Dark Night of the Soul: The Descent

Well it's been ten years and a thousand tears, and look at the mess I'm in.

A broken nose and a broken heart, an empty bottle of gin.

Well I sit and I pray in my broken down Chevrolet

While I'm singin' to myself, there's got to be another way.
Take away, take away, take away this ball and chain
Well I'm lonely and I'm tired and I can't take any more pain.

Ball and Chain, Social Distortion

Life is a figment of our imagination.  We all imagine life to be lived a certain way, to follow a certain story line, to have a specific texture and flavor with which we are familiar.  Guys typically grow up with stories of heroes and villains; eventually finding a role within society that fits their instinctual reality.  Girls typically grow up with stories of goddesses and princesses in waiting or of Cinderella servitude.  Regardless of how close anyone may fit those culture identity plays the nature of becoming a part of society is to live out some expectation in the grand scheme of our shared imaginations.

But then life happens.  We are fragile creatures who don’t bend easily without breaking.  And break we do, over and over, until we often lose sight of what it was we thought life was suppose to be.  At the heart of darkness, where all that was thought to be, crumbles; the people we thought would fulfill our destiny, disappoint; the roles we thought we would be playing, disintegrate without any hope of fulfillment.  At that moment, we either turn to escape, or we brace ourselves to face forward to a new unfamiliar, unintentioned reality beyond our expectations. 

Escape is by far the more reliable strategy.  Why suffer when we can numb our senses with soul altering substances that empty us of the capacity to feel pain?  We can hide behind false identities that mask our vulnerability to the world; or, we can enjoy our despair, finding new ways to show the world our pain over and over again, taking our place in the great hall of tragic victims, that didn’t deserve to be what they became—the failure, the drunk, the addict, and the outcasts.

As "satisfying" as the soulless victim might be in the grand scheme of shared imaginations, the question still stands, what would it be like to face the emptiness of a life unfulfilled, to actually move through the “Dark Night of the Soul” to discover what is on the other side?  To many, the prospect is too terrifying to even entertain; a complete deconstruction of identity and personal history.  And in truth, the journey can be most terrifying, which leads most into the hands of the pharmaceutical industry and drug oriented psychiatrists or to self-medicate.  The obvious problem is that it doesn't attend to the underlying issue, the call for psychological transformation within the individual psyche.  Antidepressants and Anti-Anxiety medications are great at masking the symptoms and creating a person that can mutely function in society.  And if that is what one choses to do, nothing should prevent one from taking that path of cyclical but less intensive depressive episodes.  In some cases where the boundaries toward suicide are psychologically unmitigated it can be lifesaving.  


But there is a different path that can also be taken what the great Mythologist, Joseph Campbell, outlined as the Hero’s Journey, the archetypal path of the unwitting initiate’s descent into darkness to face the great monster deep within or without, to eventually emerge chastened and wizened, the heroic persona who transforms the society he came from and then returned.  Frank L. Baum’s Wizard of Oz series is a good example of the hero’s journey in modern literature.  George Lucas deliberately used Campbell’s work in writing the Star Wars film series. 

Well I've searched and I've searched to find the perfect life,

A brand new car and a brand new suit, I even got me a little wife

But wherever I have gone I was sure to find myself there

You can run all your life but not go anywhere

Second Stanza, Ball and Chain,et.al.

In personal terms, the Hero's Journey is the process of letting go of dysfunctional expectations and behaviors that keep us circling the same spot day after day when we are actually trying to go somewhere else.  The tremendous energy that is experienced as psychological pain at that moment, is refocused on moving through to an authentic space beyond the portal of what we know and with which we are comfortable, to find our own heroic identity within, to finally embrace the integrative calling from what Carl Jung described as the Self, the core sense of wholeness within each individual. 

Not surprisingly, with our penchant for “quick and easy’ this has been paralleled in popular storytelling with the “Action Hero” the warrior/magician who rather than go through the uncomfortable deconstruction of the hero’s journey instead conjures up the great powers of the unknown to control reality to meet their own imagination.  Rather than be transformed they become the transformer, dictating a new reality by a secret formula/weapon which they uniquely possess; overcoming all odds.  In popular storytelling we intuitively understand the difference between a Hero and an Action Hero--a Luke Skywalker and a Conan the Barbarian, or a Dorothy of Oz and a Helen of Troy.  But once the credits role, are we willing to descend into our own story to face the forces within that conflict and inhibit our ability to live freely?