When the Light Goes Out

There are periods in a spiritual life when the connection simply isn’t there. Not a crisis of belief exactly — more like a phone call where the line goes quiet and you’re not sure if anyone is still on the other end. You go through the same motions. You sit in the same stillness. You return to the same teachings. And where there used to be something — a warmth, a sense of presence, a feeling of being held by something larger — there is now just the sound of your own thinking.

For others the experience has no religious language at all. It is the quiet that settles in when you understand, intellectually, that the universe is vast and extraordinary — that you are made of the same atoms that once burned in stars, that the cosmos became aware of itself through creatures like you — and still feel, somehow, inexplicably empty. The science is true. The wonder is real when it comes. But it doesn’t come all the time. And when it doesn’t, there is a particular loneliness in having no framework for what the absence means.

If you are in either of those places right now, you are in good company. Better company than you might expect.

“The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God… But we have this treasure in jars of clay.”

Paul names a force he calls the god of this age: not the ultimate God, but the god of the surface world, of appearances, of the immediately visible. Its method is not dramatic temptation but subtle dimming — the gradual obscuring of a light that was never extinguished, only made harder to see.

Read it alongside what the Gnostics were writing at the same moment in history, in the same Mediterranean world, and something more interesting emerges. The Gnostics called it the Demiurge — the lesser god who rules the surface of things. Not evil in the cartoon sense. More like a foreman who has forgotten there is something above him. The Demiurge keeps souls occupied with the world of appearances — the urgent, the measurable, the immediately visible — so that the deeper light goes unnoticed. Not extinguished. Unnoticed.

The Hindus called it Maya — usually translated as illusion, but more precisely the tendency to mistake the surface of reality for the whole of it. The Sufis called it hijab — the veil. The Buddhists named it moha — delusion, the root confusion about what reality actually is. The Gospel of Thomas: “The Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.” The Tao Te Ching: “Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.”

Every tradition has a name for the veil. Every tradition agrees it is not the final word.

For those who don’t use the language of religion, the veil has a different name — and science is beginning to find its edges. The hard problem of consciousness is the question no neuroscientist has yet answered: not how the brain processes information, but why there is something it is like to be you. At the boundary of that question — where physics and neuroscience run out — is precisely where the traditions have always been working. The veil, for the scientific mind, is the assumption that the surface of things is the whole of things. That assumption is what the traditions have been dismantling for four thousand years.

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

“For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

Sagan spent his life translating the universe into language that could be felt as well as understood. His most famous sentence was not a metaphor: the iron in your blood was forged in a dying star. The calcium in your bones. The carbon in every cell. The universe spent thirteen billion years creating the conditions for matter to become aware of itself — and then it did, through you. The cosmos knowing itself through human consciousness is not a poetic flourish. It is the literal situation.

This is the agnostic version of what Paul says just a few verses after naming the god of this age: “We have this treasure in jars of clay.” The treasure is already inside the ordinary, fragile, cracked vessel of a human life. The light did not have to be added. It was always already there — forged in supernovae, carried across billions of years, assembled into something that could look back at the stars and wonder.

The feeling of disconnection from something larger — from meaning, from wonder, from whatever it is that makes existence feel significant rather than arbitrary — is itself the evidence that the connection exists. You do not miss what was never real. The absence is pointing at the presence. And Sagan, who would not have used spiritual language, nevertheless arrived at the same recognition: “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” Which is remarkably close to what every mystic on this map has said in their own dialect.

“In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything, desire to have pleasure in nothing. In order to arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing. In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing.”

“The soul that is in this state of spiritual dryness and abandonment should consider that God is working in it secretly, without its knowing it, and that it ought not to think that he has forsaken it, because it does not feel him.”

In the sixteenth century, a Spanish Carmelite friar named John of the Cross wrote what remains the most precise description of spiritual disconnection ever set to paper. He was not writing as a theorist. He wrote it in prison, smuggled out in fragments, having been jailed by his own religious order for the crime of wanting to reform it.

The Dark Night is not depression, though it can feel like it. It is not a loss of faith, though it can look like one. John describes it as the soul being deliberately weaned from the consolations of spiritual experience. The warmth, the felt presence, the sense of being held — these are not God. They are the training wheels of the spiritual life. And at a certain point, the training wheels come off. Not because God has withdrawn. Because the soul is ready, whether it feels ready or not, for something more direct.

Thomas Merton spent seventeen years as a monk at Gethsemani before an ordinary errand in downtown Louisville broke him open. He was standing on a street corner in the middle of a shopping district when it happened — not in a chapel, not in meditation, not in any recognizable spiritual context. He later wrote: “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” Seventeen years of effort. Of the training wheels on and off. And then — on a street corner, running an errand — the light broke through not because he had achieved enough but because enough had been cleared away.

Meister Eckhart named what had been cleared: “God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.” The dryness is the subtraction. It is doing something, even when — especially when — it does not feel like anything at all.

“Ever since I was cut from the reed bed, men and women have lamented with my lamenting.”

Rumi wrote the Masnavi’s opening lines as a lament. The reed has been cut from its reed bed. It cries. The cry sounds like music to everyone who hears it. But the reed knows it as longing — the raw experience of separation from the source.

The disconnection is not a departure from the spiritual life. It is the spiritual life, in one of its most honest forms. The reed does not stop making music when it cries. The crying is the music. The wound is not the obstacle to the connection. It is the connection — the place where the soul is most open, most available to what it cannot manufacture on its own.

None of this makes the disconnection comfortable. John of the Cross was in prison when he wrote about the dark night. Paul was under house arrest. Rumi was grieving the loss of Shams. The tradition does not offer comfort in the sense of making the feeling go away. What it offers is something different: the recognition that this territory has been crossed before. That the silence on the other end of the line is not disconnection. That the god of this age — the force of appearances, the veil of the surface world, the Demiurge, Maya, hijab, moha — is real, and its dimming of perception is real, and it is also not the last word.

Paul continues in the same letter, just a few verses after naming the god of this age: “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We have this treasure in jars of clay.” The jars of clay are ordinary human fragility. The treasure is already inside them.

The Peace Paul speaks of in Philippians is not the peace of feeling peaceful. It is the peace that passes understanding — operating beneath the experience of its absence, holding what the feeling cannot currently confirm. The Kingdom, Thomas says, is spread out upon the earth. People don’t see it. That is a description of the veil. It is also a description of what is behind the veil — present whether perceived or not.

The cosmos knowing itself through you does not stop because you have stopped feeling it. The star-stuff does not un-become what it is. The reed, cut from the reed bed, still plays. The longing itself is the sound of knowing that something exists worth longing for.

You do not cry for what was never real.

And the cry — yours right now, whatever language it is in — is the connection you thought you had lost.