Thus begins what are called the Dukkha Ñanas, which translates to “Knowledges of Suffering”, though somehow I like “The Dark Night of the Soul” (to use St. John of the Cross’ terminology). I place the whole of the Dark NIght in the third vipassana jhana, although it is also the entrance to the fourth vipassana jhana in U Pandita's model, and it is worth knowing that controversy exists on this topic. The Dark Night spans stages 5 through 10 in this map. Stages 5 through 9 tend to “come as a package,” with one leading fairly quickly and naturally to the others. Stage 10, Re-observation, tends to stand out as its own distinct and often formidable entity. It should be noted that some pass through the Dark Night quickly and some slowly. Some barely notice it, and for some it is a huge deal, regardless of the speed at which one moves through these stages. Some may get run over by it on one retreat, fall back, and then pass through it with no great difficulties some time later. Others may struggle for years to learn its lessons.

    I am going to describe the Dark Night largely in extreme terms, but realize that this is just to give a heads up to what is possible, not what is necessary or guaranteed. As before, on retreat these things are likely to be more intense and clear, though those on retreat who are able to keep practicing are likely to make much faster progress as well. On the other hand, practice in “daily life” can be powerful and sometimes very speedy. These things are strangely unpredictable. Enough disclaimers!

    Once someone has crossed the Arising and Passing Event, one will enter the Dark Night regardless of whether one wants to or not. It doesn’t matter if you practice from this point on; once you cross the A&P you are a Dark Night Yogi until you figure out how to get through it, and if you do get through it without getting to the first stage of enlightenment, you will have to go through it again and again until you do. I mean this in the most absolute terms.

    The Dark Night typically begins with just about all of the profound clarity, mindfulness, concentration, focus, equanimity and bliss of the previous stage dropping away. So also ends the cause-and-effect-like phenomena of the breath or walking shaking or jerking up and down in a way related to attention and noting, as well as all of the fine vibrations and vortex-like raptures. Early on, the frequency of vibrations disconnects from the cycle of the breath, remaining largely stable at whatever frequency is going on at that stage once they can be perceived again (in late Dissolution or Fear).

    Whereas one might have felt that one’s attention had finally attained the one-pointed focus that is so highly valued in most ideals of meditation during the Arising and Passing Away, during the Dark Night one will have to deal with the fact that one’s attention is actually quite wide and unstable. Further, the center of one’s attention becomes the very least clear area of experience, and the periphery becomes predominant. This is normal and even expected by those who know this territory. However, most meditators are not expecting this at all and so get blindsided and wage a futile battle to make their attention do something that, in this part of the path, it simply won’t do.

    If one has ever been meditating in a place with lots of mosquitoes buzzing in one’s ears in a way that made it very hard to concentrate on the primary object, one can get a sense of what one’s attention will be like in the Dark Night. Rather than fighting against this and ignoring the metaphorical mosquitoes, one should try to understand what it feels like to have one’s attention be however it is. Just like listening to discordant, chromatic jazz with lots of jarring harmonies and instruments playing more at odds with each other than together takes some getting used to, the quality of attention in the Dark Night is an acquired taste, and the sensations that arise tend to be very rich, complex, broad and unsettling. Those that fixate on staying one-pointed will suffer more than those who learn to stay with what is going on regardless of whether or not it feels like “good meditation.”

    There are two basic patterns of vibrations in the Dark Night, and they are actually the Dark Night’s defining characteristics. One may get overwhelmed by the descriptions of emotional difficulties, but keep these patterns in mind and try to stay on that level. One is fairly slow, somewhat regular and chunky, at perhaps 5-7 Hz, with not much else going on. It’s an early Dark Night thing and it tends to feel like a shamanic drum beat. The later pattern is fairly fast, perhaps 10-18+ Hz, a bit more irregular, and has faster and slower harmonics in the background and around the periphery of our attention. It tends to make us feel very buzzy and edgy. The fact that the background is beginning to shake is a good sign of progress, as this needs to happen for the cycle to be completed. On the other hand, it is exactly the fact that the background has begun to shake and crumble that can cause people to freak out.

    Things were all fun and games when the primary object was shaking, but when the sense of the observer starts to shake, that can be creepy. Simply pay careful attention to exactly what is happening, staying with each pulse of each vibration as clearly as you can, trying to see each from its beginning to its end. Chances are you will be just fine.

    There are two basic things that happen during the Dark Night. One is that our dark stuff tends to come bubbling up to the surface with a volume and intensity that we may never have known before. Remembering what is good in our life can be difficult in the face of this, and our reactivity in the face of our dark stuff can cause us staggering amounts of needless suffering. On top of this, we also begin to directly experience the fundamental suffering of duality, a suffering that has always been with us but which we have never known with this level of intensity or ever clearly understood. We face a profound and fundamental crisis of identity as our insight into the Three Characteristics begins to demolish part of the basic illusion of there being a separate or permanent us. This suffering is a kind of suffering that has nothing to do with what happens in our life and everything to do with a basic misunderstanding of all of it.

    Dealing with either of these two issues, i.e. our dark stuff and our fundamental crisis of identity, would be a difficult undertaking, but trying to deal with them both at the same time is at least twice as difficult and can sometimes be overwhelming. It goes without saying that we tend not to be at our best when we are overwhelmed in this way.

    The knee-jerk response often is to try to make our minds and our world change so as to try to stop the suffering we experience. However, when we are deeply into the Dark Night, we could be living in paradise and not be able to appreciate this at all, and so this solution is guaranteed to fail. Thus, my strong advice is to work on finishing up this cycle of insight and then work on your stuff from a place of insight and balance, rather than trying to do it in the reactive and disorienting stages of the Dark Night! I cannot make this point strongly enough.

    As a close friend of mine with a ton of experience in insight practices and a gift for precise language and teaching so aptly put it, “The Dark Night can really fuck up your life.” However, I will give you two hard-won pieces of advice that I have found have made the difference in the face of these stages. First, make the time to do basic insight practices. Do your very best to get sufficient insight into the Three Characteristics so as to get past this stage! Make time for retreats or alone time and don’t get stuck in the Dark Night. You and everyone around you will be happy that you did so.

    The second piece of advice is to have a “no-bleedthrough” policy when you suspect you are in the Dark Night. Simply refuse to let your negativity bleed out onto everyone and everything around you. Failure to do so can be disastrous, as your profound lack of perspective, fixation on negativity and the suffering from your fundamental crisis of identity can easily get projected out onto things and people that simply did not cause that suffering! No one appreciates this at all and it does no good whatsoever.

    Combining these two pieces of important advice, resolve thus, “I have recently crossed the A&P Event and I know this by the many obvious signs of that stage. Now I am feeling strangely reactive and negative about things that I ordinarily am able to handle with more balance and clarity, and I know that a good part of this is due to the inevitable Dark Night that follows the A&P. I realize that I am in a less than ideal position to skillfully deal with the personal issues that are driving me crazy, as I am likely to project the suffering from the illusion of duality and the odd side effects of the Dark Night onto these issues.

    “I have been warned that this is an extremely bad idea from those who have successfully navigated in this territory, and I have faith that they know what they are talking about. Even if these issues are real and valid, I am likely to blow them way out of proportion and not be able to bring balance and kindness to them. By contracting into my own reactive darkness and confusion, I could easily hurt others and myself. Thus, I resolve to keep my darkness to myself, tell only those who are skilled in navigating in dark territory, or at least share it with others in a way that does not project it out on my world and them, and so will spare those around me needless suffering which they do not deserve. In short, I will use the meditation map theory to keep the reins on my dark stuff and to deal with it in ways that are known to help rather than harm.

    “I will make time for insight practices and retreats during which time I will simply see the true nature of the sensations of whatever arises, however horrible or compelling, and not indulge in the content of my stuff for one skinny instant if this is within the limits of my strength and power. In this way, I will be able to navigate this territory skillfully and not damage my daily life. Should I fail, I will actively seek help from those who are skilled in helping people keep a healthy perspective in the face of dark issues until such time as I can face the Dark Night as recommended.

    “When I have attained to the first stage of awakening, that will be a great time to see how much of my negativity was really valid and how much was just due to my own lack of clarity and the side effects of the Dark Night. From that place of clarity, I will be much more likely to fix those things in my life that really need fixing and attention and be able to dismiss easily those paper tigers that I have created for myself. By not trying to take on all of this at once, that is, by gaining deep insights before tackling the personal issues, I am more likely to lead the happy and wise life I wish for myself. I will attain to both liberating insights and insights into my issues, and this will be of great benefit to myself and all beings.”

    One of the primary reasons that I wrote this book was to write this important resolution. I have suffered needlessly and sometimes profoundly from the failure of myself and those I love to follow this resolution. They have also. Were you hearing me say these things to you rather than simply reading them, you would see tears in my eyes and hear my voice cracking with sorrow as I recall those past events and even reflect on what is happening around me as I write this. I beg you, for the sake of all that is good in this world, do not fail to heed this advice.

    Unfortunately, not everyone seems to be able to do this. In fact, not everyone is even willing to attempt to follow this advice, particularly those who buy into the dangerous paradigm that “whatever I feel right now is real” in the sense that their feelings at that moment must be the only possible valid perspective on their current situation and are thus completely justified along with their reactions to those feelings. There are those who simply don’t believe that such a wondrous and holy thing as insight practices could produce such profound difficulties. There are also those who do not believe in the maps or that the maps could possibly apply to their own very special and unique life. Lastly, there are a few whose pride and insecurity issues will not allow them to admit that they might be affected by the Dark Night in this way.

    I would warn such people to STAY THE FUCK OUT OF THE DARK NIGHT until they come to a place where they might be able to approximate at least some aspects of the above-mentioned resolution or apply the basics of the theory behind it. That means that if you are not willing to at least try to make and live by some version of my recommended resolution, you should not do insight practices and should not cross the A&P Event. Yes, I am a little bitter at times. Bitterness comes and goes. If you end up in a relationship with someone in this territory, perhaps you will be so unfortunate as to learn why.

    I am a big fan of fast sports cars, but I wouldn’t give one to a six-year-old kid. Just so, I am a big fan of insight practices, obviously, but I have come to the conclusion that those who are not willing to use them responsibly and intelligently should not use them, as it is too dangerous. They cause too much trouble in the world to be of little if any benefit. This is not likely to be a popular view, but I have experienced too much of what can go wrong when people fail to try to live up to such a resolution to come to any other conclusion.

    The problem is that some people cross into the Dark Night without doing formal insight practices. I did when I was about 15 and had no idea what was going on. How to reach these people I have no idea, but they tend to come wandering into spiritual communities soon enough. I hope they find people there who can tell them the above advice.

    This resolution and the spirit implied by it are an aspect of training in morality, and this sort of morality is one of our best friends in the Dark Night. When we adopt the spirit of this resolution, we do our conscious best to craft our way of being so as to be kind and compassionate. Many people have commented that insight training is a “monastic practice.” If we are able to build our own virtual monastery through skillful speech and skillful action, then we do not need a monastery to protect us and the world from the potential side effects of our practices. We can live skillfully in the ordinary world and still make progress in insight.

    However, there are those who are willing to buy the theory and spirit inherent in the above resolution but are so swamped by their personal issues that they simply cannot follow the above advice after they get into the Dark Night despite their kind and skillful intention to do so. My advice to them is to diligently and quickly seek professional help in the form of psychotherapists and their ilk until such time as they are able to follow something like the above-mentioned resolution.

    Realize that this is not an optimal way to go, as the inherent lack of perspective of the Dark Night makes aspects of the therapeutic process more difficult, but for some there will be no other option and this solution is better than simply floundering. On the other hand, at least such people have tons of stuff bubbling loudly up for them to deal with, making some aspects of the therapeutic process easier. However, I would try to do just enough healing so that you can push on to the first stage of awakening with minimal bleed through and then finish whatever therapeutic process you began in the Dark Night after you are out of it.

    It is time to get back to describing Dissolution. As the stage of the Arising and Passing Away ends, the meditator may be left feeling raw and incompetent despite the fact that they are continuing to make valuable progress into deeper and deeper levels of profound insight. This feeling that something is wrong when things are actually getting better and better can cause all sorts of problems during the Dark Night, especially to those not familiar with the standard maps.

    On the other hand, having come through the A&P territory can be quite a relief, and so sometimes Dissolution can seem quite welcome. Some will stop practicing here, as they feel they have “released the Kundalini” and so are done for the time being. Dissolution feels like a very natural place to stop practicing, the only problem being that the later stages (Fear and the rest) tend to follow it soon enough even if one stops, though less intense practice leads to a less intense, if often prolonged, Dark Night.

    However, those who wish to keep doing formal practice may find Dissolution frustrating. Whereas just one stage ago they could sit for hours and perceive the finest vibrations of reality in exquisite detail, now reality appears to be slipping away, vague, and hard to get a handle on. Whereas we may have had stellar posture in the previous stage, now we go back to being ordinary mortals. Images of the body may even seem to completely disappear, similar to that which happens in formless realms but without the clarity.

    Practice is likely to be more difficult, and we may experience pain from sitting that was basically completely absent during the previous stage. This can be extremely frustrating for those who don’t know that this is normal, and the desire to re-attain a fading past can greatly interfere with being present. In the face of these difficulties, I highly recommend noting practice. It may seem like a step back to some who abandoned it during the glory of the A&P, but the spiritual path is not a linear one. In the face of Dissolution and the stages that follow, noting practice can be very useful and powerful.

    In short, if they are able to keep practicing (familiar theme yet?) and adjust to having to actually work to perceive things clearly again, they will begin to make further progress. This time the effort will have to be with a lighter touch. Note well, if they give up in the stages of the Dark Night (or any time after the A&P Event), the qualities of the Dark Night will almost certainly continue to haunt them in their daily life, sapping their energy and motivation, and perhaps even causing feelings of unease, perhaps depression and even paranoia. Thus, the wise meditator is very, very highly encouraged to try to maintain their practice despite the potential difficulties so as to avoid getting stuck in these stages!

    I think of Dissolution as the couch potato stage, though it can also have a sense of sensual languor to it. A hallmark of Dissolution is that it is suddenly hard to avoid getting lost in thought and fantasy when meditating. We may feel somehow disconnected from our life. Another effect that can be very noticeable at this stage is that actions just don’t happen easily. For instance, you might be going to lift your hand to turn off your alarm clock, but your hand just doesn’t move. You could move your hand, but somehow things just tend to stop with the intention and get nowhere. Eventually you move your hand, but it might have been just a bit tiring to do so. That’s what Dissolution can feel like. Meditation can be the same way, and until one breaks out of this, things can get a bit mired down in the overstuffed cushions of Dissolution. However, when the perception of things ending becomes clearer again, there arises...

    The clarity and intensity begin to return, but now this stage can involve all sorts of frightening distortions of perception when sitting, accompanied by great feelings of unease, paranoia, fearfulness, and/or “the willies.” It can even sometimes seem that our body is falling in tatters through the floor or that we are rotting away. Vibrations from here on out should no longer change frequency with the phase of the breath as they did in stage 4 and for the next few stages tend to be slower than those in that previous stage.

    Strangely, Fear can also be a just a bit rapturous in the ways that a horror movie can be or in the way that riding a roller coaster at night can be simultaneously scary and exciting. However, the nice side of this stage tends to be greatly overshadowed by the dark side. We are being asked to accept the full range of life here as it is. Acceptance and clear, precise awareness of the true nature of the actual sensations that make up all of this are the key in all of the Dark Night stages as before. On the mild side, this stage might manifest as just a slightly heightened sense of non-specific anxiety. As fear passes and our reality continues to strobe in and out and fall away, we are left feeling...

    This stage can be characterized by great feelings of sadness and loss. Again, there can almost be something nice about the heartfelt depth of these feelings, but this tends to be greatly overshadowed by the dark side of them. We are having our whole concept of self and the world as being permanent, able to satisfy, and even being us or separate from us being torn down and violated by the now undeniable truth of the Three Characteristics. There can be a lot of grieving in this process.

    This is hard to accept, and our resistance to this process causes us misery. Becoming lost in the content of these sensations and being unable to see their true nature is a somewhat common cause of failure to progress and failure to live healthily. On the mild side, we may just feel a bit like after we do after we have been crying. Misery is the transition point between the Drum-like 5-8Hz part of the Dark Night and the very complex, irritating frequencies that follow. Attention continues to get wider and the center more blind. As things continue to fall apart, clearly demonstrate their unsatisfactoriness and their selflessness, this can cause...

    We become disgusted with the whole thing. This is where the buzzy 10-18+ Hz chaotic vibrations around the periphery really begin to get strong. Through this section of the Dark Night, our ability to see objects in the center of our attention is poor, and it may feel like our minds are being stretched wide and yet contracting at the same time. We begin to feel completely tormented by our noisy and repetitious minds (a classic sign of this stage), by a body that is full of suffering and unpleasant sensations, and by a world that is falling apart. Perceiving thoughts as thoughts gets harder and harder. On the mild side, one might just feel subtly revolted and disappointed with reality in general, or perhaps have the slightly creepy feeling of crawling skin. On the strong side, we see nothing to cling to, no self to be found, and we begin to wish the whole edgy thing would just end, also called...

    At this stage, we are fed up with the whole thing, but at a level that transcends mere suicidal thoughts. Thus, it is actually beneficial though it seems otherwise. No longer do we look forward to anything but the complete ending of all sensations, i.e. the first taste of Nirvana. We just wish the noise in our minds would stop cold, but are unable to will this to happen. We wish the vibrations, which can be quite intense, harsh and irritating by this stage, would all go away forever. If we do not associate the pain ending with deep insights but instead with changing something in our ordinary life, we are likely to wander far and wide until we come to realize the limitations of ordinary solutions.

    This is the stage when people are most likely to quit their jobs out of frustration and go on a long retreat or spiritual quest. Fascination with celibacy as somehow being “a higher spiritual path” can arise. Our renunciation trip can be very disorienting to partners, particularly if we were going to the opposite extreme of intense sexuality during the stage of the Arising and Passing Away just a few days before, so try to be sensitive to their needs if you can. Somewhere in here, there can arise the tendency to try to get one’s life and finances in order so that one can leave the world behind for a time and have something to come back to without having to worry about such things for a while. A profound resolution to push onward can arise at this stage driven by our powerful frustration and the powerful compassion in it. We make the last push for freedom, the push against the seemingly impenetrable wall of...

    This stage may not sound like much of a problem, as it has such a boring-sounding name, but this stage is often, though not always, like a brick wall, particularly the first few times we run into it. It can be as if all of the stages of the Dark Night converge again for one last important lesson, the lesson of re-observation. We must let go of (read: “see the true nature of”) all of our ideas of perfection, all of the ideals we cling to, all images of how the world should be and shouldn’t be, all desire for anything to be other than the way that it is as well as all desire for enlightenment that is anything other than this. It may seem impossible to sit for even a minute, as the levels of restlessness and aversion to meditation and all experience can get quite high. This stage and part of stage 3 (The Three Characteristics) can share some common features. This should be seen as a strong warning to those who are prone to being overly certain about “where they are.” Continuing to investigate the true nature of these sorts of sensations is often difficult, and this is a common cause of failure to progress.

    Now, I am about to describe all sorts of emotional or psychological manifestations that can sometimes happen at this stage. The more extreme the description of a possible side-effect of this stage, the rarer that side-effect is likely to be, particularly those that sound like descriptions of mental illness. For someone who is staying at the level of bare sensate experience, as I strongly recommend, the only difficult manifestations that seem to be quite common are a strong sense of aversion to formal meditation and experience, and a deep sense of primal frustration, though these tend to fall quickly in the face of good practice. These are due to the fact that the vibrations by this point can be quite fast and harsh, and the noise in our repetitive minds quite irritating. Some of my own descriptions of this stage while on retreat have included such phrases as “the mindstorm” and “a bracing work in D minor for six sense doors, hailstorm and stuttering banshee.” If we are very powerful meditators, it can literally feel as if we will be torn apart by these vibrations, and this is exactly what we are trying to accomplish. Even if the other odd manifestations do arise, if we are practicing well they should not last very long at all, at best minutes, at worst hours or days.

    You see, Re-observation is actually all fluff and no substance, but if you confuse fluff for substance, the effect will be the same as if it actually had substance. It is like a toothless dog with a ferocious bark. If you run screaming or faint from fear when the dog barks, then it needed no teeth to prevent your progress. The corollary is that the primary sign that the negative side effects that may occur in the Dark Night are actually not associated with insight stages but instead are due to other processes is that they do not change much in the face of strong and accepting investigation or stopping practice entirely. That said…

    This stage is sometimes called the “rolling up the mat stage” and is when many who joined monasteries in the stage of the Arising and Passing Away now give up and disrobe. People on retreats tend to need lots of reassurance and often leave right then even with good guidance and encouragement. There can be the distinct feeling that it is impossible to go forward and useless to go back, which is exactly the lesson they should learn. Acceptance of right here and right now is required, even if it seems that this mind and this body are quite unacceptable and unworthy of investigation. No sensations are unworthy of investigation!

    One of the hallmarks of the early part of this stage is that we may begin to clearly see exactly what our minds do all day long, see with great clarity how the illusion of a dualistic split is even created in the first place sensation by sensation, moment to moment, but somehow there is not yet enough spaciousness of perspective and equanimity to make good use of this information. This can be very frustrating, as we wonder how many times we have to learn these lessons before they stick.

    Great feelings of frustration and disenchantment with life, relationships, sex, jobs, moral codes and “worldly” responsibilities may sometimes emerge at this stage in ways that can cause all sorts of disruption and angst. These aspects of one’s life can temporarily seem bland and pointless at this stage, though it may seem that this will always be the way one feels about them. This stage can mimic or perhaps manifest as some degree of clinical depression. Beware of making radical life changes that cannot easily be undone (such as a divorce) based upon temporary feelings in this stage. For those that recognize that they are in this stage, some sort of active mental compensation for these potential effects can be helpful so as to keep one’s life functioning. It can help one appear more “together” than one feels, and thus maintain relationships, jobs, studies, etc. at some sort of functional level. This can be very skillful if it is also combined with practice that allows the experiences of this stage to be acknowledged and understood as well.

    Layers of unhelpful and previously hidden expectation, pressure and anxiety can show their true uselessness, though this beneficial process can be very confusing and difficult. We may get the sense that we have never had such a strong feeling life, and until we get used to this new awareness of our previously subtle emotions, this stage can be quite overwhelming. Occasionally, people can also have what can seem like full psychotic breaks during this stage, though if these are truly a side effect of insight practices they should pass quickly. The big trick here is to continue to acknowledge and accept the content but also continue to see the true nature of the sensations that make up these natural phenomena. This can be extremely hard to do, especially if people have chanced upon this stage without the benefit of the guidance of a well-developed insight tradition and teachers who can recognize this territory.

    Those who do not know what to do with this stage or who get overwhelmed by the mind states can get so lost in the content that they begin to lose it. This is the far extreme of what can happen in this stage. Fear is frightening, misery is miserable, and seemingly psychotic episodes are very confusing and destabilizing. In the face of such experiences, we may swing to the opposite extreme, clinging desperately to grandiose images of ourselves. These things can easily perpetuate themselves, and this can become a blatantly destructive mental habit if people persist in wallowing in these dark emotions and their deep and unresolved issues for too long. It can be like cognitive restructuring from Hell.

    If the content continues to be bought without the ability to see its true nature, then the mind can spiral down and down into madness and despair. When people mention “touching their own madness” on the spiritual path, they are often talking about this stage. This stage can make people feel claustrophobic and tight. If they push to make progress, they can feel that they are just getting wound up tighter and tighter. If they do nothing then they are still suffering anyway.

    The advice here is: stick with it but don’t try to force it. Pay attention to balancing effort and acceptance. Remember that discretion is the better part of valor. Practice in moderation as well as maintaining a long-term view can be helpful. Think of practice as a life-long endeavor, but do just what you can each day. Stay present-oriented. Walks in nature or places with large, expansive views can help, as can exercise. This stage has the power to profoundly purify us, given sufficient commitment to just trying to sit with it, be clear, precise and accept all this despite the pain and anguish, both physical and mental, that it can bring. If on retreat: sit and walk according to the schedule and do not leave!

    This stage is actually a profound opportunity to see clearly the pain of the dualistic aspect of our attachments, aversions, desires, hopes, fears and ideals, as all this has been amplified to an unprecedented level. It is this stage that makes possible the path of heroic effort, diligent investigation of this moment based upon the powerful desire for enlightenment, as at this stage all of the unskillful aspects of this desire are beaten out of the meditator with a force equivalent to the suffering caused by them. You can actually get very far on highly imbalanced and goal-oriented practice, and it can give sufficient momentum and meditation skills so that, should one get one’s ass kicked in this stage, one continues making progress quickly anyway.

    Again, if the meditator stops practicing here, they can get stuck and haunted by this stage in the whole of their life until they complete this first progress of insight. Their lack of practice will deprive them of the primary benefits of this stage (i.e., the increased perceptual abilities that allowed them to get this much insight in the first place) and reduce their chances of getting beyond it, and yet the emotional consequences can remain long after the skills in meditation have faded.

    They can become “Chronic Dark Night Yogis,” meditators that somehow just don’t figure out how to get past this stage for very long periods of time. You would be surprised by how many of these people there are out there. Their failure to unstick themselves may be due to their own psychological makeup, poor instruction, imagining that the spiritual life is all about bliss and wonderful emotions, believing in absurd models of spirituality that do not allow for the full range of the emotional and mental life, or chancing upon this stage outside of a well-developed insight tradition, which is what happened to me at about age 15. I was a Chronic Dark Night Yogi for 10 years without having any idea what the hell was happening to me, so I can speak on this topic with some authority. Further, I have gone through numerous other Dark Nights at the higher stages of awakening and come across the same issues again and again. Being stuck in the Dark Night can manifest as anywhere from chronic mild depression and free-floating anxiety to serious delusional paranoia and other classic mental illnesses, e.g. narcissism and delusions of grandeur (my personal favorites). They may act with a strange mixture of dedicated spirituality and darkness.

    I mentioned that the A&P Event could impart a bit of the inspirational, radical religious leader quality to those prone to such things. For these same individuals, Stage 10 can sometimes have a bit of the paranoid, apocalyptic cult leader quality to it, a confused whirlwind of powerful inspiration and despair. We may all have our own particular neurotic tendencies that come out when we are under stress, but if you feel that you are really losing it: get help, particularly from those who know this territory firsthand! Don’t be a macho meditator and get stuck, and don’t imagine that spiritual practice can’t cause some wild and sometimes unpleasant side effects. One of the best things about working with a thoroughly qualified and realized insight meditation teacher before we get into this sort of trouble is that they will have some idea of our baseline level of sanity and balance and thus know what we are capable of.

    That said, I suspect that both the Mushroom Factor and the dharma jet set culture of teachers popping in and out with little chance for students to have meaningful contact with them off retreat contributes to the non-trivial number of Dark Night Yogis out there. I suspect that there are fewer problems with Chronic Dark Night Yogis in traditions where the maps of what can happen in this territory are well known and in which there are teachers who are very accessible and honest about their humanity and the possible range of the spiritual terrain.

    On the other hand, sometimes genuine mental illness or unrelated emotional or psychological difficulties can show up in people’s lives. Blaming it all on the Dark Night may not always be accurate or helpful, though if you have recently crossed the A&P Event and not completed an insight cycle or gotten into the next stage (Equanimity), there is going to be some Dark Night component mixed in with whatever else is going on.

    Meditation traditions tend to attract what can seem like more than their fair share of the spiritual, emotional and mental equivalents of the walking wounded. Sorting out what is what can sometimes get murky and may require the help of both those who know this insight territory and those who deal with routine mental illness and emotional and psychological difficulties. The best combination would be someone who knows both. I have a highly enlightened friend who has found it very useful to take medication to treat his bipolar disorder. There is something very down-to-earth and realistic about that. These practices won’t save us from our biology. They merely reveal something in the relationship to it.

    On the other hand, there are those that are so deeply indoctrinated by the models of “working through” our “dark stuff” that whenever it comes up they turn to psychotherapy or a whole host of other ways of getting their issues to “resolve” or go away. This view implies false solidity and an exaggerated importance to these things that can make it very hard to see the true nature of the sensations that make them up. The trap here is that we turn a basic crisis of fundamental identity into a witch-hunt for the specific things in our life that we imagine are making us this dissatisfied with our basic experience. If someone has gotten to this level of practice, no amount of tinkering with the specifics of our life will ever solve the fundamental issue.

    That doesn’t mean that some of the dissatisfactions with specific aspects of our life may not be valid, and in fact they often are quite valid. However, these relative issues get mixed in with a far deeper issue, that of who we really are and aren’t, and until this progress of insight has been completed, this mixture tends to greatly exaggerate our specific criticisms of those things in our life that could actually stand improvement and work. Learning this lesson can be very hard for some people, and the dark irony is that they may wreck their relationships, careers and finances, as well as emotional and physical health, trying to get away from their own high level of insight into the true nature of reality. Until they are willing to work on a more direct, sensate level, there is no limit to the amount of angst and negativity they can project onto their world. I have seen this play out again and again in myself and in the lives of my dharma companions. It can be a very ugly business.

    My advice for such situations is this: if, after careful analysis of your insight practice leads you to the conclusion that you are in Re-observation, resolve that you will not wreck your life through excessive negativity! Resolve this strongly and often. Follow your heart as best you can, but try to spare yourself and the world from as much needless pain as is possible. Through sheer force of will, keep it together until such time as you are willing to face your sensate world directly and without anesthesia or armor. I have seen what happens when people do otherwise, and have come to the conclusion that, in general, things go badly if people do not follow this advice, though some unexpected good can always come from such situations.

    The framework of the Three Trainings and the three types of suffering that is found within each of their scope can be helpful here as well. Since people are generally not used to facing fundamental crises of identity, i.e. the basic issue in Re-observation, they are not familiar with the pain of fundamental suffering. Being unfamiliar with the pain of fundamental suffering, they are likely to imagine that it is actually suffering produced by the specifics of their ordinary world. However, if you have gotten to Re-observation, in short, if you have found these techniques to be effective, have faith that the remaining advice may be of value and try to fulfill this part of the experiment. That is, if you are in Re-observation, the task that confronts you is to dissociate the fundamental suffering you now know all too well from the specifics of your life in an ordinary sense.

    Following this advice may sound dangerous, heartless or bizarre to some people. It is a valid criticism. In an ideal world, we would not have to go around second-guessing ourselves and the sources of our suffering in the specific way that I advocate here. In an ideal world, we would really have our psychological trip together, be able to stay with the practice during these stages, and thus cross quickly through the Dark Night and finish this practice cycle. It definitely can be done.

    However, we are not always ideal practitioners, and thus the Dark Night often causes the problems mentioned above that need to be dealt with somehow. My solutions to what happens when we cannot or will not do insight practices in the face of the Dark Night are also not ideal. However, the outcomes are likely to be much healthier in the short and long term than those that come from simply allowing unrestrained Dark Night bleed-through. Strangely, I have come to the conclusion that simply practicing is often much easier than trying to stop Dark Night bleed-through if we are willing to just try it, though it can easily seem otherwise. The old kindergarden evaluation, “Follows instructions, plays well with others,” is still a valuable standard in the Dark Night.

    Not restraining one’s negativity and reactivity in the Dark Night is a bit like getting stinking drunk and then driving in heavy traffic rather than just sitting down and waiting to sober up. Not continuing to do insight practices in this stage is like going into surgery, opening up an incision, making some repairs, and then freaking out because the patient now has a big, bleeding incision and running away from the operating table, leaving them there to suffer. You could think of many ways to make the patient happy and try them all, but until you close up that wound they are gonna’ be pissed! Unfortunately, in this case you are both the surgeon and the patient. Face the wound and close it up! You obviously have the necessary skills, as you have gotten this far. Use them. The operation is nearly over.

    There are also those who try to investigate the true nature of their psychological demons and life issues but get so fixated on using insight to make them go away that they fail to hold these things in a wider, more realistic and appropriate perspective. This subtle corruption of insight practices turns them into another form of denial rather than a path to awakening. Drawing from the agendas of training in morality, in which there is concern for the specific thoughts and feelings that make up our experience, they fail to make progress in insight, whose agenda is simply to see the true nature of all sensations as they are. Both are important, but it is a question of timing.

    I have come to the conclusion that, with very rare and fleeting exceptions, 95% of the sensations that make up our experience are really no problem at all, even in the hard stages, but seeing this clearly is not always easy. We tend to fixate on strong sensations when they arise, those that are very painful or very pleasant, and in these times we can miss the fact that most of our reality is likely made of sensations that are no big deal, thus missing many great opportunities for easy insights. Further, the Dark Night can bring up all sorts of unfamiliar feelings that we rarely if ever have experienced with such clarity or intensity. Until we get used to these feelings, they can frighten us and make us reactive because of our unfamiliarity with them even if they are not actually that strongly unpleasant.

    I highly recommend using physical sensations, such as those of the breath, as the objects of inquiry during the Dark Night whenever possible, as plunging into emotional content, even with the intention of investigating it, can sometimes be a very hard way to go. Remember, whether we gain insight through investigating physical or mental objects is completely irrelevant! Insight is insight. Choose objects for investigation by which you don’t get caught whenever possible. The best thing about reality, particularly in the Dark Night, is that you only have to deal with one little flickering sensation at a time. Staying on that level when doing insight practices is an unusually good idea. Pay attention to what is right in front of you, but keep your attention open.

    All of that scary stuff said, there are people who breeze straight from the Arising and Passing Away on through the whole of the Dark Night in as little as a few easy minutes or hours and hardly notice it at all, so don’t let my descriptions of what can sometimes happen script you into imagining that the Dark Night has to be a gigantic problem. It absolutely doesn’t. These descriptions of what can sometimes happen are merely there to help those who do encounter these sorts of problems to realize that these things can happen and so be more able to deal with them skillfully. There is no medal awarded for having a tough time in the Dark Night or for staying in it for longer than necessary, much to my dismay.

    One of the more bizarre potholes we can fall into in the Dark Night is to become identified and fascinated with the role of The Great Spiritual Basket Case. “I am so spiritual that my life is a non-stop catastrophe of uncontrollable insights, disabling and freakish raptures, and constant emotional crises of the most profound nature. My spiritual abilities are proven and verified by what a mess I am making of my life. How brave I am to screw up my life in this way! Oh, what a glorious and holy wreck I am.” Both my sympathy and intolerance for those caught in this trap is directly related to the amount of time I have spent in that trap being just like them. Whereas we should not try to pretend that the Dark Night hasn’t made us a basket case if it has done so, we should neither revel in being a basket case nor use the Dark Night as an excuse for not being as kind and functional as we can possibly be.

    One way or the other, when we finally give up and rest in things as they are without trying to change them or be them, i.e. are very accepting of our actual humanity as well as clear about the Three Characteristics of mental and physical phenomena, there arises...