درسنامه اصلی

Dark Night

Have you ever felt hopeless? Hopeless? Miserable? More than just sad? More than just depressed? Have you had a time in your life where everything seemed to fall apart, to be destroyed, your whole life seemed to be crumbling? Crumbling means like falling apart.

One common cause of this can be the loss of a very important relationship. For example, a very terrible divorce or a terrible break-up and you’re so in love with the other person and you built your life with that other person and then that relationship ends. When that happens your whole life can feel like it’s dying, falling apart. Everything you knew is destroyed. Many of your friends will leave. That person who you loved so much leaves. Your identity, the feeling of who you are can suddenly be gone, you’re confused, you don’t even know who you are, what’s important in your life anymore. You seem to lose everything.

A massive, a huge failure can sometimes bring this feeling of hopelessness, powerlessness, the loss of your identity, the loss of meaning in your life. And, of course, the very worst, most difficult cause of all is death. Someone close to you dies or is dying or facing your own death, even just thinking about your own death, knowing it to be certain can cause you to lose all of your confidence in everything, in all parts of your life, suddenly all at the same time. So this is more than just the normal failures, the normal challenges of life. There are moments in life, times in your life, where you may feel everything is being lost all at the same time.

Now I have been recently reading, I recently read, finished reading a book called The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. It’s a very old book. The Dark Night of the Soul and in that book St. John describes exactly this kind of situation, The Dark Night of the Soul right, your soul, your spirit, your mind, your consciousness suddenly going into a dark, dark night. There’s no light at all.

And the truth is, all of us will face this sometime. Maybe if you’re lucky this has not happened to you in your life, yet! But almost certainly it will. And maybe you have had this happen already and the sad news is, it’s probably going to happen again. I mean, right at the end of our lives we all have to face this, the loss of our loved ones and eventually our own life.

So we can find ourselves in this Dark Night of the Soul, where it seems we’re losing everything and most of all we lose confidence in ourself, in ourselves. Right, everything we believed seems to fall apart and disappear. Everything we thought was certain becomes uncertain. We lose our faith. Now, of course, St. John; St. John, he was a saint, so he was a Christian saint. So, of course, when he writes of this he writes from a spiritual, a religious point of view and he’s very much writing about this loss of certainty, happiness and even faith.

But here’s what’s interesting… in a lot of modern psychology right, even, people I love like Tony Robbins for example or other self-help teachers, they will tell you, they will teach you how to get out of this kind of situation right. If you’re depressed and sad they’ll tell you to change your state, change your physical state, shoulders back, head up and change your beliefs and change your focus so you think about positive things, and move forward. Be positive. Be strong. And they have very strong, powerful techniques for doing this and all of those things are very good, I teach them myself. In many VIP lessons I have taught you these techniques and these methods, these psychological methods. They’re very useful for overcoming big challenges, big difficulties in life.

But, when it all falls apart at the same time, when you face this difficult truth of, everything will be lost, you will die. Everyone you love will die. Everything you know will ultimately disappear. Well, all those little tricks of psychology just don’t seem to work with that huge, big difficult truth. In The Dark Night of the Soul, we sometimes need to go a different way, to think about it differently. And here’s what’s interesting about St. John and what he wrote, because he does not write about getting out of it. He does not give you any mental tricks or psychological tricks to become more positive and feel better quickly.

He does not, in fact, view this Dark Night of the Soul, as negative. He views it as, not only positive, but essential, required. That it’s a requirement for spiritual growth, for you to wake up, to become more enlightened. The Buddhist would call this enlightenment. Other religions might call it salvation or awakening. We could just call it wisdom. It doesn’t matter the words, but to reach that higher level of wisdom and understanding and faith and power, we have to go through this dark night, that it’s actually required. It’s necessary and that it’s very beneficial.

When these things happen to us it doesn’t feel beneficial, it feels like the most horrible hell imaginable. So what possibly could the benefits be of that terrible, terrible, miserable suffering? Let’s talk about some.

Number one, the first benefit of all is true honest self-knowledge.

True honest self-knowledge… See, when everything’s great. When you’re making lots of money and you’re successful and people seem to like you, everything’s going well it’s easy to fool yourself. It’s easy to become over confident. It’s easy to belief all the great things people are saying to you, to get a big ego. We all do it it’s human nature. It’s very easy to fool yourself to think, somehow you are superior and better, and all those horrible things they’re not going to happen to you, right. We lose our perspective. We lose our humility sometimes when we have too much success.

If you want to see the best example of this look at celebrities, right, the people who are making millions and millions of dollars and they’re famous and everyone’s telling them all the time, you’re so beautiful, you’re so handsome, you’re so great, you’re awesome. They’re surrounded by people like that all the time and they start to lie to themselves. They start to believe all of this stuff. And, when they’re young and rich and super famous that can be great, but of course it never lasts forever, and as we’ve seen with celebrities, when the fame starts to fade when they get older and they don’t look so good anymore, when they start having financial problems, when they start getting divorces and all these other problems their whole lives can fall apart.

They can become drug addicts, I mean, horrible things right. We see the news and we don’t understand, how could that happen? They’re rich and they’re famous, it’s because they didn’t have true self-knowledge, they started to believe all those lies and that led to ultimately, their destruction, their misery. So, on the opposite when we’re in that Dark Night of the Soul and everything is horrible, we begin to see ourselves as we really are, especially our limits, especially our weaknesses. We become much more honest about our own weaknesses. We tend to try to hide them and avoid them, but when we’re in that miserable state of horrible suffering and that Dark Night of the Soul, we tend to finally be honest.

Another classic example of this is an alcoholic or a drug addict. I used to work with them when I was a social worker. All these people will lie to themselves, ‘I’m not an alcoholic’, ‘I don’t have a problem’, ‘I can quit, I can quit’, and they go for years and years doing all these horrible things, causing so many problems, so much suffering. And it’s not until they are in that Dark Night of the Soul when they lose everything. They finally wake up and see themselves. They see the truth and they realize, I’m an alcoholic, I’m an addict, I’m weak, I have limits. So they see their weaknesses and limits honestly, finally. This is an example. We all have these and we all do this. Alcoholics are an extreme example, but we can all do it. So true self-knowledge is a benefit of the Dark Night of the Soul.

Another huge benefit of going through the dark night is sensitivity, tremendous sensitivity.

When we’re suffering so much, we wake up, we open up, we become sensitive. Sensitive to what? Sensitive to intuition. Sensitive to wisdom. Sensitive to spirit. Sensitive to a higher power, beyond just ourselves, our little small selves. See again, when everything’s great and wonderful, oh, we kind of ignore a lot of this stuff. We don’t listen. We think eh, everything’s fine, it’s human nature again, but when we’re suffering we suddenly, we listen more carefully. We see more clearly. And when we’re open to that wisdom, we’re very, very sensitive at those times and that’s powerful.

Another one, a huge benefit of the Dark Night of the Soul, these horrible times in our lives; humility, humility right.

And why is humility so important? Because humility leads to compassion. Humility leads to understanding other people more, understanding and appreciating their suffering also.

Love, ultimately love.

If you think you’re the best in the world and you’re so awesome and you have a huge ego, it’s hard to love other people. But when you have that humility, when you realize you’re not the greatest, you’re not the best. In fact, you’re weak and you see all your problems and you understand that you have these weaknesses and limits and all these things, and that you’re not super powerful. You develop a sensitivity and you also develop that humility. Your ego goes down, down, down, maybe even all the way down to nothing and then suddenly you can love. Your capacity to love grows tremendously during those times.

Finally, true leadership.

True leadership… it seems strange, I recently had a quote. In fact, in the interactive lesson I’m going to read part of it to you, it’s gonna be part of our interactive lesson where a writer named Zubati wrote that, ‘defeat and failure and pain are the source of true great leadership’. It’s a powerful idea and a lot of people don’t understand this. Again, most leadership teachers, most leadership speakers they teach you techniques. Again, I also teach you these techniques, you know, how to use your voice more powerfully, how to use non-verbal communication and eye contact. There are many, many, many techniques, psychological techniques for great leadership, but let me tell you this is the fundamental one.

This is the key one. Your suffering is the most powerful leadership tool that you will ever have. I never hear anyone talk about this but it is true. Why is this true? This is the power of genuine, natural, true leadership. You see when you suffer, when you go through something so painful, when you have this Dark Night of the Soul, a big one or even in a small way, you hurt. You open up to wisdom. You gain humility. You connect to higher power, a higher intuition. You think beyond just your own miserable little self, and then you develop that compassion, that love, that desire to help other people who are also struggling, who are also in pain. You see that they are also struggling. You see they are in pain and you have this true love and compassion inside of you, caused by your suffering, caused by that Dark Night of the Soul.

Because of that you understand them, not just a little bit but deep, deep, deeply. You understand their problems. You understand their suffering and you truly want to help them. And see when you go through this horrible, terrible Dark Night of the Soul, and then eventually you will come out with greater faith, greater humility, greater love, greater compassion, greater intuition, greater connection to something higher. And that gives you an amazing ability to lead other people, without tricks, no psychological tricks, no language tricks. It doesn’t matter if your voice is great. It doesn’t matter about your non-verbal communication because people will feel it because it’s deep and it’s real. They will know that you understand them. They will know that you care about them. They will know that you really want to help them. And they, will therefore, listen to you and respect you because of that.

Even if you’re a terrible speaker, even if you have no leadership skills other than that, you can still be a powerful leader. That’s where it must start. The tricks and the techniques and the strategies that are all extras that make you more effective, that improve your communication, but going through this suffering and defeat and this Dark Night of the Soul and going through it and suffering and facing all of this and becoming more sensitive and more humble, and looking at yourself honestly and seeing your weaknesses and limits. Truly, developing compassion and love and understanding for others who are also suffering or who have suffered, that is the essence and foundation of true leadership.

People will feel it. You can’t fake that. People ask me sometimes, how have you been so successful as an English teacher? It’s from suffering, let me tell you it’s from suffering. It’s because for 10 or more years I was a failed English teacher. I tried so many techniques and I suffered and it was horrible. Many times I doubted myself, I said AJ you’re a terrible teacher, you’re not helping your students they are failing, they’re not learning, they’re not fluent. I felt horrible. I went through a small Dark Night of the Soul in my career, where I was ready to give up, to leave English teaching completely because I thought, I don’t know how to do it. I can’t help. I’m a complete failure.

And as a language learner I failed and failed and failed. It was terrible. I suffered and I hated studying grammar. I was so bored and I still hate language learning, to be honest. It’s painful and boring and horrible. It sucks! But because of that, because I went through all of that suffering and pain, I understand you. That’s why students listen to me and respect me. It’s not all the tricks and how good I am as a public speaker, I’m pretty good now. But in the beginning I wasn’t, but still the students respected me and loved me. Why? Because of that suffering. Because I understood their suffering, because I went through it myself, horribly, terribly, intensely. I completely doubted myself in every way.

And because of that my ego went down to nothing and I became very sensitive. I began to talk to my students and tried to understand them. I understood their suffering and their challenges and their problems, and I still do. And see that’s the difference between me and a lot of the people I see online teaching or in schools. For them it’s just a job they don’t really understand, they haven’t gone through that horrible pain. It’s this way in all areas of life.

See, your potential to be a leader it’s best in the areas in life where you have suffered the most. This is interesting, it’s not where you’ve been most successful it’s where you have suffered the most. If you have suffered with your health, for example, for part of your life and it’s been horrible and terrible and it’s been a nightmare. Well, health is the area where you have the biggest potential to be a leader.

For example, Jack Lalanne, I talk about him in the bonus lesson later. As a young man he suffered and suffered and suffered with health, so many health problems. He was miserable. He thought he would never ever cure his health problems. He had despair. He had no hope. And then finally he got through that dark night and he learned how to become healthy and he became an incredible leader in the area of health, because of that suffering and going through it.

So it’s the same for you, and this is my final message of hope is, that those areas of life where you have had that dark night or maybe you’re having it now or you will have it in the future, those are the areas of your life where you have the most potential to be helpful to others, to contribute to others. See, that’s the way you get through the dark night and St. John talks about this as well, you do it by abandoning yourself, by abandoning your selfish self and looking to others, to help others, to contribute to others, to give, to let go of that ego and connect with a higher purpose. That’s the way through the Dark Night of the Soul, to awakening, to greater wisdom whether that be in a small way like teaching English or in a very big way, in a religious or spiritual sense.

Either way it’s through abandoning your ego, letting it go and moving beyond yourself to serve something bigger, serve others, serve a higher purpose. That’s the way through. The Dark Night of the Soul is a necessary step.

All right, I’ll see you in the other lessons. We’ll talk more about this in the commentary and in the interactive lessons.