced two of them actually just before the full crucifixion one while before the cross on in in the Garden of Gethsemane and the other one on the cross but Jesus was actually approaching what we end going through what we call the fourth initiation which by the way is also called the crucifixion and so here at the moment of of liberation suddenly God disappears father father why have they forsaken me right at the moment just prior to the earned initiative right of passage in in his case into full liberation so think of think of think of these dark night experiences when we look at it in that light think of it as a time of testing and it is a time of testing and think of it as a kind of it's it's a system that's trying to make sure that you've actually done the inner work and that even when the soul seems disconnected you can still hold what it has already given you and you can go through your life or the next period of time without the souls connection without the souls connection or without God's connection let us say and you can go through that and still live your outer life as a demonstration of higher values and as a demonstration of the consciousness of the soul even though the soul seems disconnected with you you see that's so important when it comes to the subject of initiation it is said by a great master that one is initiated necessary I'm saying that wrong one is initiate before they are initiated in other words you have to demonstrate the consciousness of a certain initiative level of evolution leading to enlightenment you have to demonstrate it as a prelude to actually going through the initiation but in that process of demonstration as a prelude there's often a dark night experience that is right there as well cutting you off from the connection to the greater life to make sure that it really is a kind of wisdom and the kind of understanding of life and a perspective on life that is now truly integrated into your personality and can be functional and effective in service to the world even without the continued inspiration of the soul again it's about proving yourself it's about proving yourself yeah yeah so I think what I'm gonna do is I want to highlight something here that might be helpful for us and to do that I want to show you a different slide so I'll come back to this sequence in a minute but let me let me bring something else forward for just a moment and this has to do with a kind of irony about the whole subject of the dark night of the soul because you see in a certain sense in a certain sense it's um it's a misleading statement even to say the dark night of the soul because you see it really what we what we call a dark night of the soul experience isn't really a dark night of the soul experience it's really a dark night of the personality experience it's a huge misunderstanding in a way because it's not that your soul is experiencing darkness it's that your personality the PERT the lower self is experiencing the darkness so for centuries we've been using the term dark night of the soul and I do it all the time but if we get technical about it it's an incorrect statement it's it's really the dark night of the personality and and and yet there is one experience that is truly a dark night of the soul I want to show you another image that might help you understand this so let me get that visual for you okay so what I've got here is two columns the dark night of the personality and the dark night of the soul now in in this you can see that we've got three structures monads soul and personality now for those of you who are well-versed in this you know probably what the monad is but there might be people listening to this that are rather new to the theosophy and esotericism so let me briefly say what monad is monad is another word for pure spirit its beingness monad is the spark of life that gives rise to your your experience of consciousness monad is beyond the soul in each of us the monad is it's actually I believe that the word comes originally from Pythagoras and it means it's rooted in the the word mono the one meaning it's where you are interfacing with the total oneness of all things if you if you - just to make a difference for you think of the soul in you think of the soul in you as the Christ in you think of the monad in you as the God in you now you and I are not at a place in our evolution where we can consciously experience the Monad that's way beyond our ability you have to be at a certain level of the consciousness before and it's really just very quick it's very soon before enlightened but full enlightenment that you become more conscious of the monad for us it's unconscious and and and yet what we are conscious of is the soul and the personality and so when we say the dark night of the soul if you can see at the bottom here it says encode arcnet of the soul even though this is really a dark night of the personality periodically occurs in the life of every disciple it's imposed by the soul upon the hastening personality and it a provides time for the integration of lessons so that's kind of just kind of swinging back to what I mentioned earlier that you can see that it's a disconnect because it is connected and that's because one of the explanations given on this slide is that it's to arrest the haste and in personality that wants the next step when it hasn't fully integrated the previous lessons that the soul has given it so it's the soul itself that does the disconnecting on the other side you see on the right side the darknet of the soul the actual dark night of the soul experience is actually when you have a fully soul infused personality by that I mean that the soul and the personality are now fully fused and no longer does the personality have any kind of undue sway on the on the souls agenda that's called initiate consciousness and that too is a bit out of reach for for all or most of us listening to this but it is the long-term goal for all of us to completely fuse the soul and the personality together so that the lower self becomes the rightful servant of the soul because that's all your personalities really for your personality it's you might say it's destiny and its purpose is to be the outer garment used by the soul as a function of service to humanity's upliftment and each initiation that we talk about is really a process of creating more and more soul infusion and there comes a point when there's complete soul infusion and that's when you wake up to the monad for the first time and so you wake up to the monad for the first time at that point and and yet after that there will be times when there will be a disconnect and one of those biggest disconnects at that time is the fourth initiation which is what master Jesus took 2000 years ago so what master Jesus went through is a true night of the soul experience what you and I go through is on the left side of this chart it's really a dark night of the personality experience that we tend to call a dark net of the soul experience just if you read down at the on the right side here it says this is the true dark night of the soul periodically occurs in the life of every initiate and it's imposed by the monad is prelude to destruction of the causal body and ensures that no unredeemed karma remains to hinder there's a lot to that that's giving us some idea of what it means to take the fourth initiation because what's what happens is that the at the fourth initiation the causal body itself is crucified that's what's crucified and it's also at that level where all karma must be have been transformed and no longer is there any dissonance which is what karma is there's no longer any dissonance within the system and that's the true dark night maybe it would be helpful if I just quickly showed you another graphic that just kind of gives you a sense of this process of soul personality fusion okay so I've got three big steps here as you can see it's stages of infusion and here we have what is there's three terms that are often used in the esoteric philosophy the term the sprint the disciple and the initiate the aspirant is where they've had their awakening there's no sold infusion yet but there's a recognition of the soul soul and that's the beginning of the probationary path so that's what I said earlier that's when it's from that point forward that it is possible to have a dark night of the soul experience which again really is a dark night of the personality experience but then when you're more serious on the path you move into the whole realm of discipleship where you have partial soul infusion and that's when part of the personality is infused by the soul and you have a growing commitment to the soul when living the life in that phase and it's what we call the path of discipleship it means you are learning to be a disciple of your own soul to be a disciple of your own higher promptings that's discipleship and that too is going to be there are going to be moments where the personality is going to lose connection with the soul and and again it's because of this I one of the reasons is because of the personalities too much in a hurry to create more soul personality fusion it has to actually do some interchanges in order to accomplish that and then it again it could also be related to readiness for initiation and the darkness before that dawning opportunity and this is the third is the initiative where you have the soulful soul infusion recognition of the monad and you're on the path of initiation now having said that that just gives you a sense of it so where you are on the path defines some what the nature and the intensity of a dark night experience as well as what your Rea nature is okay so I think what I'll do is now get back to the other slide that we were looking at the sequence of ideas let me get that back up for you to see okay so let's go to the next one number six it can be a test of your readiness and your trustworthiness that's another that's a bit similar to what I was just discussing think about it in the in the sense that there's a certain point on the path where you you become what is called a trusted disciple a trusted disciple and a trusted disciple is one whose consciousness has demonstrated enough soul infusion that there's no way that that personality is going to make a sharp turn to the left and starting starting to go the way of what is called the way of Mahad which means of pure mind but if it doesn't go with love and it's sort of the black magical arts way there's a point where and it's a fairly far point it's it's a it's shortly after the second initiation where you become what is called a trusted disciple and again it's also related to that sense of readiness readiness for an initiation opportunity so let's take a look at the seventh point and is it it's initiated by the soul itself as I mentioned it's the soul itself that is creating the dark night experience the dark night experience one of the things I'd like to share with you is this that again remember that it's inevitable you are going to have those moments it's just inescapable but it's important to know ahead of time that it's inescapable and that there is always going to be a dawn via after that darkness so one of the ways of just kind of conditioning in your consciousness is that understanding that this is built into the very fabric of the path itself but I want to expand our thinking about this now I'd like to take it and look at it from the larger perspective and look at all of humanity for a moment you know said that humanity itself possibly in this century is approaching a great initiative and that what's trying to happen in the world today is that humanity is trying to figure out how to be one and if it can't get that figured out pretty soon well we're all in big progress big problems for us we already see it and so one of the very important concepts to understand in this philosophy is that the whole of humanity in a larger context is considered a single entity humanity as one being and by the way it has a soul and it has a personality and it taught at times it too is struggling to transform the lower in support of the higher just like that's happening to you and I and the physics of the consciousness of the soul of humanity works exactly as the physics of the consciousness of the soul of an individual human being and and that includes the whole subject of the dark night experience you see that's what's happening today in many ways the crisis of the world today is a collective dark night of the soul experience because right now particularly but even in the last few years this has been a time when we can feel that there that something is building of a crisis you know it is said that humanity today is quote walking the burning ground walking the burning ground the burning ground is the the walking across the hot coals that are required in order for Humanity to reach that new and dawning era for for all of us and so humanity itself is walking the burning ground which is a type of dark night experience and that dark night experience leaves us all feeling less connected and now with this virus we even have another element of it and Midlands one I didn't expect but I've been kind of watching this dark night experience for some time and we see it in economics we see it in political systems we see it in various social systems we see we see the burning ground when it comes to the tendency of humanity to become more separative rather than unitive in fact it has been a great master once said that the greatest obstacle to humanity's future is what he called quote the heresy of separateness the heresy of separateness and now with crisis and fear that that heresy becomes even more prominent whether we're talking about separateness in terms of moving away from internationalism toward nationalism or we're talking about that separateness as in building walls or we're talking about that separateness as in religious intolerance or we're talking about the crisis around immigration issues around the world all of these are manifestations of as I said the heresy of separateness and all of them are amplified now because humanity collectively is feeling less and less disconnected are sorry less and less connected this will feel more disconnected from the soul of humanity because what is the soul of humanity anyway I mean how do we recognize it and we recognize it in our collective higher values the soul of humanity is that part of us that when we sense that inwardly we're all one it's this it's your soul being an agent on behalf of the soul of humanity and keep that in mind when we save the soul of humanity we're saying humanity has a single soul and that your soul your individual causal body is a cell within its beingness and so when you're aligning with your soul you are aligning with the soul of humanity and yet collectively Humanity is going through this crisis and a lot of people that are becoming less and less connected to their own soul through fear the personality is being fearful and as a result less and less connected to the soul of humanity and so we are in the burning ground phase right now and as I say I had no premonitions or anything about that the next phase of the burning ground would be microbial but in fact it has become and so the tension is mounting and so all of humanity is entering this dark night experience and we all so what do we do about it well for those of us who are still feeling inwardly connected our symbols and I hope many of you are still that you become the promise of the future you know in this philosophy there's something called the new group of world servers the new group of world servers represents the sum total of all people on the planet who have had some measure of awakening to their higher consciousness their souls consciousness who have has some measure of capacity to do the hard work of transforming the lower so that they can be more effective in expressing the higher through the lower you might say and who have a growing burning sense of wanting to make an uplifting contribution to the betterment of something beyond themselves and that's service and the new group of world servers are now in their millions around the world and undoubtedly many of you who may be listening to this presentation our members of that group whether you're conscious of it or not because it's an inner group it's not an outer group and at this time of human history in crisis it's that group that is so needed now to help humanity get across this burning ground period and to help humanity navigate through this collective dark night of the soul experience in that sense you are needed more now than ever all of us are more now than ever and so this is the time to bring light into a dark world that's what discipleship is about to be a light bearer in places of darkness and we don't have to look far to find where the darkness is it's all around us right now but this is an opportunity now if you yourself personally are feeling disconnected from your own higher consciousness and so you're personally having a dark night experience well that's one thing that that requires you to remember what I said earlier that this too shall pass and that this is preparation a darkness before a dawning hour of preparation for you to become more effective in your service but those of you who still feel connected and I hope most of you who are listening to this do your opportunity to really really make a difference in that within the circumstances of your life as a function of upliftment and in service to the soul of humanity this is your time this is our time so so often in this philosophy there's this understanding that there's both many of the principles apply to the individual life but they also apply the larger living systems I'm talking about it from a humanity perspective as a whole now if I looked at it from a national perspective it's the same thing because also a nation is an entity here in the United States the United States is not just a country it's a being and it too has a soul and it too has a personality and at this point it too is struggling to transform the lowerin and and a lot of resisting energies are rising in defiance so one of the wonderful things about this philosophy is you everything that applies to the individual applies to larger living systems including the dark night of the soul experience so just to kind of wrap things up for us here I just want you to understand that the dark night again is not something that you can avoid it will happen it will happen and it will pass and it's it's a process of creating a darkness so that your lower self can make more adjustments in its perceptual processes so that when the light does return your lower self is far far more capable of being a better servant on behalf of the soul than it was prior to the dark night experience in that sense the dark night is a very good thing as I say it's a it's a it's a it's a kind of renewal that has an on it's an unwinding while at the same time it's a renewing so think of it that way in your personal life but always remember that this larger drama of humanity is has to be taken in consideration because if you are really aligning with your soul and you're not in a dark night experience personally at any given time you should start to feel the oneness of humanity because that's what the soul in each of us does it does many things but one of the things is it helps you to sense the underlying unitive field and it's in that sensing of that unit of feel that you begin to sense that fundamentally we are all one not just in kind yes we're of course we're one in kind were all in kind because we're all human beings but were one in essence in soulful essence and when you feel that inside you then you're if you're experiencing not only the soul that you're experiencing the kind of intimacy with the soul of humanity and it's from that place deep inside where the impulse to serve the impulse to uplift should arise so I hope you found this presentation to be of help and I call on all of us to to do our best at this very difficult time in human history the dark night of the soul experience for Humanity will pass and to the extent that all of us can bring our very best in terms of love and wisdom into the fabric of our lives particularly when this isolation period is done to that extent the soul of the soul of humanity will will not only become more evident for all of humanity and we get back on it and an evolutionary track that is helpful to all of humanity but I have a feeling and in fact no doubt that for all of us the soul of humanity will look well upon all of us as we try to serve the greater whole thank you for spending your time with me today [Music]

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Rating: 4.9160838 out of 5

Keywords: theosophical society, theosophy, Spiritual Path, Discipleship, Probationer, Initiate, Monad, Soul, Personality, Dark Night of the Soul, William Meader, Theosophical Society in America

Id: -DQsyNDyNGY

Length: 50min 13sec (3013 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020