A Dark Night of Grace

The Descent of Śakti in its Manifold Forms

The impulse to pursue yogic truth cannot be easily explained by the values of modern life. It arises from an event beyond linguistic utterances, as an inner attunement that emerges often spontaneously from within.

The tradition of yoga speaks about this event as a moment of grace, a descent of the śakti (the power of reality itself), called śaktipāta. Depending on the yoga tradition, śaktipāta is considered either to be the result of positive karma produced through spiritual practices, or it is the result of a completely spontaneous intervention of the divine outside worldly sequences of causation. Whatever the doctrine one appeals to, the outcome is the same: as a result of this event, one’s life becomes forever transformed. One has become turned toward a horizon of spiritual fulfillment and intoxicated with a devotion to the spiritual path as the most meaningful project one can pursue in this lifetime. Whatever one’s feelings are toward the doctrinal context surrounding this concept, simply by virtue of having this concept available, many of us can use it to name a time, a moment, or an event wherein something shifted for us and turned our attention toward something deeper.

Śaktipāta has become an institutionalized practice for some yoga communities, wherein seekers attend, for example, śaktipāta intensives as a way to experience a transformative download of awakening energy from an authorized teacher. However, in the teachings of Abhinavagupta, we find a more mystical explanation of this process. According to this view, in order for anyone to be in a place where one would decide to enroll in a śaktipāta intensive, grace would have already ‘descended.’ This cosmic download, this ‘turning toward’ or ‘upward shift’ has already taken place if one has already become a deep spiritual seeker. Without grace having already influenced our existential priorities in some deep albeit perhaps subtle way, we wouldn’t be compelled to seek out spiritual instruction in the first place. And so if you have taken an interest in reading autobiographical spiritual accounts like this one, chances are you have already been visited by an experience that the tradition would refer to as a “descent” of the śakti.

When we hear a term like “grace,” we tend to project ideas onto it that lead us to imagine these experiences as necessarily characterized by that ubiquitous New Age phrase ‘love and light’; we imagine ‘grace’ must mean that someone has encountered a pervasive certainty that, for example, “God exists,” or that we will have encountered some glimpse of transcendent luminosity that never leaves us. I think this is a rather confused understanding that narrowly defines the concept of grace. Perhaps the very translation of “grace” is partly to blame here, pointing out how slippery it can be to use terms that are already loaded with assumptions – ones that, at least in the case of ‘grace,’ harkens to a Judeo-Christian theology and its various interpretations. There are many ways we can challenge this view and push back against a translation that misrepresents what the yoga tradition is speaking about. In my experience, the experience of grace showed up in a moment of extreme loss, what one might appropriately call a ‘dark night of the soul.’

When I was around 15 years old, I lost my faith in the Christian God that I had been raised to believe in my entire life. I had a friend named Heather who was a kind of mentor to me, who was about fifteen years my senior. I had become enamored with her during our time together performing in the local community theatres of Puget Sound in Western Washington. Heather knew so much about the world, and in my youth and innocent curiosity, I looked up to her. She had a wisdom and worldliness that I longed for in myself. She was one of those early childhood influences who represented something that I aspired to be.

On an average day, during one of our many phone calls, we got onto the topic of Ancient Egypt, something I knew little to nothing about. Through our conversation, I learned about a completely different culture and its unique worldview. To this day, I can’t remember exactly what it was she said to me about Egypt that changed my life. All I know is that by the end of the conversation, my faith that God existed had vanished. After I hung up the phone, I looked up at a painting I had in my room of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and — as Jesus himself did in a moment expressed through this image — I wept. The child who would flee home to his mother in tears because the neighbor kids didn’t believe God knew how many hairs were on their head — that child and his precious and vulnerable love for God died that day.

The anchor and foundation of my entire identity dissolved over the course of a phone call. In the place of that unwavering belief entered a great void, a void that was simultaneously heart-broken and yet simultaneously saturated with longing. For several hours, I was engulfed in nothingness, without a buoy to cling to in my newfound ocean of absence. My identity was as if emptied of all content, and what remained was a centerless mourning and a desperate desire to reverse what had been done — to unsee what I had seen. But even as I reached into that void to draw belief back to myself, I recognized quickly how losing my faith in God was a radically complete kind of loss, one that offered no substitute or silver lining. What was once there was simply and irreversibly gone. No glimmer of hope glistened in that existential darkness.

It would be many years before I allowed the word “God” to symbolize anything about what I was seeking, but the emptiness left by God’s absence became the condition of a profound opening that motivated a lifetime of spiritual exploration. For myself, I now understand how true it is that sometimes you have to lose your entire orientation before you can discover a path of fulfilment rising up out of the rubble. One has to encounter the void of meaninglessness before one can begin to discover what the mood of meaning actually is.

Now I see this moment as an event of unspeakable grace; nestled in the heart of a random teaching about Egypt was a profound force of transformation that completely eradicated my sense of self. In some accounts of experience, this might be interpreted as a kind of violence, but in reality it was one of the greatest gifts I have ever been given. It pulled out the weeds of a limited awareness so that seeds of a new imagination could grow.

I feel no tension in calling this an experience of śaktipāta. After having studied the philosophical perspectives about reality that ground an understanding of grace’s function, I retroactively recognize the significant role this event played in shaping the trajectory of my life afterward. But this was my own experience, of course, and I don’t assume that grace will show up similarly for others. I share this experience not as a paradigmatic example of grace but as an utterly individual one.

In a culture that loves institutions and organizations, oftentimes these universal experiences are enfolded in doctrine and even proffered as the exclusive material of particular traditions. But the experience of śaktipāta can not be monopolized by any spiritual or contemplative tradition. No spiritual institution has privileged access to śaktipāta. It is a function of reality itself, and it shows up for each one of us in ways that are uniquely our own. But while grace can be uniquely experienced outside any tradition or doctrine, different traditions offer fruitful languages and vocabularies through which we can come into contact with the universal function being referred to by yoga traditions. As we explore the work of different philosophers and spiritual thinkers, we begin to grasp the altogether universal possibility of coming into contact with the bewildering power of grace.

It is taught within Tantric traditions that śaktipāta is an experience facilitated by a guru or teacher. Where this truth runs into confusion, in my view, is when there is an assumption about what counts as a qualified teacher. In the experience I’ve shared, Heather was not a spiritual guru. She was not a teacher of Tantric yoga or indeed any spiritual path, traditionally conceived. But within this experience, she performed the role of a guru — not because of any intrinsic quality or achievement on her part, but because I related to her as such.

Due to my perception of her, and because of the power this perception allowed her, she was contingently capable of facilitating one of the most significant spiritual experiences of my life. While there are many teachers who are incredibly gifted and perhaps even have access to intuitive faculties not available to others, no teacher wields an intrinsic power to facilitate grace. Insofar as we can experience grace in the wake of someone’s unique intervention, the source of that transformation exceeds the abilities of any individual teacher. As one of the insightful adages of the yoga tradition goes, “grace is an accident, and spiritual practice makes us accident-prone.” The more that we refine our knowledge about reality and about the possibilities of contemplative experience, through study and practice, we skirt the shores of our existential possibility and become more prone to stumble into the river of grace.

This capacity that anyone potentially wields to serve in the function of a guru highlights what is referred to in the yoga tradition as the guru tattva – the “guru principle.” A fundamental feature of reality – particularly as it is described in the Tantric traditions – is revealed through its capacity to teach us something radically true about ourselves. This revealing, or teaching function of reality shows up in a moment, in a relationship, or through an individual who formally inhabits the role of a teacher. Reality is ready and willing to teach us something about ourselves at any given moment, and we miss these manifold opportunities in the degree to which we are turned away from that possibility.

A homeless person shows up on the street, and we walk past without reflection. A war breaks out in a remote part of the world, and we persist within the comfortable stories that distract us from paying attention. We get in a fight with our partner, and instead of listening so as to learn, we react from our own embedded prejudices and assumptions. Moments of grace land in our lap every day, and without the faculty of receptivity and a without a refinement of our spiritual vocabulary, it is easy to let them slip away.

This is one justification for deep study. After having studied and practiced, and after having absorbed ideas about the unique mechanisms of consciousness, in retrospect we are able to trace the auspicious hand of grace in our life. Because grace is as natural as a dew drop, and as universal as being awake. When we take the time to cultivate a yogic vision, we can witness it operating everywhere.

---

This work is part of a project to build a new community of yoga practitioners and teachers grounded in the deeper teachings of yoga. It is happening over at Embodied Philosophy’s Sādhana School. If you’re interested in learning more about the curriculum and schedule, go here.