Selfless

The energy in the room is stifling ... a veritable vacuum. The walls slowly close in to form a cell. The floor rises and the ceiling descends to form a coffin. The silence is deafening and it is always 3am. The body of evidence lay still and corpse-like, enveloped in a heavy blanket made of shadows and audible whispers. There is nothing left. No sign of life and no sign of death. There is only surrender... No realization of anything, except disappearing ... Just the kind of catatonia styled numb that leads to a special brand of surrender, the kind in the breathless sigh, "I just give up." It happens after that one fateful phone call, that message, that news, that loss, that betrayal, that pain, that aloneness. No matter what we had ever sacrificed for another, how intense our prayers, how deep our meditation, how profound our love ... that dark night comes when there is nobody ... nobody. Imagine ... Your face engulfed in the blue glow of artificial light, your radiated hand clutches a smartphone, your index finger scrolls down your list of "contacts" ... a misnomer, because you are not really in contact with anyone on that list ... not the kind of contact you need right now for even one ray of Light, not one concerned voice to say "Don't give up." Without a single person on the planet that knows or cares, one way or the other. I will never forget such a night. It was an existential nightmare! It was not a depression. This was something different. All of the Light in my life had been eaten by something in the darkness, in the nowhere, my new home ... alone enough to realize, I was not alone. From the Dark Night of the Soul, can emerge a sovereign life, re-born to know the experience of liberation ... cherished, guided, protected, and loved by the Beloved, Creator of all. A gentle breeze carries the sweet fragrance of dawn's mist into the cocoon of this new being. It caresses the faceless face of this beautiful, ethereal butterfly that chose to yield to a transformed life. I experienced a spontaneous transcendent state of consciousness known as Turiya. The realm of Turiya is the consummate aim of a committed meditation practice. It is the ultimate surrender into the Unknowable. It was a purification, a regeneration, a message, "We will never find the Most Sacred Connection we seek in the names and forms of others, not even in our own. We are more than that. We did not create ourselves. In the dark night as well as the dawn, we move toward surrender to That which did ... and had always been there, waiting to hear, "I can't anymore. Help me." This book is my journey through that Dark Night, into the embrace of The Beloved.