Your dark night is forcing you to consider alternatives. It is taking you out of the active life of submission to alien goals and purposes. It is offering you your own approach to life. You can sit with it and consider who you are and who you want to be. You can be fortified by it to stand strong in your very existence. You can be born again, not into an ideology that needs your surrender, but into yourself, your uniqueness, your God-given reality, the life destined for you.

Professional men and women have their own parallel dark night. They may spend their days and hours making a living, keeping the needs of their family in mind. Then they, too, find that this is simply not enough to make their lives worth living. They, too, have to discover a deeper dimension, their own underworld. Unfortunately, they may collapse into alcohol, affairs, or excessive work—underworlds that are too literal and concrete. Instead of completing the myth by finding first the void and then some purpose in themselves, they fall into various symptomatic states that disrupt their lives.

This phrase, “flexible control,” describes the reconciliation of strength and submission. The Tao Te Ching recommends wu-wei: achieve things by not trying to achieve. But another quality helps turn masochism into flexible control—intelligence. You have to know when and how to surrender, even to whom to surrender.

In his powerful book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker addresses the many complications and ambiguities, as he calls them, in this process, stressing the need of any person to enter life newly cleansed and liberated. ‘The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his ‘cultural lendings’ and stand naked in the storm of life.

It’s an illusion to think that most people are normal, rational, and in control of themselves. In fact, most people lose control frequently in anger or in brief periods of unreality. Sometimes a dark night of the soul takes the form of a passing madness.