Dearest Friends,

As many of you know by now, Shift Network has invited me to give six transmissions starting April 23, called From Light to Darkness, which will address the dark night exploding everywhere. It will offer a way through this dark night and speak of the great birth of a new embodied divine humanity that it could engender, if we align with its laws and do the necessary inner and outer work.

I am writing to all who have taken one of my classes and all who haven’t, to invite you from my heart to take this class now, as the dark night is obviously exploding everywhere and especially in our country, so that I can give you everything I have learned that could be of use to you and keep you joyful, hopeful and active throughout everything that is erupting.

This is the most important letter I have ever written to you.

For thirty years I have been teaching and writing about the coming global dark night. I knew it would come before 2025, that it would be unspeakably frightening and devastating and unprecedented because it would be both universal, communal and a dark night of the earth and Nature. Most of all, I knew with tremendous grief that the great majority of people would be completely unprepared because of our addiction to comfort, denial, fake mysticism, exaggerated belief in scientific solutions and grotesque materialism.

I knew all of this because by the year 2000, I was coming to the end of my own excruciating and revelatory dark night and I understood that it had prepared me to be one of the midwife warriors who would be useful when the world woke up, because we had already been through what was going to unfold in an inescapable revolutionary quantum intensity.

What my dark night gave me was the prophetic vocation that I have lived as passionately, fiercely and bravely as I can, making many mistakes but encouraged and infused by divine revelation and grace. The last thing I ever wanted to be was a prophet. I would much rather have been a wild bohemian artist writing poems and novels and living in a garrot in Paris, consorting with a band of ragged multi-talented buddies. But that was not God’s plan.

Through much of 2000, I was in South India on a private pilgrimage to the Shaivite temples. Through a series of synchronicities, I found myself in a bare, small white room in a tiny village near Chidambaram, the center of the Shaivite world. I had just turned on my portable tape recorder, sitting opposite a steel desk where a humble middle-aged Nadi read from an ancient scroll the names of my parents, the names of the schools I was educated in, and the names of my teachers. I was stunned beyond description at the way his quiet, flat voice read out everything I had lived from a 2000-year-old scroll.

Then he paused and looked very kindly at me. He said, “You are nearly 50 and the next 20 years are going to be extremely difficult. You will be shown what you have to do, what you have to write, and what you have to teach and there will only be a very few who will recognize the reality of what you will be given to transmit.

“You will go through humiliation, derision, poverty and some extreme health challenges. You will be alone except for a few loving companions. At times you will want to die and give up your divine assignment. Do not do so. In your early 70s a vast crisis will erupt and your work will then be seen for what it has been and you will realize the meaning of your incarnation by being useful and able to transmit everything you have learned and realized to a much larger audience that by then will be ready to receive it.”

He paused, then said, “In your sixties, you will be opened to the Golden. I do not know what this means and the text goes on to say that you will be among those who give humanity the vision of its next possible stage. I wish I could tell you more about this but you will be told at the right time.”

I have never spoken of this conversation for obvious reasons but it is time to lay out my inner life before you. Everything he said has come true. When I finished The Hope, for example, I listened again to the tape of our conversation and there is was: “In your late fifties, you will give hope to humanity.”

As many of you know in my sixties, I plunged into the vision of engoldenment, the next evolutionary stage, the birth of the divine human revealed to me by Father Bede Griffiths that I explored secretly in the multiple mystical traditions I had been initiated into. This is why I devoted so much time in a hut in a wooden cottage in the middle of Arkansas with my two beloved cats, Jade and Topaz, to create Engoldenment, to acquaint you with Kabir’s fierce radiance and his most lucid, austere and exalted account of this amazing process.

I also recognized this process in Hadewijch of Antwerp and learned enough middle high Dutch to bring her astounding witness to transfiguration back for all of you with Love is Everything. I also recognized the engoldenment possibility at the core of Angelus Silesius’s cherubinic wanderer and gave you Becoming God, where his clear, vibrant telegrams from embodied divinity could be there for you when the time was right.

This was no mere academic or artistic adventure. I knew the time would come when you would need these beings as I needed them to continually inspire, ground, educate, elevate, instruct and ennoble yourself.

Bede had prepared me, but nothing can prepare you for the reality of the divinization process. It is scary, astounding, bewildering, amazing and above all, extremely humbling, because all you can do is follow something for which there are very few texts or authentic instructions or living teachers with authentic instructions. You have to make mistake after mistake because that’s how the birthing process teaches you. You make a bad mistake, suffer and then align to what you discover through that mistake to be the real path. This birthing process does not create omniscient gurus. It creates humble, precise pioneers who are willing out of love and gratitude to take step after step in luminous darkness.

There is much more to be said about this process and I have already given teachings on engoldenment for The Shift Network which will help you get a knowledge of the first steps. I do not want you to imagine that I know this process. Nobody does, because it’s unprecedented, happening at unprecedented speed, and in unprecedented ways and can only proceed if you radiantly unknow at every moment everything you have ever learned.

When I returned to America after that conversation with the Nadis in 2000, 9/11 happened. I had seen a symbol of it in a vision I’d had near the sacred mountain Arunachala, and for me the crumbling of the towers was experienced as the breaking of the waters of the monstrous birth. I realized that an inescapable dark night process was now beginning for the world. This process, dear friends, is now nakedly and absolutely clear in the relentless, unspeakably fast growth of the most dangerous fascism the world has ever seen in our own country. Many of us tried to warn you that electing Trump would set in motion not only the destruction of democracy here and all over the world, but also fuel those dark addictions to power, domination, hubris, conscienceless cruelty and rape of Nature that are preparing an extinction crisis of unimaginable ferocity.

Many of us have experienced your denial, rage, derision, fantasies of magical thinking and your blistering contempt. We also knew that despite how painful it was, we could never abandon you, even if tempted to because we knew that the terrible time would come when you couldn’t help but see what we could see clearly and you would cry out in agony and despair at what you had unconsciously colluded with, just as we had cried out in agony and despair when we realized what was unfolding and now had to share with you.

We are now at the beginning of the last, most painful stage of the death and rebirth mystery we are now in. What my life and inner experience and prophetic training have revealed to me and others is these four truths:

The first truth is that our dark night resurrection process is, in the deepest sense, a mystery of the divine feminine as all birthing mysteries must be. It is a Kali, Black Madonna event and as all the great evolutionary mystics have known, and I discovered for myself, what is essential for all of us is to turn to the motherhood of God and ask for her love, protection, wisdom, holy passion, and unconditional burning compassion to flood us with her birthing fire. In other words, in this event, all of which she is guiding and living in and orchestrating, what we need most to do is to take refuge in her engoldening love from all the necessary incinerations of illusion that she must now enact to give us a chance of saving ourselves and Nature from our own dementia.

The second truth is that nothing at all will stop this dark night now unfolding. There was a chance. It could have been avoided but humanity turned that down. It is now here and it will continue with devastating surgical precision to burn away all illusion to tear down the terrible structures of oppression we have created and to expose us all individually and collectively to sufferings and realizations of our own collusion, blindness and vanity that we would now give anything to avoid. The only way you can prepare is to finally and humbly take refuge through profound mystical practice in the One, the divine alchemist whose terrible and sublime alchemy this dark night process is.

The third truth is that if we can humble ourselves and do the inner work and align with the laws of the dark night, an astounding possibility is still offered to us—the birth of a radically different divine human in us. This is what is meant by engoldenment. All the ancient mystical traditions have preserved astoundingly precise descriptions of how the dark night, although it seems and feels like the end, can also be the birth canal of a divine humanity. This is not poetry. I know this to be true in my own life and for hundreds of thousands of people throughout human history including Jesus, Rumi, Kabir and Hadewijch, among others of all religions. I must warn you however, that the unprecedented crisis we are now going through involves every individual in the world—every religion, society, institutional structure, ideology, and the future of a great deal of the animal race and of Nature herself. When you add in the reality now surrounding us—the poly-crisis that has created an inter-related storm of disasters that are growing exponentially and feeding each other—you can see why everything must now speed up. We have far less time left than we might want to imagine not to transform because the very crisis we have created from our madness could soon tear us apart and destroy us and a great deal of Nature.

The fourth truth is that the very things that we are most terrified of are those we must now embrace: the dark night process is always paradoxical. The dying it makes possible also enables the birth. Everything that terrified you about what I have just said about the poly-crisis and its lethal gathering speed can become a tremendous savage grace if you realize it is asking you to surrender totally to divine love and allow yourself to die as quickly as possible into it in a way you have never imagined with a trust, faith and surrender that you never thought you could manage.

This is the only way forward because only such a death can birth in you and in all of us the new powers of creativity, joy, peace, and courage that we will need, not only to be transformed in the dark night but to become humble co-creative sacred activists with the Divine of a new world. Divine love knows exactly what it is doing. Understanding the mind and soul-shattering horror of this crisis in all the ways I’ve described is actually the perfect quantum crucible for an unspeakably intense crystallization of your divine in your human.

The diamond of human divinity is going to be created through a series of shattering destructions that create intolerable pressure. That is just how it will be. Many of us know this. I know it because I endured a ten-year dark night in which I nearly died many times, where my life was threatened repeatedly, where I often felt I was going mad and completely abandoned by God, had lost everything I had ever loved, believed in, wanted or thought I needed. (For two detailed books about the dark night experience, read my book, Sun at Midnight: A Memoir of the Dark Night and Mirabai Starr’s extraordinary Caravan of No Despair.)

What you will discover through the grace of the Beloved is that at the end of the night when you are reduced to nothing, you are possessed by a rapture, bliss and power that can only come to you when you are emptied of your false self. It is this rapture, bliss and power that rebirthed me in my early fifties, enabling me to survive until now, giving me the energy to pour out countless teachings and 42 books. It is speaking to you now in this letter because at last I know you can listen and I know many of you are ready.

Turn to the helpers now. There are just enough of us. We are here. And we love you. Together let us take the journey ahead whose end we cannot know but whose road can bring us what we cannot now completely imagine.

If you have never taken course with me, please do take this one, because it will be the most important and the most essential course I have ever given. It is exactly tailored for our crisis.

All my love,
Andrew