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It is the dark night of the soul--that terrible and desolate period when the Divine seems as far away as the stars, when emotional listlessness and intellectual lassitude fall on a man, when he finds no help within himself and none outside himself. It is a melancholic experience undergone and lamented by Job and Jeremiah in ancient Israel, by John of Avila in seventeenth-century Spain, by Swami Ram Tirtha in modern India. "Oh, my dryness and my deadness!" is a typical cry of this period, found in Lancelot Andrewes' devotional diary, Private Devotions.

-- Notebooks Category 23: Advanced Contemplation > Chapter 3 : The Dark Night of The Soul > # 3