The Soul's Night and Awakening

The experience of enlightenment often appears foreign—even within the Christian tradition. When people think of John of the Cross, they usually associate him with the “dark night of the soul”: a phase of inner emptiness, dryness, and spiritual trial in which previous experiences of consolation disappear and the soul seems abandoned. Yet within these descriptions lies something deeper: a transformation that shows striking parallels with Buddhist enlightenment. The Dark Night of the Soul: More Than Suffering The dark night is not simply a period of suffering, but a necessary process of purification. In it, external attachments, inner desires, and even the most subtle forms of spiritual pride are gradually stripped away. What remains is a form of radical inner emptying that prepares the soul for a direct encounter with the divine. John of the Cross explicitly describes this as a path of “enlightenment” in the sense that the soul is transformed in its very mode of being. It does not...

The “dark night of the soul” is often treated as a problem to fix. But John of the Cross saw it differently: as a necessary passage of transformation rather than something to escape. In contemporary culture, there is an almost automatic reflex when it comes to suffering: if something is painful, it should be eliminated as quickly as possible. Problems are expected to be diagnosed, treated, and solved. This is especially true for inner crises—loss of meaning, spiritual emptiness, emotional dryness—where we tend to immediately search for familiar categories such as psychological distress, depression, burnout, or some form of dysfunction. This approach certainly has its value. Many people suffer from genuine psychological conditions that require attention and care. But there are also experiences that do not easily fit into these frameworks. One of them is what Christian mysticism calls the “dark night of the soul.” The term comes from the Spanish mystic John of the Cross, whose work Th...