Dark Nights and Baby Universes

In an earlier entry on this blog, “The Information Paradox et Alia” I mentioned with respect to the classic exposition of the “dark night of the soul” by St. John of the Cross that a further distinction should rightfully be made as between real and imaginary nights.

Now of course as outlined by St. John there can be various kinds of “nights” which in psychological terms relate to development of unconscious - as opposed to the conscious - aspects of understanding.

The simplest are - what he refers to as - active nights where one exercises a degree of conscious control over development.

When the (holistic) conscious is fully balanced with the (analytic) conscious mind, one can operate in full freedom of spirit with no undue attachments (positive or negative) arising with respect to conscious phenomena.

So if one becomes keenly aware of an excessive attachment, one could then attempt to consciously counter this attachment by moving in the opposite direction.

Say for example this relates to a craving for chocolate. So one would then try and counter this attachment through abstaining from eating it thereby consciously denying oneself the associated pleasure.

Now when this conscious effort, motivated by spiritual desire generally is applied to a wide range of sense attachments an “active night of the senses” would follow.

At a deeper level the same attempt to curb undue identification with embedded conceptual and volitional notions could lead to a corresponding “active night of the spirit”.

Then later when one’s understanding has become more intuitively refined (reflecting initial development of the unconscious) a more prolonged “passive night of the senses” and "passive night of the spirit” would be required (where little conscious effort is involved) to get the to very root of the disordered nature of desire (i.e. that is rigidly focused on conscious phenomena).

So the “dark night of the soul” in its most profound spiritual sense refers to the “passive night of the spirit” that like a powerful syringe attempts to remove the deepest roots in the unconscious of involuntary rigid attachment to conscious type phenomena.

However with respect to my own experience, I gradually came to the conviction that the account given by St. John was unduly one-sided, in that it concentrated on merely the transcendent aspect of spiritual development and that for proper balance both immanent and transcendent aspects should be emphasised.

So I came to discover that a further distinction needed to be made as between real and imaginary “nights”  relating to real and imaginary attachments respectively.

Thus “real” attachments relate directly to conscious objects (in both analytic and holistic terms).

For example in my own case a significant holistic attachment related at one stage to a strong identification with Hegelian type philosophy, which dominated my thinking to an unhealthy extent.

So at a crucial stage of the spiritual journey I was required to surrender this attachment through an extended “passive night”.

However I gradually realised that the very attempt to undo all such conscious attachment in a transcendent spiritual ascent, was causing serious repression of basic instinctive desires (which could not yet be properly uncovered in experience).

So this gradually caused a switch in emphasis in an immanent manner, whereby “lower” nature was gradually allowed to express itself more freely through the projection of repressed desires into conscious type experience.

And as conscious phenomena now served indirectly as the focus of primitive fantasies (projected from the unreformed conscious) attachments thereby arising were of an imaginary rather than real nature.

Thus the imaginary “nights” related to the gradual attempt to erode involuntary attachment to projections that were increasingly emitted into consciousness (as expressions of holistic desire).

So putting it more simply, the real aspect relates directly to the psychic objects of experience; the imaginary aspect, by contrast, relates indirectly to the psychic objects of experience (as unconscious projections emitted into consciousness).

We have already seen that associated with the phenomenon of the “dark night” in psycho-spiritual terms is the complementary physical phenomenon of the black hole.

We now perhaps can see further that associated with both real and imaginary “dark nights” are corresponding real and imaginary black holes.

Indeed Stephen Hawking in his work makes this very distinction in his attempt to understand what happens to matter (as information) that is sucked inside a real black hole. And - at least in one of his better known formulations - according to Hawking this matter is preserved in another black hole existing in imaginary time, that operates as a new baby universe attached to our existing universe.

There are even complementary connotations to be found in the very term that Hawking uses here i.e. baby universe.

For we have seen that the nature of the repressed primitive desires gradually emitted as projections into experience date back to the earliest childhood, when one was indeed literally a baby.

However one extremely important point needs to be made.

Because present physics adopts a mere analytic approach to interpretation, it is not able to successfully incorporate notions of imaginary time (and space) with accepted real notions. So we have this artificial separation, as for example in Hawking’s treatment as between real and imaginary universes.

However when understood appropriately, in holistic terms, all psychological events take place in both real and imaginary space and time (as indispensable components of the same overall experience).

So again when object phenomena are understood directly in a localised manner, real notions of space and time apply. However when these same phenomena serve as the means by which our holistic desire for meaning is expressed, then they exist in imaginary space and time.

And because both local and holistic aspects necessarily co-exist with each other, this entails likewise that both real and imaginary notions of space and time likewise co-exist in the same complex experience.

And because again appropriately understood, both physical and psychological aspects are complementary, this entails that both real and imaginary notions necessarily co-exist for all object phenomena in physical space and time.