During the first morning's group meditation on Day 5, I was about 30 minutes in. The girdle of liquid fire wasn't completely on fire yet, and my mind was drifting back over the past few weeks. I was brought back to an incredibly sad and poignant moment that I had had with Kirsten in Sri Lanka. She had been having a very bad day, and went by herself to see a Dutch colonial fort about 45 minutes away. When she came back she was in tears. We walked down to go for a swim since it was very hot. I hoped the distraction might make her feel better.
She was crying constantly now, saying things like — I just don't have anything to live for. I've been pretending that everything is OK. It's not OK. Things will never be the same. Never.
I didn't know what to say at the time. I just tried to hold her. We were in the waves now, swimming, but she was more in my arms. She felt frail, weak and so broken. It was heartbreaking to see her in such a bad condition. I only tried to console her by holding her, stroking her hair, and keeping her above the waves.
Shhh. I know. It's OK. We will survive, just as we always have and have been doing.
No. We are just pretending.
This memory was going through my head, and then I realised I had still been in the dark night of the soul. I was still in it.
The dark night of the soul is something my therapist had told me about. Not depression exactly, but a spiritual crisis — deeper, more disturbing, a kind of existential desolation where you feel disconnected from everything. God, life, the universe, whatever you want to call it. The purpose of it, supposedly, is spiritual transformation. A stripping away of superficial beliefs, leading to something more authentic.
How did I know I was in it? Because I knew something was wrong with me, but I also knew that I was not depressed. It felt similar, but it wasn't the same thing.
For me, nothing could be more profound than what I had been going through over the last 5 or 6 months, and in particular, this 5th day of the Vipassana. The thoughts of Finn's death were so exaggeratedly real and of primary focus that I could feel a tipping point of whether I might actually fall beyond the grasp of reality. Like, it was a real threat of going insane with grief because it was only me and my thoughts, and I was in this prison literally and figuratively in the form of a meditation ashram.
She was right. We were both pretending to be fine. I was even pretending. I thought I had started to recover but the fact was that I hadn't done anything to recover. I was still in the midst of the dark night of the soul.
My life is a sham. I am a sham. How could I possibly think that things would be OK?
Then I felt a wave of energy come flowing down from the top of my head. It went into my heart like a warm flow of almost euphoria, and then I realised that this whole 4 or 5 days all I had been doing was thinking about my problems and the death of Finn, but then suddenly the concept of my other son came rushing in.
I still had Somers.
I had barely even thought about Somers, but just then as I did, this warm flow of love came rushing into my heart and made me gasp with how wrong I had been to think that I had nothing to live for, I still had Somers, and he was very much in need of my love and attention. Then I thought of Kirsten, my mother, my sister, my two brothers, my nephew, my best friend Chase, there were so many others that I loved dearly, and in the meditation, I felt something or someone fill my whole body with a shock wave of this powerful loving energy.
It was when I first became acquainted with the One Who Observes. This is what I call the presence that brought in this feeling of love. It is that presence that we all know is there, and has been there our whole lives. The one that controls our deepest desires, wakes us up in the middle of the night from a dead sleep with an intuition. He's been there since our first memories, but I'd never heard his voice before.
He was lifting me out of my dark night of the soul. As if to say — it's OK, this period of your life is over. I am here, and you know who I am. I have always been here. I am here to guide you, just as I always have been. This was all said telepathically. No words were spoken. But the warm loving energy conveyed this message very clearly.
By the time I had been lost and transfixed by this feeling, I realised that the meditation was nearly over. TEO was just starting to sing. I had five more minutes in this meditation, one that had transformed my life.
Why Finny. Why, why Finny.
This thought came to me again but now, instead of me looking over my wife crying on my dead son's body, it was the One Who Observes sitting over me and looking down over the both of us. He sucked this thought into a bubble, it was inside of my meditation, and other thoughts immediately became packaged into bubbles, like the level 7 pain in my back. This was put neatly inside of a bubble. The two were side by side, the level 7 pain and the Why Finny thought, two bubbles floating in a stream of consciousness.
I felt tears starting to come to the corners of my eyes, my lip was trembling. He was packaging these feelings up into perfect equilibrium. Perfect equanimity with the wisdom of impermanence.
TEO was saying these words, and I knew that the One Who Observes was now guiding me through my thoughts. He was at the helm, and he easily steered past the bubble of Finn in the ambulance, his mother crying, and me helplessly standing over still in shock.
I felt nothing. He was guiding me through this as if to say — it's OK. I'm in control now. You don't need to do anything.
At this moment, with a new feeling of love back in my heart, something I hadn't felt since Finn's death, I knew with 100% certainty that the dark night of the soul was finally ending.
Still, the One Who Observes was at the helm, effortlessly guiding the ship between my thoughts like harmless bubbles in its wake.
As one of the last reassurances sent from the universe, as I sat gazing for a few moments between meditations at the lotus pond, two dragonflies that were joined together flew and landed right in front of me. It was another sign, sent by Finn, God, the One Who Observes or the pond. Love was back in my life, and the dark night of my soul was ending.
I knew it, and I felt relieved as I smiled internally and walked towards the mess hall to have some tea.