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The Light Inside the Dark: Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life – Blending Buddhist Meditation and Greek Myths for Wisdom and Joy
In this landmark guide to the spiritual journey, respected Zen teacher and psychotherapist John Tarrant brings together ancient Eastern traditions and the Western passion for the soul. Using real-life stories, Zen tales, and Greek myths, The Light Inside the Dark shows how our darkest experiences can be the gates to wisdom and joy. Tarrant leads us through the inevitable descents of our journey--from the everyday world of work and family into the treasure cave of the interior life--from which we return with greater love of life's vivid, common gifts. Written with empathy and a poet's skill, The Light Inside the Dark is the freshest and most challenging work on the soul to he published in years.
272 pages, Paperback
First published August 19, 1998
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568 people want to read
About the author
John Tarrant
8 books34 followersb. 1949. John Tarrant is the author of “The Light Inside the Dark” and “Bring Me The Rhinoceros”. He directs the Pacific Zen Institute and has taught koans for over 30 years.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
John^^^Tarrant
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
John^^^Tarrant
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
November 24, 2008
A wonderful book about surrendering to and navigating those painful periods of life when self-transformation is called upon. Written with the insight of a therapist, the wisdom of a Buddhist and the soul of a poet.
July 6, 2018
The writing is very poetic and draws on multiple theistic paths. this is the kind of book one could read several times over and over again still gaining greater, different and more profound insight each time.
January 18, 2026
This is a wonderful exploration of what could simultaneously be called the soul’s journey in life/meditation practice/trauma and healing. The writing is poetic and feels super alive - John Tarrant constantly surprised me with wonderful imagery.
This is a consoling book if you’re going through difficult times in life. It’s probably a helpful book for therapists and people engaged in dedicated mystical practice.
I gave this 4/5 stars because I think it’s simply too much to read in one go, and sometimes feels like an overload of imagery. While there’s probably a lot to say about this topic, and maybe some very broad themes in the journey, it’s also one of those things where you basically can’t say anything in words. So while Tarrant’s imagery feels beautiful and alive, sometimes it felt that you could replace it with something totally different and the general meaning wouldn’t change.
Probably this is one of those books that’s best read slowly over time, or that you dip back into at the points when you need it.
This is a consoling book if you’re going through difficult times in life. It’s probably a helpful book for therapists and people engaged in dedicated mystical practice.
I gave this 4/5 stars because I think it’s simply too much to read in one go, and sometimes feels like an overload of imagery. While there’s probably a lot to say about this topic, and maybe some very broad themes in the journey, it’s also one of those things where you basically can’t say anything in words. So while Tarrant’s imagery feels beautiful and alive, sometimes it felt that you could replace it with something totally different and the general meaning wouldn’t change.
Probably this is one of those books that’s best read slowly over time, or that you dip back into at the points when you need it.
August 26, 2020
I realize that Tarrant’s book is about the spiritual life as seen in terms of Zen Buddhism, but much of it I thought expressed a universality that incorporated Jungian, and even Christian insights. It is a vision that sees life as a journey and made up of two of chief elements – soul and spirit. Soul involves our immersion in earthly, ordinary interests, and spirit involves us in the question of our relationship with eternity, the reality that precedes and follows our brief existence on earth. Both are needed, and when we find that balance, we lead a life of integrity and character.
This is not a self-help book, although insights from Tarrant could certainly help an individual to lead a meaningful life. I think it’s more of a descriptive book of the stages of life that people go through in living.
There are of course the innumerable things that give us pleasure – friendship, sex, meaningful work, love and family, possessions – and these are good in themselves and areas where the “soul” is most at play.
But by themselves, they are not enough and without balance they can easily lead to excess. The balance comes in the realm of the “spirit”, and that is accomplished through meditation. Meditation doesn’t accomplish any of the tasks of life, but it creates a background against which to measure and assess the concerns of the soul. As I read this, I thought, in Christian and Jewish terms, what is the Sabbath but the day on which one turns to the spirit and to a period of meditation. In Tarrant’s terms, zen koans are crucial to the spiritual life; paralleling this idea, a reading of Christ’s parables could be interpreted as koan-like utterances where appearances are often deceptive. An example, a person must lost his life in order to find it.
The title of the book is particularly apt. Life’s journey, in its combination of soul and spirit always involves opposites that are intertwined. Everything we love in this life comes to an end, often long before we’re ready for it. Unexpected accidents, diseases, death plunge us into darkness, or as one chapter heading puts it, a “Descent into Night.” Every life has this dark time, there’s no escape from it, and all one can do is to expect it and attempt to endure. It will end. In Christian terms, the darkness of Christ’s death ultimately results in a resurrection culminating in Christ’s “ascent” to heaven. In Zen terms, a similar psychological process is one of climbing into enlightenment. But in the way of Zen there are always more descents, a return to the ordinary things of life. Life is a matter of cycles then, and Tarrant says the best we can do is align ourselves with them.
Tarrant concludes by suggesting that any part of the world can help to restore our balance – it comes through imagination and openness and can appear at unexpected moments. Zen awakens us through intuitive bursts of light. A koan on which to conclude:
Spring comes with its flowers, autumn with the moon,
summer with breezes, winter with snow
when useless things don’t stick in the mind,
that is your best season. - Wumen Huaikai
This is not a self-help book, although insights from Tarrant could certainly help an individual to lead a meaningful life. I think it’s more of a descriptive book of the stages of life that people go through in living.
There are of course the innumerable things that give us pleasure – friendship, sex, meaningful work, love and family, possessions – and these are good in themselves and areas where the “soul” is most at play.
But by themselves, they are not enough and without balance they can easily lead to excess. The balance comes in the realm of the “spirit”, and that is accomplished through meditation. Meditation doesn’t accomplish any of the tasks of life, but it creates a background against which to measure and assess the concerns of the soul. As I read this, I thought, in Christian and Jewish terms, what is the Sabbath but the day on which one turns to the spirit and to a period of meditation. In Tarrant’s terms, zen koans are crucial to the spiritual life; paralleling this idea, a reading of Christ’s parables could be interpreted as koan-like utterances where appearances are often deceptive. An example, a person must lost his life in order to find it.
The title of the book is particularly apt. Life’s journey, in its combination of soul and spirit always involves opposites that are intertwined. Everything we love in this life comes to an end, often long before we’re ready for it. Unexpected accidents, diseases, death plunge us into darkness, or as one chapter heading puts it, a “Descent into Night.” Every life has this dark time, there’s no escape from it, and all one can do is to expect it and attempt to endure. It will end. In Christian terms, the darkness of Christ’s death ultimately results in a resurrection culminating in Christ’s “ascent” to heaven. In Zen terms, a similar psychological process is one of climbing into enlightenment. But in the way of Zen there are always more descents, a return to the ordinary things of life. Life is a matter of cycles then, and Tarrant says the best we can do is align ourselves with them.
Tarrant concludes by suggesting that any part of the world can help to restore our balance – it comes through imagination and openness and can appear at unexpected moments. Zen awakens us through intuitive bursts of light. A koan on which to conclude:
Spring comes with its flowers, autumn with the moon,
summer with breezes, winter with snow
when useless things don’t stick in the mind,
that is your best season. - Wumen Huaikai
August 29, 2023
I want to love this book so much, but I have finally accepted the fact that the writing style is just not for me. I think because he tends to give a lot of examples and stories, I kept getting lost and having to re-read and backtrack. There is truly beautiful and profound insight here - the teachings are on point. It's just the delivery that trips me up. There were several parts that led me to have "aha" moments, that I even used in my own meditation and workings. I would still recommend people give this a try, despite my somewhat low rating.
January 6, 2013
Not an easy read-but worth the flashes of lightening!
May 9, 2020
One of my favorite books. Frightening, inspiring, beautiful.
June 22, 2014
This is a rare book indeed. It's one of the few books I've read more than once, and is one of the best books I've ever read.
April 5, 2019
This was challenging but worth the journey.
July 22, 2024
"... the Bodhisattva offers an image of spirit and soul coming together, of clarity and love conjoined in an integrity of being. The Bodhisattva does not transcend the world, but remains within its turmoil to work for the enlightenment of all."
This book describes the dialectic between what the author terms the spirit and the soul, with the synthesis being the Bodhisattva, as described in the quote above. The spirit is close to the Absolute, while the soul is the Relative.
Through the use of Jungian dream analysis, Greek mythology, and Zen philosophy, the author beautifully details the spiritual journey from the descent to the ascent, with all the zig-zagging that entails. The rose is nicely balanced: crisp and poetic.
Highly recommended for all spiritual seekers.
This book describes the dialectic between what the author terms the spirit and the soul, with the synthesis being the Bodhisattva, as described in the quote above. The spirit is close to the Absolute, while the soul is the Relative.
Through the use of Jungian dream analysis, Greek mythology, and Zen philosophy, the author beautifully details the spiritual journey from the descent to the ascent, with all the zig-zagging that entails. The rose is nicely balanced: crisp and poetic.
Highly recommended for all spiritual seekers.
June 2, 2025
This book took me many months to read, a few pages a day -- I didn't want to rush through and miss, well, everything. Tarrant is a master teacher of zen koans and deeply understands the work of Carl Jung. With many side stories and poetic notes, he walks through the myth of Cupid and Psyche (or the fairy tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon) and, through that lens, show us how our own spirit and soul find each other. Such an enjoyable journey.
November 17, 2019
For most of the read, I felt like I was understanding about 10% of the writing. With all due respect for a person I very much admire, Rachel Naomi Remen, I was a long way from saying that this was "the best book I have read in the past ten years." Then came the final chapter in which I said over and over again "wow" if this is what he was getting at, I'm with him, I get this.
February 16, 2026
I love the subject. Some parts I understood and were meaningful, the rest not so much. Maybe this book is like meditating and I'll get moments of understanding as I live. I would love to read this in a different style of writing. It was brutal, but I made myself finish it so I can never see it again.
July 29, 2019
John Tarrant has an expansive view of his subject matter, and in that sense he's very much a Western master and teacher. The Light Inside the Dark is a useful guide. What more need be said? (You could take that last sentence as a koan - if you were so inclined.)
October 31, 2019
I'm finished as in I quit. I cannot read one more beautifully-written sappy "spiritual" book written by one more privileged male trust-fund kid. Just one more of that group; they blurb each other's books, it's a gang just like the suits in Washington DC.
January 6, 2023
Sometimes a book is so well written it takes ages to get through because I spend so much time looking out the window musing on the last sentence. John Tarrant does this over and over again with fabulous insights in a very poetic style of prose. It's just very beautiful.
February 12, 2024
The author writes in a moving poetic style and expresses emotion in a sensitive way; however, this style does not lend itself to the overall theme of the book. The book comes across as vague and obscure.
February 14, 2017
This is another book that's taken me entirely too long to finally finish (probably a few years by now, until I recently took up reading it again.) I can't say why for certain, except that it might be a simple laziness and a deeper lack of concentration.
This book has been cathartic at points, very opaque at others, sometimes downright irritating whenever John's descriptions of spiritual highs and lows become a little too poetic or a little too saccharine, perhaps. I found the message of waiting and stewing in darkness, in uncertainty, fear, and dread, resonated a lot with me: I'm currently going through my own difficult time, which bears similarities to another difficult time but which nonetheless carries a hefty sense of worry, and terrible doubt. I often feel deeply separate from my experience in some way that's difficult to fathom, though I do my earnest best to understand it all the same: this book reminds me to be gentle with myself, and that this set of experiences is, fundamentally, an experience and therefore transient, if mysterious. Despite my understandable grasping after comforting certainty, all that is left is to wait and see what happens, to live through the experiences life provides me.
This book encourages us to trust whatever happens to us, even though what occurs often seems terribly meaningless and difficult to bear, and oftentimes negative experiences can seem to last forever. John elevates what he writes somewhat above simple, vapid spiritual platitudes by reassuring us that we are, in fact, right where we belong in life, however much it can seem to the contrary. He does not promise the resolution that we might have desired to whatever vexes us, because that isn't the way of Zen and it isn't the way of life, and nobody can claim to have all of the answers, so John doesn't attempt to. There's a heavy dose of mysticism and Zen, though Tarrant draws from many divergent sources, both eastern and western, both overtly spiritual and (oftentimes) literary. I've made him sound more pragmatic or practical in this short review than the tone of the book really is, because Tarrant is after all a poet, and so that's his style.
I could probably say much more about The Light Inside the Dark, but nothing more is occurring to me right now. I would recommend reading this book at least once, though I'm not sure if it merits multiple readings - some portions and sentences in particular seem to have jumped out at me as especially germane to my own life, others seemed almost to verge on mumbo-jumbo, or seemed to be overly lost in reverie. A decent contemporary spiritual text.
This book has been cathartic at points, very opaque at others, sometimes downright irritating whenever John's descriptions of spiritual highs and lows become a little too poetic or a little too saccharine, perhaps. I found the message of waiting and stewing in darkness, in uncertainty, fear, and dread, resonated a lot with me: I'm currently going through my own difficult time, which bears similarities to another difficult time but which nonetheless carries a hefty sense of worry, and terrible doubt. I often feel deeply separate from my experience in some way that's difficult to fathom, though I do my earnest best to understand it all the same: this book reminds me to be gentle with myself, and that this set of experiences is, fundamentally, an experience and therefore transient, if mysterious. Despite my understandable grasping after comforting certainty, all that is left is to wait and see what happens, to live through the experiences life provides me.
This book encourages us to trust whatever happens to us, even though what occurs often seems terribly meaningless and difficult to bear, and oftentimes negative experiences can seem to last forever. John elevates what he writes somewhat above simple, vapid spiritual platitudes by reassuring us that we are, in fact, right where we belong in life, however much it can seem to the contrary. He does not promise the resolution that we might have desired to whatever vexes us, because that isn't the way of Zen and it isn't the way of life, and nobody can claim to have all of the answers, so John doesn't attempt to. There's a heavy dose of mysticism and Zen, though Tarrant draws from many divergent sources, both eastern and western, both overtly spiritual and (oftentimes) literary. I've made him sound more pragmatic or practical in this short review than the tone of the book really is, because Tarrant is after all a poet, and so that's his style.
I could probably say much more about The Light Inside the Dark, but nothing more is occurring to me right now. I would recommend reading this book at least once, though I'm not sure if it merits multiple readings - some portions and sentences in particular seem to have jumped out at me as especially germane to my own life, others seemed almost to verge on mumbo-jumbo, or seemed to be overly lost in reverie. A decent contemporary spiritual text.
December 13, 2017
I really enjoyed reading this. The poetic, mythical, stream of consciousness style of writing is captivating. The presentations of soul and spirit are fascinating and unique; they penetrate right to the core of what it is to be alive and human. There are parts that are painful and difficult to get through, but feel necessary to encounter and process. Other parts are able to transmit the sense of joy and freedom that comes with really living life on its own terms; the words and phrasing make it an alive and tangible feeling. Encountering this book was a valuable experience.
February 2, 2012
This is that rare book you read slowly in the dawn's light and take notes on, if you get up that early and do that sort of thing. It's a companion, in other words. I found myself relating to Tarrant as to a knowledgeable, poetic spiritual director who could help you to make sense of the patterns of your life. His analysis is seamlessly Jungian, Buddhist and Christian, and will send me. when I get organized, back to rereading John of the Cross, Dante, and T.S. ELiot. I was puzzled, as a young person, by all those dark-nights-of-this-and-that John talks about, but, for my elder years, Tarrant makes sense of the journey, especially of the eternal recurrence of these plunges into incomprehension and Lucy Ricardo behavior which I thought were behind me.
November 5, 2021
Tarrant is a Zen teacher, Jungian psychotherapist, and has a strong interest in literature and the arts. Drawing on his various areas of specialization, he describes the ways in which people can deal with severe life setbacks and achieve spiritual growth. He describes the need for a balance between soul and spirit. His writing differs from the standard Zen literature in giving meditation and therapy a shared role in personal growth. The book has a wide range of “stories” drawn from classical mythology, literature, Zen, and the dreams of patients undergoing therapy. It is also poetic and broad-brush in nature, which may leave some looking for more detailed advice. But I found this a very helpful book, offering a language to think about issues that are rarely addressed.
December 26, 2009
I have started rereading this upon completion, for I read it too fast. Like a first rain of the year, I don't think I was able to absorb it all. I just was so taken with Tarrant's mind, that I could not put this down. When his imagery and style works, it's revelatory. When it doesn't, I suspect it works for someone else, or for a me at a different time, or me at a different pace.
A book I will return to.
A book I will return to.
October 26, 2016
This Tarrant book is much better than I've read in the past. It has some really mind opening thoughts and his description of the interaction between soul and spirit is enlightening. This is a good companion book to take around. Lots of bent corners in my edition so I can refer back to.
March 24, 2011
Amazing book. It seems full of wisdom and Tarrant's style of writing reminds me a lot of how Thomas Moore writes when he's on his A game!
August 11, 2011
Still remember the reading
May 23, 2015
I have read this book about 3 times now, and I still find it compelling, challenging, and beautiful.
November 18, 2021
Deep. I'm struggling a bit. Will keep goin'
February 7, 2017
Wonderful
May 23, 2012
An excellent book!
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews