The sea is the vast potential of life, but it is also your dark night, which may force you to surrender some knowledge you have achieved. It helps to regularly undo the hard-won ego development, to unravel the self and culture you have woven over the years. The night sea journey taken you back to your primordial self, not the heroic self that burns out and falls to judgement, but to your original self, yourself as a sea of possibility, your greater and deeper being.

We can’t understand what is happening to us, and if we are in the habit of always wanting to know what is going on, this aspect of the dark night will be maddening. We can find meaning in these times of change, but we have to think differently about our lives, be less psychological in our approach, and more philosophical and spiritual.

A person suffering a dark night might say, “Help me. I’m depressed. Get me out of it.” But how can you get out of a natural process of change? How can you medicate self-transformation? The problem, of course, is that we no longer think in terms of passages and transitions. We have exchanged a spiritual awareness of life’s meaningful moments for a psychological view based on medicine. We would like to cure ourselves of the darkness. The resulting confusion of categories only makes things worse.

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 helpful, then, during a dark night, to constantly broaden your imagination of what is happening to you. If your only idea is that you’re depressed, you will be at the mercy of the depression industry, which will treat you as one among millions, for whom there is only one canonical and approved story.