Can you count the number of times you have been present in a moment of your life and realized how much you wished you weren't you? That you hadn't done what you just did, and wished you would never do it again... loathing yourself for your weakness, despising yourself for your ambition that compromises you with every step you take, feeling frightened over some possession you've managed to acquire in the hope of some freedom it promised, and then seeing yourself as an absolute slave of the very thing that you thought was the path to liberty?
Yet inside of our present nature, there's always an imagined point in time where there's rest from running from our inadequacies toward some imagined end. There's always a moment promised that when we reach it, we will finally be in charge of our own nature and we'll have our patience, our grace, our peace. But it's not true. You know it's not true, but you don't want to see that it's not true. Because to see it would mean that the usefulness of this part of you that imagines your life getting better is finally of no more use. Why? Because it has served its purpose. It produced (depending upon the individual) a certain set of characteristics -- a certain set of qualities -- established for the purpose of allowing you to interface with life in some seemingly natural fashion. But the use of a personality, the use of what's created inside of you by your culture, your religion, was never intended to be the fruit of your possibility. And that's what it is now.
Individuals believe that the culmination of their existence is somehow to polish the personality so well that everyone loves it -- that you can get what you want from whom you want, whenever you want it, and that means you've accomplished something. No, it doesn't! It means you have become deluded into a form of belief, and that somehow the form that came out of this body is the same thing as the freedom it promises. But it's not. And you know you cannot remain there in this place of rest, because now you're chased by your own dreams.
Do you know what it means and feels like to be chased by your own dreams? In case it's not clear, the mind establishes and imagines a time to come in which something will take place. It dreams of a certain set of circumstances and forms through which it will feel fulfilled. And then the very thing that it has dreamed begins to chase it, so that you become the captive of a dream instead of its creator. But the one who creates the dream and who understands the nature that is creating that dream cannot be held captive of it, because the usefulness of those dreams is finally seen as having no more function -- no more purpose.
"The dark night of the soul" is that terrible but required experience in the life of the aspirant when you see, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the purpose of your present nature -- all that you have desired and fought to become -- is as pointless as it is empty of anything real. Your personality, with all of its cultivated pride and passion, is seen as worse than useless to you. It has become a stumbling block of pressing demands, impossible to please.
And so there remains only one thing left for us to do. We must surrender ourselves up to the very light that is showing us, seemingly without mercy, all that we can no longer be. We must somehow choose not only to die to all that we have been, but we must also agree to stand there and be the witness to our own sacrifice in the light of another order of consciousness that is capable of withstanding the passage of any form in time. We must stand willingly in the midst of our own crucifixion. "Crucifixion" meaning standing in the presence of that nature that is relentless in its pursuit -- pushed, made impatient, because nothing takes place in the time that it demands -- and remaining there with that nature's fire, its violence, its insistence and its self-righteousness, even as that nature is viewed as being something that can no longer be agreed to and sustained by the self that sees it. So that all there is in that moment is a complete awareness of the uselessness of all that you have believed yourself to be, and in that same instant, to understand that something is revealing this uselessness.
And because of the revelation, the only thing there can be left to do isn't to become something else, but to simply die to all becoming. And to watch with incredible clarity, produced by the pain itself, how these characters in yourself cannot wait for the moment to appear by which the form of the old nature is elicited and brought into existence to act one more time to ensure its continuity.
And rather than accepting as the only possibility the hatred of yourself in those moments, rather than believing in the pointlessness of these purposes that belong to that form of the old "you" so that the pain becomes nothing but resisting what is revealed, you stand there and allow that world to be as present as it is, even as you stand present to what is revealing all of that to you. And there you "die" -- meaning that in that moment, the form that was formerly the root of your existence ceases to be the root of your existence. You observe the fact that within you is something that is created with the potential to stand between these worlds. Then that moment becomes a fractal moment, which is what the interior world is never-endingly meant to be. It's a fractal moment because you understand what has been revealed to you here is to understand it there; and to understand it there is to understand it everywhere.
