Spiritual literature often celebrates light, clarity, unity, and peace. Mystics speak of luminous presence, of being carried, of the heart opening into a sense of vast coherence. Our recent papers explores this terrain, describing how, under contemplative conditions, consciousness becomes transparent to something deeper than the everyday self.

But there is another side to this path, a side that looks less like revelation and more like collapse.

Many mystics describe a phase in which God seems to withdraw. Meaning dissolves. Prayer becomes dry. The inner world feels dark, empty, or unbearably lonely. This is the “dark night” spoken of by John of the Cross. He insists that this darkness is not the absence of God, but the removal of every support that is not God. In other words, what disappears is not the divine, but the structures of attachment through which we tried to possess God.

Earlier Christian voices sensed something similar. Gregory of Nyssa describes the journey into God as a movement not from darkness to light, but from light to deeper darkness, a “luminous darkness” in which God is known precisely by exceeding our capacity to grasp Him. What remains when understanding collapses is not nihilism. It is an awareness too subtle to be handled by concepts.

At first sight, such states appear to contradict our emphasis on coherence. They feel disorienting, unstable, exposed. Yet from the perspective of complexity science, this may be precisely the point.

In complex systems, growth rarely proceeds by simple accumulation. Systems reorganize by passing through instability. When existing patterns reach their limit, they begin to break apart. The system enters a threshold state, not yet destroyed, not yet renewed. In that liminal moment, old constraints dissolve and deeper patterns become possible. Order does not merely strengthen; it re-forms.

The spiritual “dark night” can be read in this light. The self that manages, interprets, and defends encounters its own insufficiency. The experience can feel like standing alone in an infinite, silent night. But here something crucial occurs: the collapse of control may become transparency. The very place where support seems to vanish becomes the opening through which another kind of presence insists, not yet luminous, but already quietly real.

This helps us reinterpret what we call the higher luminous phases in our phenomenological model. In most cases, these phases unfold gradually: the evaluative mind quiets, coherence increases, and light-like perception stabilizes. Yet there may also be rupture-based transitions, where the system does not reorganize but drops into a state we might one day designate as Phase 6, the luminous no-dimentional state of awareness, or further still, into what could be called brilliant darkness: awareness emptied of images and yet fully awake.

Rather than emerging from progressive refinement, this state arises from implosion, a surrender forced by the collapse of the structures that once gave identity its coherence.

Here the paradox becomes visible: A consciousness that feels dissonant may still be completely transparent to divine insistence. The breakdown is not the opposite of presence; it can be the condition for a different kind of presence to appear.

The dark night is therefore not a failure of spiritual practice, nor a psychological accident. It is a threshold dynamic. Something breaks, and what returns is no longer organized around control, but around surrender, compassion, and a new form of coherence that cannot be manufactured.

From this perspective, the path of light is not linear. It includes nights, collapses, silences, and deserts in which the self is stripped to its foundations. But according to both mystics and the logic of complex systems, what emerges beyond that silence is not emptiness. It is a depth that could only reveal itself once every illusion of mastery had fallen away.