The catch. The Iranian Illuminationists said there are two kinds of darkness that look identical and are opposite: the cellar (nothing to see) and the noonday sun stared at directly (too much to see). And they said the final approach to God goes dark — not brighter, darker — because you've come so close to the unbearable Light that it overwhelms the eye into blackness. The Black Light. The Midnight Sun.
First framing. Nice paradox: the dark night of the soul is God being near, not absent.
The Live Wire. The two darknesses are indistinguishable from inside, and the whole crisis of the path is telling them apart — because one is a pit to climb out of and the other is the threshold of arrival, and they feel exactly the same. Which means the seeker who turns back at the dark night (treating the Black Light as a fall) and the seeker who gets stuck in his own murk and calls it God (treating the cellar as the sun) are making the same error from opposite directions: they can't read which darkness they're in. And the deadliest move of all is stopping in the genuine Black Light and saying "I have become God" — the saint and the megalomaniac pass through the same blackness, and the only difference is whether they kept walking.
Why it matters. Everywhere — in work, in love, in any deep pursuit — there's a darkness near the breakthrough that's indistinguishable from the darkness of failure. The skill nobody teaches is the discernment: which dark is this? — and the tell is the direction. Does it feel like being swallowed (the pit) or unbearably shown (the sun)?
Connected: The Black Light & the Midnight Sun · Avicenna's Mi'rāj