Do people go through a dark phase that lingers after a spiritual awakening?

Tagged:

In general yes. This is because spirituality doesn’t have the capacity to do for people what they really want it to do for them. They want complete overnight transformation, while spirituality is only able to incrementally improve.

In general, people turn to spirituality to help them out of dark periods of life. You ask God for help when you can’t put food on the table. When God helps you out and removes you from your bad situation, you’re awakened to this new kind of existence, the spiritual existence.

But while God can remove you from a bad situation, He can’t by Himself make it so that you’ll never find another one. We have free will and one of the consequences of that is that we are free to mess up our own lives. You need to actually deal with your inner darkness before you can reliably live in the light.

This is what the Dark Night does for us. It’s a shitty, but deeply spiritual place where we are forced to deal with ourselves. The good news is that it’s temporary, we eventually snap out of it. But it’s deep existential surgery. God will guide the knife if we let Him, but it takes a while before we can accept His help.