The Experience of Being Cast Away: On Emptiness, Inner Darkness, and the Dark Night of the Soul

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There is a phase on the spiritual path that is rarely spoken about clearly.

Not because it is rare — but because it is difficult to describe, and even harder to endure.

It is the experience of being cast away.
Not only from other people, not only from society, but from everything that once gave meaning, warmth, or orientation — including spirituality itself.

This article focuses on one specific aspect of the Dark Night of the Soul:
the inner state that mystics such as described as abandonment, darkness, or being left by God — and how this can be understood today in a spiritually universal, non-religious way, grounded both in classical mysticism and lived experience.

The Dark Night itself has been explained elsewhere in detail.

Here, we focus on what it feels like, how it unfolds, and why it is often misunderstood.

1. The First Layer: Emptiness and the “Cloud”

For many people, this phase does not begin with dramatic visions or metaphysical insights.
It begins quietly — with a strange emptiness.

Things that once brought meaning lose their taste.
Meditation feels flat or inaccessible.
Prayer, contemplation, or inner stillness no longer produce warmth, clarity, or connection.

John of the Cross famously described this state using the image of a cloud — a dense, inner obscurity that blocks perception.
But this “cloud” is not merely intellectual confusion. It is existential.

From lived experience, this emptiness feels:

  • heavy rather than spacious
  • dull rather than peaceful
  • cloudy rather than clear

It is not the fertile emptiness known from deep meditation.
It is an absence that feels wrong, dead, or cut off.

Many spiritual people make the mistake of interpreting this as failure:

“I must have lost my connection.”
“Something is blocked.”
“I did something wrong.”

But according to John of the Cross — and confirmed through experience — this emptiness is not accidental.
It is the beginning of a transition.

2. The Loss of Spiritual Sensation

One of the most painful aspects of this phase is the loss of inner spiritual feeling.

For people who have meditated, contemplated, or lived with a sense of inner connection, this loss is profound.
It is not just psychological comfort that disappears — it is the felt sense of inner relatedness, of being quietly held or guided.

Picture: Mano Harshith on Unsplash

John of the Cross explicitly describes this:

  • the inability to meditate as before
  • the loss of imaginative or affective prayer
  • the drying up of inner sweetness, warmth, or light

This is important:
This blockage is not merely subjective experience. John names it as part of the process itself.

From lived experience, this means:

  • meditation no longer “works”
  • even silent meditation feels inaccessible
  • inner stillness cannot be entered deliberately
  • effort only increases frustration

Crucially, this state does not simply reverse.
Meditation does not come back “as it was.”

The purpose is not to restore former practices, but to prepare sensitivity for something subtler — a form of contemplation that is not produced by effort, but arises quietly, almost unnoticed at first.

John calls this infused contemplation.
In neutral terms: a non-discursive, non-sensory mode of awareness that cannot coexist with the old mental structures.

3. From Emptiness to the Thought of Being Rejected

As the emptiness deepens, the psyche begins to interpret it.

This is where the experience often turns dark.

Thoughts arise such as:

  • “I am excluded.”
  • “Others are allowed access — I am not.”
  • “I must be fundamentally flawed.”

In religious language, this becomes the idea of being rejected by God.
In secular or spiritual language, it feels like being cut off from life itself.

John of the Cross acknowledges this explicitly.
He describes a stage where the soul feels:

  • rejected
  • abandoned
  • forgotten
  • unworthy

Importantly, he does not say this perception is true.
He says it appears true from within the darkness.

From lived experience, this sense of rejection does not feel symbolic.
It feels absolute.

This is why this phase is so dangerous psychologically:
the mind tries to explain an ontological silence using personal narratives.

4. Withdrawal from People and the World

Alongside inner abandonment comes a strange relationship to other people.

There is often:

  • withdrawal from social contact
  • difficulty maintaining conversations
  • a sense that interaction is draining or artificial

And paradoxically:

  • loneliness hurts
  • yet company feels wrong

John of the Cross notes this distancing from “creatures” — meaning all created things, including relationships.
Not because people are bad, but because external orientation no longer stabilizes the inner world.

From experience, this may look like:

  • reaching out, then pulling back
  • missing people, yet needing solitude
  • feeling misunderstood even by close friends

This is not misanthropy.
It is a loss of resonance.

5. Cognitive Dimming and the Darkening of the Mind

Only later — and this is crucial for structure — does the process move into deeper territory.

John speaks of the darkening of the intellect.
This is often misunderstood.

It does not mean stupidity or regression.
It means that:

  • discursive thinking weakens
  • memory access becomes less reliable
  • conceptual clarity fades

From experience, this can feel unsettling, even frightening.
Some compare it to early dementia — though it is not pathological.

This dimming is intentional.

John explains that ordinary human cognition is incapable of perceiving the deeper reality directly.
Our senses and intellect are structured for the external world.
They cannot grasp what is beyond form.

Here is where interpretation matters.

John sometimes speaks as if God withdraws.
Elsewhere, he clarifies that nothing is withdrawn — only the capacity to perceive is changing.

From lived experience, a key insight emerges:

What feels like darkness is not the absence of light —
it is awareness becoming conscious of its own limitation.

In other words:

  • all humans are “blind” to deeper reality
  • most are unaware of this blindness
  • the one in the Dark Night knows they cannot see

This awareness itself feels like darkness.

6. The Role of the “I” and the Softening of Identity

This process is often described too harshly as “ego destruction.”
That language is misleading.

What actually happens is a softening of the sense of “I”.

Not annihilation.
Not moral purification.
But a gradual inability to maintain a fixed center of reference.

John associates the intellect, memory, and will with the personal self.
As these faculties quiet, the familiar sense of identity weakens.

This is deeply destabilizing — especially for spiritually committed people who believe they have “no ego.”

But identity does not vanish.
It becomes less rigid, less defended, more permeable.

This softening is what allows sensitivity to deepen — not emotional hypersensitivity, but perceptual subtlety.

(Highly sensitive individuals often enter this phase more intensely; this is addressed in a separate article.)

7. The Purpose: A New Kind of Contemplation

This is where many explanations fail.

The goal is not to return to former meditation. The goal is not to feel good again. The goal is not moral perfection.

The goal is a shift in mode of awareness.

John describes a contemplation that:

  • is not produced by effort
  • is not accompanied by images
  • is barely perceptible at first
  • coexists with dryness and darkness

From experience, this awareness feels:

  • extremely subtle
  • easily overlooked
  • quiet to the point of invisibility

It does not replace darkness immediately.
It slowly reorganizes perception from beneath it.

Only in retrospect does the meaning of the darkness become intelligible.

8. Not Abandoned — But No Longer Oriented by Feeling

The central paradox of this phase is this:

The person feels more abandoned than ever
— while actually being closer to the source than before.

But closeness without perception feels like absence.

John insists that this state is not punishment, rejection, or failure.
It is reorientation beyond the senses and the intellect.

From experience, the most difficult realization is:

Nothing is wrong — and nothing can be fixed.

The only movement possible is endurance without interpretation.

Closing

The experience of being cast away is not a pathology.
It is not regression.
It is not spiritual failure.

It is a threshold.

And like all thresholds, it feels like loss before it reveals itself as transition.

Authored by Rebekka Waldesruh

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