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The Unfading Light
5. The Unfading Light
The physicist David Bohm writes that light is "…the fundamental activity
in which existence has its ground." The Persian poet and mystic, Jalal-ud
Din Rumi wrote that "Divine Light is what is animating this universe;
Light is what is creating everything… Everything that we are, everything
that we see, everything that we know is the Light dancing and playing — the
Light knowing itself in a thousand different disguises." The light
referred to here is not the visible light of our daily world. Augustine made
a careful distinction when he wrote: "I entered, and beheld, with the
mysterious eye of my soul the Light that never changes, above the eye of
my soul, above my intelligence. It was not the common light which all flesh
can see, nor was it greater yet of the same kind, as if the light of day
were to grow brighter and brighter and flood all space. It was not like this,
but different: altogether different from all such things." Similar to
Bohm’s point
that the light is the fundamental activity in which existence has its ground,
Augustine wrote that the Light was not above his intelligence "in the
same way as oil is above water, or heaven above earth; but it was higher
because it made me, and I was lower because made by it."
The Kaballah views light as the carrier of consciousness and the Christian
Eastern Orthodox Church puts forth the view that it is through light that
God communicates with the world. And light is also filled with the "gnosis"
or knowledge that provides inner illuminations. The inner numinous reality,
experienced by many people, can be known within our soul and body. We are
invited to an awakening and a rebirth to realize we are literally beings
of light.
The Rumi quotation is from Andrew Harvey’s The Way of Passion ( p. 160)
See Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism, (p. 250) for the selection from Augustine