Knowing nothing

[Maddie]

What to do when one feels like that nothing makes sense, and they know nothing?

 

I know this is not the best place to ask, but lets see what happens.

 

But how to know what one does not know but one needs to know?

[Sketch]

That's when it's nice to play my guitar. 

 

Edited January 18, 2021 by Sketch

[dwai]

Spoiler

 

 

[dwai]

18 hours ago, Sketch said:

That's when it's nice to play my guitar. 

 

Is that you playing?  -- it's beautiful!

[Sketch]

Thank you! The drums are my very good friend and co conspirator...who also took the fish picture. 

 

 

[Sketch]

This "Implicate Order" music is great stuff. Just right for listening to.

[Limahong]

On 1/19/2021 at 4:12 AM, dmattwads said:

 

What to do when one feels like that nothing makes sense, and they know nothing?

 

 

 

S I L E N C E

 

 

 

[Maddie]

Generally I need to be pretty desperate to ask for advice since most advice is bad, but I was wondering if anyone has ever experienced hitting a "wall" where nothing makes sense anymore, and if so what did you do?

[Sketch]

 

Eckhart on the Dark Night of the Soul

 

By Eckhart Tolle

QUESTION: Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul?  Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period.  Can you address this subject?

 

ECKHART: The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time.  Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness.  The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level.  The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.

It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before.  Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place.  But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain.  Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.

They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind.  A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer.  It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity.  Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.

The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”.   What is the purpose of a lesson like that? It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”.  With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”. You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it collapses.

You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness.  Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on.  Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it.  It can bring about the dark night of the soul – to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.

[Maddie]

37 minutes ago, Sketch said:

 

Eckhart on the Dark Night of the Soul

 

By Eckhart Tolle

QUESTION: Have you ever experienced the dark night of the soul?  Your teachings have been so helpful through this difficult period.  Can you address this subject?

 

ECKHART: The “dark night of the soul” is a term that goes back a long time.  Yes, I have also experienced it. It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness.  The inner state in some cases is very close to what is conventionally called depression. Nothing makes sense anymore, there’s no purpose to anything. Sometimes it’s triggered by some external event, some disaster perhaps, on an external level.  The death of someone close to you could trigger it, especially premature death, for example if your child dies. Or you had built up your life, and given it meaning – and the meaning that you had given your life, your activities, your achievements, where you are going, what is considered important, and the meaning that you had given your life for some reason collapses.

It can happen if something happens that you can’t explain away anymore, some disaster which seems to invalidate the meaning that your life had before.  Really what has collapsed then is the whole conceptual framework for your life, the meaning that your mind had given it. So that results in a dark place.  But people have gone into that, and then there is the possibility that you emerge out of that into a transformed state of consciousness. Life has meaning again, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that you can necessarily explain.  Quite often it’s from there that people awaken out of their conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed.

They awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in your mind.  A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer.  It’s a kind of re-birth. The dark night of the soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self. Of course, death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died there – only an illusory identity.  Now it is probably the case that some people who’ve gone through this transformation realized that they had to go through that, in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. Often it is part of the awakening process, the death of the old self and the birth of the true self.

The first lesson in A Course in Miracles says “Nothing I see in this room means anything”, and you’re supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at, and you say “this doesn’t mean anything”, “that doesn’t mean anything”.   What is the purpose of a lesson like that? It’s a little bit like re-creating what can happen during the dark night of the soul. It’s the collapse of a mind-made meaning, conceptual meaning, of life… believing that you understand “what it’s all about”.  With A Course in Miracles, it’s a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected, and you go voluntary into saying “I don’t know what this means”, “this doesn’t mean anything”. You wipe the board clean. In the dark night of the soul it collapses.

You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness.  Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on.  Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning. It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything. That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it.  It can bring about the dark night of the soul – to go around the Universe without any longer interpreting it compulsively, as an innocent presence. You look upon events, people, and so on with a deep sense of aliveness. Your sense the aliveness through your own sense of aliveness, but you are not trying to fit your experience into a conceptual framework anymore.

 

This actually seems to explain a lot of what I'm going through right now. I guess I'd thought "dark night of the soul" was a term overly dramatic emo kids used. This seems to make a lot of sense.

[Bhathen]

15 hours ago, dmattwads said:

Generally I need to be pretty desperate to ask for advice since most advice is bad, but I was wondering if anyone has ever experienced hitting a "wall" where nothing makes sense anymore, and if so what did you do?

 

 

The simple and deep words of Master Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully and slowly melted away all questions I was struggling with; about the purpose of existence and the feelings of the "dark knight of the soul". 

[Maddie]

16 minutes ago, Bhathen said:

 

 

The simple and deep words of Master Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully and slowly melted away all questions I was struggling with; about the purpose of existence and the feelings of the "dark knight of the soul". 

 

Thank you I'll consider it, though I feel myself drifting from Buddhism. I'm not sure where things are headed yet, but about a decade ago I favored Buddhism because it had lots of guidelines and definitions and Taoism (at least in as much as I had learned didn't). Now I wonder if the guidelines I once found comfort in, have become restricting, and lack thereof in Taoism is now its appeal. 

 

 

[manitou]

I would say it's always darkest before the dawn.  I would do nothing, just watch.  Allow it to realign your path.  Perhaps you are transcending dogma of any sort.  The universe knows best, and if we take our hands off things, they align perfectly.  If you ask me, the past four years have contributed to exactly what you describe.

 

 

 

Edited January 21, 2021 by manitou