The alchemy of inner transformation is not a self improvement project. It's a participation in the soul's evolution. It may not improve your life at all at first. It's a rather destructive process, dismantling your beliefs, identities, small hopes and dreams, tearing your life at each carefully stitched seam to reveal what's unbreakable underneath. It gets worse before it gets worse sometimes, so faithless and consuming, leaving you hanging by nothing but a single thread--your own breath, tethering you to life in a place that feels like you never intended to be. And at some point, you realize, this is it. There's nowhere else to go. Nowhere to hide, nothing to save you from having to live what's right here now. So you breathe the breath that is yours to breathe. You take the thread that is yours to weave. And without pretense, fanfare, or promise of any particular outcome, you live the impossible--the dream that won't stop dreaming, the breath that won't stop breathing, the thread that won't stop weaving you.
Intro:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of falling into soul. I'm McCall Erickson, creator of this podcast and author of the second half of the mountain, a g uide to the more confusing alchemical processes many of us find ourselves going through after spiritual awakening. Because, well... awakening is merely the beginning of a much longer and complex process of initiation required to align with and live from the root of your being, in all situations with all people at all times. Whew. As a diehard explorer of life, love and inner alchemy, I am ever delighted to be exploring in this space with you.
One of the things I've always felt strongly about in my work is illuminating just how terrible the journey home to the true self can be. Not to be discouraging. But to be encouraging, encouraging about how difficult it can be to undergo journeys of alchemical transformation, especially when you find yourself in the totally out there and abandoned places. I understand and talk about this extensive journey to the true self through the context of alchemy. This is a pattern of transformation that many esoteric mystics and healers have studied and employed throughout time.
And within this pattern of transformation, there lies a stage called the dark night of the spirit. It's a very advanced stage toward the end of a transformative cycle that results in total union with whatever you're trying to unify with union with... God, union with source, union with the true self within. I've talked about the dark night of the Spirit many times in this podcast, see episode six, especially where I talk about the dark night of the Spirit and how it differs from the dark night of the soul. I know I've been talking about it a lot lately, but honestly, I just don't feel enough can be said about it. Actually, it's hard to really say it. There isn't a lot said about it. It's a difficult part of the process to illuminate, let alone live through. I don't hear it talked about at all in the spiritual mainstream. Even though I do see people going through it, and there's probably even more people going through it then I can see because when you're going through it, you're really off the map. You're really just not even, it's not a visible part of the process. It's really disillusioning and rather unsayable while you're going through it. It's not even on the map. Any of the maps were given, this dark night of the Spirit is not on there. So I feel really strongly about bringing it forth and saying, Hey, this is a part of the process.
And I wanted to expand on it from a different angle in this episode, kind of riffing on something that I talked about in the last episode, when I was talking about going through initiation, then the latter stages of alchemy, and how part of that is to find no flow in every direction. How no flow is the flow that you're supposed to find during this part of the process, and how hard that can be to really accept and sink into.
We are spiritually conditioned to think that if we follow our hearts, if we align with our soul, if we work hard enough, adopt an abundance mindset, have good and clear intentions, then everything will fall into place and Everything should be easy and flow. But you know what, that's just so not the complete picture.
So I really enjoy building more context around understanding the complete picture, to understand that the process that brings us into our alignment with ourselves, and the true flow of life, to understand that that can be utterly destructive and disillusioning sometimes to get there.
When I first started considering writing a book about this process, which ended up being the second half of the mountain, I wanted to title it, Don't Worry, It Gets Worse. Because the transformational process can really get a lot worse. After initial awakening, I found that the more I followed my heart, the more I showed up for my inner work, and stayed true to my soul alignment. The further I got into the processes of alchemy and soul awakening, the worse things got. everything in my outer life completely fell apart. Things were not flowing at all. I mean, at all, no matter what I tried to implement, I just could not find all that perfect ease and flow, that all the rock stars of the spiritual internet, were always talking about.
Of course, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was right on track. Things had to fall so completely apart to reveal the real me underneath. Everything not my core had to fall away before I couldn't align with my core, and use that core as a foundation to build something enduring and lasting, which would be my life. As Rumi said, "the way of love is not a subtle argument. The door there is devastation."
So what happens through the seven stages of alchemy is a process of deconstruction, which can feel pretty devastating at times. But it's not devastation for no reason. It's not devastation to no end. It's destruction with a purpose. It's the kind of destruction that leads to renewal, like we constantly witnessed happening in nature all the time.
The Difference between Self Improvement and Alchemical Transformation
This process of transformation is not the same as a process of self improvement. It's not the same thing as using your resources and your creative powers to manifest a bunch of things in your life to prove your mastery of life, which is a total valid use of your power and creative energy if you want. It's just not the path of transformation I'm talking about here.
Let's take the metaphor of a rundown house. Self improvement would be like slapping up a new coat of paint, patching the leaky roof, revamping the decor, improving it making it look better. But the transformation I'm talking about here is like would be like dismantling the house, pulling it apart bit by bit, taking off the stained wallpaper that someone else before you chose, the wobbly beams, taking down those wobbly beams that termites are claiming for their dinner, pulling up the rotting floorboards letting it air out. It's about taking everything apart to reveal what's not working. It's getting down to the root of that. It's not about patching over what's not working. It's not about making it look better. It's about getting down to what's real. Getting down to that unshakable core. So you can build from that new foundation, it's really difficult to build something new on top of the old and call it good. We have to get down to the core first and build from there, if that's your, if that's what you're after, if that's the kind of journey you're on.
And this is so often why the soul will not let us take root in false ground. No matter how beautiful or beloved, that ground is to us. There can always be more in the way that we're being asked to remove to find the true solid ground of our soul. And one of the processes that helps us get down to our true unshakeable, unbreakable core within that I'm always talking about is the dark night of the Spirit. And as I've talked about before, the dark night of the Spirit serves one main purpose and that's to detach the ego from our spiritual work, our spiritual aspirations and dreams. It's to keep the ego from using our spiritual gifts and our spiritual purpose to prove our worth and validate our existence. Because it's a really lovely place to stop. It's a really lovely place to want to root in, right? When we have spiritual and creative purpose. But if we're trying to root in there before we've totally dismantled the house, then it's not a proper rooting, the ego can still attach to the spiritual work, instead of us getting down to that place of raw being, and building from there.
The Log and the Fire Analogy
One of the best analogies I've heard for distinguishing the dark night of the spirit from the dark night of the soul, is the log in the fire analogy. You being the log and the fire being God or love, or the alchemical processes themselves, and during the dark night of the soul, the alchemical fire, darkens the log. That's why it's, it's such a dark process, you begin to darken your senses, your outer identities darken your mental belief structures darken ways of seeing and going about life, it all darkens. But during the dark night of the spirit, the fire shifts from merely darkening the log to consuming it entirely. The Dark Night of the spirit burns up your entire inner world, your entire inner landscape, every deep rooted belief and preconceived notion about who you are and why you're here. It burns away, especially your spiritual, enlightened beliefs, beliefs about enlightenment, beliefs about soul purpose itself, expectations and beliefs you didn't even know you had. And we're still clinging to, that's part of why the dark night of the Spirit can be so painful, because it's not even necessarily conscious beliefs, we have the alchemical fire gets in there and burns, what we didn't even know was there. It burns and consumes you entirely.
And by the time you find yourself in a dark night of the spirit, you've already been through so much, you've already been through out so much alchemy, you're not new to inner healing, you're not new to alchemy, so much has already fallen away. So it's really hard to understand what could still be in the way of finding that true connection with yourself and being able to build a life from there. How could there still be so much not right? How could your life and your transformational journey still be amounting to nothing? But that's just it right there. The nothingness, the value, the power, the absolute necessity, of being delivered to, and by and through the nothingness, the abyss.
Initiated by Nothingness
During the dark night of the spirit, the ego is being refined by the fire of nothingness. It's an impossible nothingness in every direction. No matter what you try to do to make your life or your work amount to something, it doesn't stick. It's an impassible and utterly impossible, nothingness or no flow in every direction. When I first went through this in my big alchemical transformation cycle, which we really only have to do once, in a big way, throughout our lives to form the Philosopher's Stone within, although it really can take years or decades of commitment to complete that pattern of, of transformation. Anyway, when I was going through it, my big dark night of the spirit, I dubbed this part of the journey, the Great White Nothing, and I still call it that when I feel it coming up in other areas, other areas that I apply alchemy to, transmuting difficult situations, going through creative projects and processes.
Three Keys for Living Through the Great White Nothing
And the great white nothing, there are a few keys I've noticed, having been through it a few times that help to remember while going through it, so I will offer those two here.
- Number one, you have to be willing to be forgotten and abandoned. There's a big sense of abandonment that comes into play during the Great White nothing being abandoned by your hopes and dreams. Your spirit guides God, synchronicity, all your tried and true spiritual practices, feeling useful, meaningful, purposeful, everything you've leaned on before to bring meaning and purpose, they fall flat here, nothing is going to deliver you even things that worked to deliver you before. The main reason the Dark Knight of the Spirit is so difficult for the human mystic heart who seeks total union with God and spirit is because it's actually a total absence of anything that feels like Union. For those of you familiar with the principles of The Tao you know that everything comes by way of its opposite. And this is the case with coming into total union with God and spirit. It's achieved by way of feeling like you've been completely abandoned by God and spirit.
- Number two You have to give up on what feels impossible to give up on. Talk about paradox. You have to live without what it feels impossible to live without. When I was going through the dark night of the spirit, I realized at some point that I had to give up all hopes of finding what I set out on the journey to find, which was my true purpose. I felt like I went on the journey in the first place, because I couldn't live without knowing why I was here, who I was and why I was here. But in order to finish the journey, I had to live without knowing who I was and why I was here, I had to give it up. So whatever it is, we go on the journey to find, we have to give up hopes of finding it, even though it feels like we can't give it up. That's the whole point. To really sink into that paradox. It feels like an impossibility. And the ego may or may not not like this one bit. I mean, we come all this way do all this work just to give up whatever it it feels like we were setting out on the journey to go on in the first place to give up what it feels like we cannot give up on whatever it is love, a soulmate a life purpose, a place to call home, whatever it is, we have to give up on what it feels impossible to give up on. That's an initiation into paradox in a big way.
- Number three, when you lean into that paradox, you have to start living even though you feel unredeemed and unsaved. At some point, and only you and your soul really know what that point is. The call comes to start living where you are, even though it's not where you ever intended to be. Even though your dreams have not come true, even though none of your spiritual work and transformation has led where you thought it would or brought you what you thought it would, or brought you what you've thought you needed, absolutely cannot live without. You have to keep living anyway. Nothing saves you and nothing is going to save you. When you can live that truth. You are beginning to really live. That's what it means to live what is it's incredibly difficult. No fantasies or illusions to keep you from connecting to what's right here now.
And I think that's the whole point of the dark night of the spirits to strip us of everything and and pull us through that nothingness. And by leaning into that nothingness. After a while we realize that it's not really nothing. It's just not what we thought it would be. It's life as this. This is the narrow gate through which we as mystics are always endeavoring to pass. And through all the preceding years of alchemical initiations, we can finally start living the raw materials of life as is. And that's when something real begins to happen.
As Leonard Cohen once said, you abandon your masterpiece, and slip into the real masterpiece.
This is what the initiations and processes of alchemy prepare us to be able to do, not just in our minds but in our whole being our whole force of living. It's an initiation into surrender, into being able to live in paradox, not just understand it, to live in paradox to live in uncertainty, to move around to dance and create in it to be able to hold the impossible tensions required for creation itself.
I want to read a piece I wrote back in 2013 when I dubbed the darkness of the Spirit the Great White Nothing, when I was finally far enough into it that I could see and start to understand it a little tiny bit.
The Great White Nothing
You can do whatever you want with your life and what better time than now to just choose to make it happen!? they say.
I say, whoever said that obviously has no clue how complicated that shit can be, obviously hasn't lived in the unforgiving cruelty of the barren grief land that dries out your every need, every hope, and every desire before any of them can reach the edge of your parched lips. (What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?)
Oh, the lips. The tongue.
And the heart. The heart! It is resilient, it can go on, they say.
But when you are a hollowed out shell of love and loss, your heart just hanging there beat, beat, beating can feel like such a mockery. An echo of dreams that used to be.
Thump, thump, you are walking, you are walking, you are walking without a hope, a prayer, or a savior this time. Because, well... it's not about those things this time.
(How did it all come to this? Maybe you took a wrong turn? Where did the magic go?)
To die might be a relief, but it wouldn't take away the great white nothingness that has consumed you, because you can feel how its grasp is relentless. How it reaches through the veil to the other side. How it permeates everything. How it nails you to things you can't see that you might miss if you thought it was only about the things you could see. How you can't explain that to anyone else let alone yourself. How every plan, every idea for a way out is a spark that just won't catch.
No. There is no conceiving. No escape. No way to vision board or manifest or carpe diem your way out of this one. Not this time.
Just your dead legs walking, your heartbeat mock, mock, mocking, and the faithless, empty white nothing, nothing, nothing around every corner
Until...
***
So if you find yourself in this forgotten place of the Great White Nothing, if you've done just about as much as you can to bring your dreams alive in the world, but the world isn't bringing itself to your dreams. If you feel about as far from redemption, and enlightenment as you can possibly be, if you've failed to actualize whatever it is you are going on the journey to actualize in the first place. Consider that you may be going through the initiation that countless mystics, alchemists and artists throughout time have also gone through. The pattern is tried and true. When everything else is worn away, the real thing can be revealed. Creative desolation carries within it its own seeds of renewal. Paradoxically, it's in the moments when we feel like all is lost, that the indestructible light within us can shine. That's when it's found. And it is that light that helps us return to ourselves and life itself. And although it might not be happening in ways we wanted, it happens in ways we can actually and finally receive. And that right there is the next leg of the journey. When you let go of everything. You find the thread that won't let go of you. And you finally begin to wave.
Outro:
Friends, thank you so much for tuning into this episode. I'm really glad I got to make this one. I've been working on a difficult chapter in the book and it finally just said to me, girl, you've got to step back and let me breathe. So while I've been letting it breathe, I had some space to come in here again, which I'm so grateful for. I love this space. I hope I get to keep coming in here while I'm working on the book with times and moments to be able to do this. Thank you for being in this space with me. That's what I want to say. If you know someone who is in the throes of the alchemical transformation that I talk about here, consider sharing this podcast with them. Passing the love along is how the love gets passed along. Until next time, be well... or whatever you are in soul, always in soul.