Writes A.Koestler in his book The Act of Creation:

One archetype remains to be discussed...It is variously known as the Night Journey, or the Death- and-Rebirth motif; but one might as well call it the meeting of the Tragic and the Trivial planes. It appears in countless guises; its basic pattern can be roughly described as follows. Under the effect of some overwhelming experience (actually out of necessity because of one’s evolutionary status), the hero is made to realize the shallowness of his life, the futility and the frivolity of the daily pursuits of man in the trivial routines of existence...He then suffers a crisis which involves the very foundations of his being; he embarks on the Night Journey, is suddenly transferred to the Tragic plane - from which he emerges purified, enriched by new insight, regenerated on a higher level of integration...

The journey always represents a plunge downward and backward to the sources and tragic undercurrents of existence, into the fluid magma (sense a bit of the truth of Mosc in these notions), of which Trivial Plane of everyday life is merely the thin crust...

(Compare for the ‘science’ of the last line of this quotation with what David Bohm has to say about it: ‘What is implied...is that what we call empty space contains an immense background of energy, and that matter as we know of it is a small “quantized” wavelike excitation on top of this background, rather like a tiny ripple on a vast sea.’)

....The night Journey is the antipode of Promethean striving. One endeavors to steel the bright fire from the gods (our flash-like experience of totality outwards); the other is sliding back towards the pulsating darkness, one and undivided, of which we were part before our separate egos were formed...(akin to our exploring of our inner self; or reaching back to our base, our Mosc) Thus the Night Journey is a regression of participatory tendencies, a crisis in which consciousness becomes unborn (in the realm of Mosc again) - to become born in a higher form of synthesis...’(all italics and insertions mine).

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