– In my experience, the dark night basically symbolizes something analogous to the formation of a new government(self) and a falling away of the old government. In between this process, when there is no government, there is anarchy.
– Another analogy would be the transformation of a caterpillar -> cocoon -> butterfly.
With the loss of the core self, there is chaos, anarchy in the psyche.
No channelizing force(self) has emerged yet.
So then a good way to describe this experience would be, imagine a video game with a 1000 characters.
Say 20 of them form the government. Let’s say you experience the game from the eyes of these 20 people government force who are more or less in agreement with each other about policies, direction, purpose and so on.
Now lets say gradually this government completes its purpose or realizes its illusions and falls away.
What happens next? There is anarchy.
The 1000 characters now have no ruler or organization that rules.
Now instead of experiencing from the eyes of the 20 people government force who were in agreement, you start experiencing the world from various smaller random groups of people.
Every time you shift to another group’s or individual’s eyes, you entire view of everything changes.
You experience different isolated people/factions point of view from their eyes.
This is akin to the experience of the dark night where there is emptiness of meaning, and temporary meanings are just generated depending on which random group’s/isolated person’s eyes you are viewing from.
This happens, until all the 1000 people or most of them come together and form a new self/government.
This is the formation of the new self.
The REAL YOU however is simply the witness watching this whole game play out.
Only the apparent characters/viewpoints etc. shift in the game.
Journey to the Abstract 