The Dark Night of the Soul

LSD, psychospiritual death and the abyss of infinite despair

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As far as I remember, I’ve longed for a deep spiritual connection which I couldn’t find until I discovered psychedelics. At the tender age of 17, I tried mushrooms and then LSD for the first time, and was put directly in touch with the transformative healing power of the spiritual connection I was intuitively seeking.

However, without education or culture supporting responsible use, I quickly started craving for stronger mystical highs which led to an irresponsibly large dose of LSD, enabling a process of psychospiritual purification, submerging me into the darkest depths of my soul and life’s collective consciousness.

My Dark Night was the most difficult and painful experience of my life. It was also the most important and transformative experience of my life. A decade later, I can feel grateful for the terror, confusion and suffering I endured over a tormenting 10 hours.

Although the experience may once have seemed an unfortunate accident—and it once certainly was—I have come to integrate my Dark Night as a rite of passage, a trial by fire, a self-sacrifice, and ultimately, a spiritual awakening through a reluctant death and a unexpected rebirth.

And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow again, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

— Goethe

The Dark Night

John of the Cross was a Spanish Catholic priest and mystic, particularly famous for his works, "The Ascent of Mount Carmel" and "The Dark Night of the Soul." In these writings, he describes the stages of the spiritual journey, emphasizing the importance of detachment from worldly things and union with God through contemplative prayer and mystical experience. His teachings influenced many spiritual writers and mystics in later centuries. His teachings have also found their way into psychedelic research.

The similarities between the mystic's experience in the dark night of the soul and the LSD subject's perinatal experiences are so clear as to require only brief summary.

— Christopher Bache, Mysticism and Psychedelics: The Case of the Dark Night

Saint John’s “The Dark Night of the Soul” focuses particularly on the experience of the "dark night", which refers to a period of intense spiritual purification and growth. According to John of the Cross, this dark night is a necessary part of the journey towards union with God, and involves the stripping away of all things that stand between the soul and God, including worldly attachments, ego-driven desires, and even certain spiritual experiences. John of the Cross emphasizes the importance of surrendering oneself completely to God's will, even when it involves undergoing great suffering or uncertainty. He suggests that only by passing through the "dark night" and surrendering oneself completely to God can one attain the ultimate goal of the spiritual journey, which he considers to be union with God.

I first encountered Saint John’s writing while searching for answers to the most powerful and mind-blowing experience of my life, an acid trip. Thanks to Christopher Bache’s work, Mysticism and Psychedelics: The Case of the Dark Night, I began to find and follow breadcrumbs leading into an ever-unfolding journey to understand the psychospiritual process of purification I accidentally engaged by taking a lot of LSD.

It should be clear by now that there are no shortcuts on the spiritual path. If the goal of this path is a permanent transformation of consciousness, no technique can sidestep the arduous purification process necessary for this transformation to occur. Used therapeutically, however, LSD appears to be capable of accelerating this purification process to an unprecedented degree. Far from sidestepping the dark night's anguish, it intensifies and deepens it beyond imaginable limits. If it shortens the time spent in the dark night, it pays for this saving in the extreme severity of psychedelic perinatal experience. Its sometimes brutal character is a direct function of its efficiency.

— Christopher Bache, Mysticism and Psychedelics: The Case of the Dark Night

My Dark Night

After taking 500ug of acid alone on a fair October night, and then smoking a bowl of weed in attempt to reach greater and higher mystical states, I descended into hell.

Instead of revisiting the chemical-induced transcendent bliss consciousness I had become accustomed to, I entered the dark underworld of the collective unconscious, submerged in the ancestral pain and suffering of all sentient beings for 8 hours.

I experienced visions and sensations of violent war, global famine, nauseating illness and environmental destruction. I saw and felt addiction, rape, loss, scandal, disaster, betrayal, judgement, despair, dread, hopelessness, humiliation, guilt, failure, shame, death. At times, I felt as if my experience was destroying the whole world. The end of the world rested on my shoulders. I was given the world, a loving mother and father, a stable household, a healthy body. But I dropped it, shattering it all beyond repair.

My life was being ruined forever and it was all my fault. I was dying an unexpected and accidental death, and everyone was going to shake their heads in disappointment.

I remember laying on the floor of my bedroom, in the fetal position, hallucinating visions of my family crying over my grave, and my idols mocking my failure.

I remember feeling so confused, trapped, lost, hopeless. I lay in the fetal position at the bottom of a dirty, polluted, infected and smelly abyss floor. But I wasn’t alone. Thousands of other lost souls in the form of children around me, trying to climb out. I could see these tormented souls falling back to the ground, to meet me at the bottom.

Far above me was a tiny dot of blinding light, but I didn’t even try to climb out.

There was no point. I was stuck here, forever.

My heart sank.

The scenery changed. I wasn’t in an infinitely deep hole anymore. I was in my room again, but, I was still in hell. A ladder which would take me out of hell and into heaven appeared, but alas, as I moved to grasp it, it vanished into smoke.

A large book appeared before me, and the pages began to flip on their own. A heavy burden took over as I felt like I was being tested by a God I did not know well.

I didn’t know what to do. I froze.

Puzzled, I tried to stop the book before it ended, but again, I had failed the divine test.

Again, my heart sank deeper.

Soon enough, I experienced eternal damnation by the touch of God’s finger.

Looking back, a flick of divine self-judgement, viscerally felt on my forehead.

As far as I could tell, I had been cursed. Punished. Rejected. Abandoned.

The shadow of death and the pains and torments of hell are most acutely felt, and this comes from the sense of being abandoned by God… a terrible apprehension has come upon [the soul] that thus it will be forever... It sees itself in the midst of the opposite evils, miserable imperfections, dryness and emptiness of the understanding, and abandonment of the spirit in darkness.

— St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night

Desolate, lost, stagnate, alone, empty, hopeless. My soul’s cries remained unheard.

My heart was broken, and eventually, I let myself be dead inside, completely numb. Nothing meant anything anymore, as though the world, every thing and everyone in it was as dead as I felt. I had no thing to hold to for assurance, let alone consolation.

I felt nothing, absolutely nothing but existential hopelessness and spiritual despair.

In the deepest moments of confused anguish, intruding thoughts of killing myself took hold. I began feeling a drive towards self-destruction, as if I had to die in order to free myself from the worldly attachments that kept me suffering.

Convinced suicide was the only way to put an end to the eternal torment, my eyes began scanning the room for sharp objects, like the colouring pencils I had prepared for my journey. Thankfully, a deeper primal recognition of the impeding irreversible tragedy took hold. I managed to restrain myself by sitting crossed-legged in the middle of my bedroom and focusing my attention of the present moment through awareness of my breath. Yet, I could still feel a magnetic pull to inflict irreversible violence onto myself. As fear of death began to take over, I began thinking about my mother and how sad she would be if I killed myself. I began thinking about friends and extended family, the funeral, the aftermath. Soon enough, I was so focused on survival that the part of me that was eager to die began to subside. Eventually, the overwhelming desire to annihilate myself passed. I had survived.

A very tragic misunderstanding that can occur at this juncture is the confusion of the desire for the ego death with the impulse to actually kill oneself. One can easily confuse the wish for what we can call "egocide" with the drive toward suicide. People in this stage are often driven by a forceful inner insistence that something in them has to die. If the internal pressure is strong enough and if there is no understanding of the dynamics of the ego death, they may misread these feelings and act them out through self-destructive behaviour.

— Stanislav Grof, The Stormy Search for the Self

In the midst of it all, I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t, but the terror of my soul being cursed, insanity, eternal hell, suicide, planetary destruction and the rest, was real, and my body has kept the score of the emotions I endured.

No words or images can accurately describe the pain and fear I experienced during the Dark Night. The 10 hour acid trip was like slowly walking towards my own decapitation, being strapped to a slow conveyer belt approaching a hellishly gruesome meat-grinder without escape. No way out. Complete entrapment.

The trip was a laboured, gruelling anticipation for the inevitable death I unwillingly (and on another level, willingly) signed up for.

A grand cosmic comedic tragedy in which I was the butt of the joke.

Taken over by an unshakable sense of impeding doom throughout the trip, I slowly gave woeful goodbyes to everything and everyone I loved. Forced to leave it all behind, I cried for my mother, my father, my brother, my sister, my friends, my dreams. Pleasant and painful memories of my life flashed through my mind’s eye, slipping away as I helplessly grasped to hold onto them. The “I” that had registered my whole life to that point was dying, being shown as illusory. I was forced to give it all up.

Letting go of my sense of self was the most difficult. I thought I was losing my mind. I thought I would pass out and wake up with no knowledge whatsoever. Tabula rasa.

This experience of insanity is recalled by a woman after her spiritual emergency: "I felt as though my mind was being shattered into millions of pieces. I couldn't hang on to thoughts as I knew them; there were just fragments. My husband tried to talk to me, but I couldn't absorb his words. Nothing made any sense. Everything was completely jumbled and confused. I had visions of myself as a chronic patient on the back ward of some state hospital for the rest of my life. I was sure that this was the way I would be forever.

— Stanislav Grof, The Stormy Search for the Self

Out of total desperation and fatigue, I eventually gave my self up. On my knees, hands clasped, head bowed, I prayed to the God that cursed and deserted me. As I prayed, I let go of the fear that held me hostage to my separate suffering self.

I surrendered, and in a flash, Spirit awoke anew.

I felt life come back into my dead body.

Liberation and peace ensued, and in the silent illumination of unknowing, a voice clearly said, seemingly out loud, “this is what you are.” Stunned by the mysterious voice, I gazed around the room, looking for a source. All I could see was the room.

Total presence. Pure consciousness.

My ego soon came back online, reminding me that my body was safe and alive. I had not biologically died. I was still alive. I was in my room, at home. I survived a night of pure terror, confusion and pain, but I’m still breathing. I didn’t accidentally stab myself, I’m not actually stuck in hell forever, I remember who I am, I’m feeling more sane with every passing moment. Actually, I’m starting to feel cleansed, purified, purged. I’m starting to feel a profound sense of appreciation for life and nature.

Relieved, I sit by the window with eyes set on the horizon. I welcome the soft light of the rising sun with the deepest gratitude I’ve ever felt. My heart is broken, but open. My mind is empty and serene. I’m here now, bathing in the wholeness of the eternal present, feeling profound peace, joy and relief for surviving an unimaginable ordeal.

As I reflect, it dawns on me, I died and was reborn.

If you die before you die, then you won’t die when you die.

— Incription at St. Paul’s Monestary in Mt. Athos

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