Ep. 40 | Dark Night of the Soul, Gratitude and the Renaissance of Psychedelics

Call and Response Ep. 40 Dark Night of the Soul, Gratitude and the Renaissance of Psychedelics

Q: So Ram Das talks a lot about how, as you awaken or you go on this spiritual journey, the passions of life kind of start to fall away, and for me, personally, it can be such a release some days when I look out and I see people that this is it and that car is it and doing this and winning is it and I kind of see through it, and then there are days when I just want to go back to sleep because I want to be lost in it. It’s so hard sometimes, I mean just to, I don’t know, everybody’s going bowling as Ram Das says in his talks and you don’t want to bowl anymore. It’s just like, “I can take it or leave it.” Are we just supposed to get to that point where the highs are gone, the lows are gone and we’re just here? Now?

“On this path, those moments of darkness, all that energy fuels the longing to be free, fuels the longing to connect more deeply with what we want to connect with. It’s a good thing, ultimately. It’s a dark night of the soul but there’s a morning right after the night.” – Krishna Das

Q: Can you just talk a little bit about the dark night of the soul.

KD: Oh.

Q: I know. So Ram Das talks a lot about how, as you awaken or you go on this spiritual journey, the passions of life kind of start to fall away, and for me, personally, it can be such a release some days when I look out and I see people that this is it and that car is it and doing this and winning is it and I kind of see through it, and then there are days when I just want to go back to sleep because I want to be lost in it. It’s so hard sometimes, I mean just to, I don’t know, everybody’s going bowling as Ram Das says in his talks and you don’t want to bowl anymore. It’s just like, “I can take it or leave it.” Are we just supposed to get to that point where the highs are gone, the lows are gone and we’re just here? Now? Just kidding.

KD: Like, be here now, you mean? Oh, wow, I never thought of that. Yes and no, of course. Dryness of heart is not something that’s useful, so when shit doesn’t work for you anymore, you can start to feel very dry and very disconnected from life and very, you know, you can really feel like, isolated from things and cut off. So, that’s not useful. That’s neurosis, essentially. But the problem is that we’re so used to trying to squeeze water from a stone that everything we see, we try to squeeze and bring out pleasure from it. It’s very hard to break that habit so that when it’s not working for whatever reason, the hands are still going like this but there’s nothing there, you know? That’s why there has to kind of, that’s why, when you have a practice that you’ve been doing for awhile and you recognize that you understand that you’re not supposed to be, it’s not about how you feel. How you feel is irrelevant. You do the practice. If it makes you feel a certain way and you’re still doing the practice in that moment, that feeling becomes the object of awareness and you come back from being lost in how good this feels, then you can also extend that to how bad this feels. You get lost in that. And the more you’re used to letting go, the more you’ve trained yourself not to be identified so strongly with the experience, you come back naturally a little quicker. So it doesn’t feel dry. The dryness is that you still wish there was something coming from that stone, which there isn’t. But when you become aware of that, see, you have to get used to, so what I was saying, It’s not easy. It takes time to cultivate that motion of letting go. So, Sri Ramakrishna was a very very great saint who lived in India in the 1800s and he talked about the way the practice of the repetition of the Name works, for instance. There are other practices, of course. But this one… and he said, every repetition of the name is a seed that gets planted in your mind stream, so to speak, in your heart stream in your life.