The Dark Night of the Soul
 


Pamela channels Mary Magdalene


Translation by Maria Baes and Frank Tehan

Dear friends, I am your sister, Mary Magdalene. I am right beside you as your very close friend. I am not elevated above you, but one whom you know from within. Feel for a moment our deep connection – we are one, part of the same family.

I, too, have traveled the path of being human on Earth, have known and explored the depths there, and have been touched by a bright and vivid Light that inspired and took hold of me, and reminded me and made me dream and long for a more beautiful and better world on Earth. I have known both extremes, the Light as well as the dark. Those extremes are poles that belong together; they are each other's driving force, you might say. Life seems to be about opposites: Light and dark. The feelings they call up seem to be opposites, yet there is a hidden connection between them; they can not function, one without the other. The experience of Light is possible only by having experienced the absence of the Light, and by contrast with its opposite, the dark.

Never is the Light more visible than when appearing out of the darkness. Just think of the first rays of the Sun at the waking of the day, the warm morning light that bathes the world. How deeply it can touch you, especially when you emerge from a cold, dark night. Contrast creates dynamics – life, movement, growth, change – so the dark has a function in our lives. However, humans often experience the dark as the antithesis of Light; not as a driving force for change and growth, but as a trap or pit into which you get caught and where you can no longer move. From that deep pit it seems like you have lost contact with the Light, as if it has been cut off from you.

You all know that mental state of being cut off from the Light, being deprived of a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. That in fact is being dead. The only possible way to die is not a physical death, but to cease any movement in your heart, your feelings, your mind. In reality, death does not exist; your soul is eternal and lives on. Everything that is mortal about you is only form; your essence is eternal and cannot die. However, you can temporarily lose sight of your essence to such a degree that you become inwardly rigid and cease to move. You are dead inside and you feel extremely depressed. This is an extremely painful state.

Travel along with me for a moment. Descend with me into that depressed state and investigate it with an open mind. What happens if someone loses all hope, shrinks back, and feels powerless against all the feelings that well up from within? Usually this reaction is triggered by exterior events that are disruptive; events that a person is unable to place in his or her frame of reference, and which make everything in that person’s life become uncertain. It can be big things, such as the death of someone close, becoming ill, losing one’s job, or the breakup of a relationship. These are events that affect people deeply, and can bring them to the edge of the abyss.

However, the darkness can sometimes also reveal itself from within without a clear cause from without. Old emotional burdens that you once stored in your soul’s memory come to the surface. Painful experiences, possibly stemming from previous lives, spring up from your depths, and you have to deal with dark feelings, fears, and doubts. Deep experiences of lack, loneliness, and of being defeated can enter into your psyche without reason. They can make you lose your footing as much as any outward event that happens to you. 

When someone gets caught in a depression, in a dark night of the soul, it always comes with the experience of being engulfed and unable to cope with all the emotions. The flow of painful, heavy emotions is experienced as being too great to bear. You are overpowered by them, or so it feels, and you shut down from a deep sense of powerlessness. At the moment you turn away and refuse to face the emotions, you become stuck. Those emotions want to flow; it is essential to emotions that they continue moving onward, like the surge of a big wave onto a beach. But you are afraid to allow that, so you refuse to go along with that movement and you pull back from these flooding emotions. You build a dam, a barrier, and say: "I cannot deal with this. I do not want this. I want done with it". Your reaction, often out of sheer powerlessness, creates a depression, which is a state of numbness and of being closed off from life. Over time, that situation becomes unbearable and you no longer want to live.

From an earthly perspective, you want to die because life is intolerable. Seen from the soul’s perspective, you are dead, and it is an experience so unbearable that you want to do everything you can to put an end to this situation. The desire for death is essentially a desire for change, a desire to live again. People who wish to commit suicide have a deep desire for life, not for death. It is precisely this feeling of being dead inside that drives them to extreme despair. It is their urge to live that leads them to terminate their physical life.

When you experience a depression, there is in you a combination of deep resistance and at the same time extreme vulnerability. The depression is a way to defend yourself against the enormous power of the emotions that threaten to engulf you. You think they will destroy you, so in your powerlessness you build a shell around yourself; you wrap yourself in a cocoon of not wanting or being able to feel anything. You do not want to be here any longer, just as the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand. You are suffocating in the sand and yet that seems the only possible way out. And after a time you no longer are able to get your head out of the sand, the depression. You have become so closed off from life and from any feelings that you are no longer able to turn things around and effect a change; the choice to say “yes” to your emotions seems to lie beyond your power. The depression has now reached a climax.

On the one hand, you cannot accept your emotions of fear, despair, sadness, and loneliness, or share them with others, while on the other hand, you know and feel that it is agonizingly painful to live without emotions; that it is a form of death, a total denial of your living core. After a time, you want to feel again. The pain of not feeling is greater than the pain of feeling your emotions. That is your salvation, and this is the turning point. The refusal to feel, and the saying: “No, I can't, I don't want it, I want to be dead, I want to disappear”, makes you so hollow and empty inside that you can no longer sustain it. What happens from the perspective of the soul is that life is becoming stronger now; it can not be held back indefinitely. When the life force has been restrained strongly for a very long time, it creates an opposing force that eventually erupts. The strength of the tidal wave that wants to roll out onto the beach can not be held back forever. At a certain moment,  from within you, emerges a “yes”, even if you are not aware of it consciously. Nothing is static in life; the urge for life is unstoppable. When a climax has been reached, you create events in your life that provide change; that create a breakthrough.

Sometimes this happens in the form of a suicide attempt. If it fails, there may be an upward spiral because the suffering of that person becomes very visible to the outside world. When someone discovers how much other people care about them, there may arise an opening to more Light, and to the receiving of understanding and sympathy. However, it may also happen that someone does not open up and remains depressed. There is no fixed recipe for how a breakthrough occurs. However, life has a pushing and driving force that makes it impossible to linger endlessly in a static state of consciousness.

Even when the earthly life ends by actually taking your own life, you immediately have to face new choices on the other side, because you will still have to experience your feelings there. The gloom that was there while alive, with its feelings of pain and anxiety, is now able to come forward even more sharply, and in a less veiled way. Sometimes the astral realm where you end up after death confronts you directly with the emotions that you repressed, and through this they begin to flow again. For example, someone may feel desperate and horrified when they have  passed over and discover that life has not really ended. Or they sees the emotions of their family on Earth, their grief and sadness, and are very affected by it. By being so touched, a new movement can be set in motion in the soul who has passed over. It can lead to a breakthrough, making that soul open to help from guides who are always there, both on Earth and in heaven. Help is always there, provided you are open to it.

No matter which way you twist or turn, life is more powerful than any death wish. Life always reassumes its right to be, you cannot kill it. Therefore, there is always hope. Hold on to that for yourself, but also for others whom you see suffering. Things can seem so hopeless at times, but there is always another outlook, even though you cannot imagine in your mind how that can be and how change is going to take place. Life is always stronger than death, the Light stronger than the dark. The water eventually breaks through a dam, because water has the power to move: it pushes, it is alive! The power of the water is stronger than the resisting force that wants to hold it back.

Feel the driving force of life in yourself for a moment. Each of you sometimes finds yourself with parts that are stuck, patterns that repeat themselves endlessly: doubts about yourself, feelings of inferiority, uncertainty, mistrust, anger, resistance. Now imagine that those parts are just there, and that life continues to flow around them at the same time. The water continues to flow, and although there remain boulders in the stream that seem so fixed and unmoving, they still are worn down by the movement and pushing of the water moving past them. It takes time, but do not forget who you are: you are the living water! The more you remind yourself of that, the more you can reclaim the energy from those boulders and stones that lie in the stream. There is pain from the past that continues to be there. You do not have to downplay that, or make it irrelevant, but neither do you have to lug those boulders from the river. You only have to remind yourself that you are the water! 

This can be difficult at times because, in part, you have become identified with those boulders that block your energy: "I am someone who is not properly grounded; I have difficulty feeling at home on Earth; I carry sadness and traumas from the past". And that is all true, but imagine for a moment those ideas as rocks or stones in a large, wide river – a huge waterway. Because that is who you are; that is your actual life force. It is your soul that flows and flows, always along its path: alive, bubbling, rushing and roaring, exploring and discovering. That flow has no judgment about those boulders that it encounters, it engulfs them. You do have a choice!

Of course, you occasionally get stuck with your consciousness in such a blockage when you begin to identify with it for too long. But you can detach from that blockage by just experiencing yourself as the flowing water. Remember that you are a living, soul-consciousness, always moving and flowing and not bound to those boulders – you are free. The more you withdraw your consciousness from those blockages, the rocks that lie there, the easier they give themselves up to the flow. They release sooner because you let go of them and identify yourself with the moving water. The water is your soul, and it can not be held back. Feel it flowing and moving and sparkling. Imagine that it is washing over you, and feel the bubbling strength, the Light that sparkles in it. Feel how your soul, in its deepest part, is not threatened by the darkness that you experience; by those boulders that appear to be so solid and unyielding. Your soul is not at all troubled by what is there, because it knows the boulders belong there; they are part of the landscape of life. Try, when you are stuck within such a boulder, to hear the water rushing by. Remember the water and the ease with which it flows.

You do not have to do everything yourself. Life provides you with endless opportunities and possibilities. It might sometime bring you into deep, dark valleys, but it also propels you up again into the Light. Even when you have the feeling of no longer being able to struggle on, and you cannot see how things can ever turn out well, life still propels you. The art of living is to preserve your trust, even when there seems to be nothing left to trust, and when everything that you were certain of has disappeared from your life.

At this time on Earth, many people are involved with the processing of ancient darkness; parts of the soul are coming to Light right now and want to be seen. And why is that so? Because you are making a leap forward. It is really a leap in the evolution of the consciousness of humanity. This leap cannot be made without reaching out to the darkest places in your consciousness, those that are filled with fear, distrust, or a very deep sadness about everything that you have experienced on Earth. Do not be afraid of that darkness – welcome it!  When you say “yes” to the darkness, it begins to release and flow, and that is the art of living this life. And when you feel: "I can’t really say yes to this”, remember there is something in you that still says “yes”. That is what will save you and bring you along further – trust in life.

I love you all, you are dear to me. Maybe you think: "How can that be? You can not know us all personally”. But you as a human do not know or realize how extensive the network of souls really is. When you have connected from the soul with another, that is a permanent connection. A bond once forged will not separate through time, because in our dimension there is no time. There is a living network connecting us as souls. We share a certain history, a certain desire, a flame that was once ignited in our consciousness. With this flame the Earth becomes gradually lit. The awakened consciousness in all people brings us together and creates a new foundation, from which that leap into consciousness is really going to take place. You do not need to ponder over this. Stay with your own process, your own way – that is sufficient. Feel the powerful thrust of life, not only in you, but in many others, through which a wave of consciousness is flooding over the Earth.

© Pamela Kribbe 2012
www.jeshua.net


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