Sometimes the most obvious thing is full of mystery. What could be more obvious than having a conscious experience? And yet just being conscious is a major scientific mystery. Scientists and philosophers are uniformly baffled. Moreover, consciousness is the root of all human experience—without it, practically speaking, we cease to exist. Consciousness is totally obvious but totally unexplained.
Here’s another example of an obvious mystery. This is a phenomenon that science has a long history of trying to understand—light, which, incidentally, leads to the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
The physical mystery of light nicely complements the mental mystery of consciousness. Just as light makes things visible, consciousness makes things experienced—seen, felt, heard, touched, smelled, dreamed, etc.. By the way, the energy associated with light that makes life possible is part of this mystery matrix. Science, for all its mighty achievements, needs to acknowledge a bevy of fascinating mysteries. Look more deeply into, not away from them.
Poets, mythologists, and scientists have been trying to explain light since ancient times. For insight into the light side of the mystery matrix, read Arthur Zajonc’s Catching the Light: the Entwined History of Light and Mind. From Newton to Einstein and other great names in science, we witness a phenomenon that pushes us to the edge of quantum physics and beyond. The very physics of light, as Zajonc explains, implies the existence of mind.
Light seems the most mindlike of physical realities. Just as our conscious minds can engage with a limitless range of possible thoughts, so does physical light illuminate an endless variety of possible visual objects. Experiences of light best described as transcendent have been collected and analyzed in Annekatrin Puhle’s comprehensive review of the varieties of transformative light experience, Light Changes (2013). These experiences occur in near-death situations, mystical and visionary episodes, alien (UAP) encounters and often just spontaneously, as when Jacob Boehme was thrown into a mystical trance by sunlight reflected in a metal utensil. Transcendent light encounters are perennial phenomena that appear in various cultural contexts. They usually signal a breakthrough to another dimension of being.
Consciousness, physical light, and, we must add, life—all are unexplained by mainstream physicalist science. Facts of everyday experience we take for granted are amazingly interesting and strange. Of course, it’s easy to lapse into mechanically interacting with the world around us, with just enough alertness and sensitivity to get by. The mystery and wonder of life, light, and our consciousness easily escape notice. A grey film of ordinariness settles on our everyday minds.
Something unusual has to happen before the strange events transpire. It could be anything that shakes up the grey film. A moment of inspiration, a creative coincidence, falling in love, ingesting a psychoactive substance, and so forth. Or the spur could be negative, like sudden loss, illness of mind or body, near death, literally and symbolically.
The yogis and saints get proactive and rearrange their lives in ways designed to trigger encounters with the transcendent. We can all learn new ways to break through to the other side.
2 comments:
Gurdjieff emphasizes we have to build up our astral body. I used to see light around people as an aura. I even saw ghosts going to get healed by qigong master Chunyi Lin! The ghosts were yellow lights shaped as humans - they floated in from outside - at the retreat center in the woods. He was in full lotus yoga meditation. When we close our eyes to visualize light internally we need to listen to the source of that light. This process resonates the virtual photons - the time-reversed, negative frequency - and we can then absorb virtual photons to increase the photons internally. The virtual photons turn into more photons internally. Our biophotons go out of our eyes when they are open - this is now a proven fact in quantum biology. When we build up our light internally we can then heal people by sending out biophotons out of our eyes. Since I did so much healing and not enough meditation then I stopped seeing light. haha. I need to meditate again to build up my internal light. The source of the light is this cosmic Qi - it's called the "Golden Key" as superluminal "yin matter" in Neidan or alchemy meditation. Physics already admits that all matter is made of light.
Thanks for this interesting comment. I too need to get back to meditating on the light. When I practiced I got results. Let me know what happens if you get back into it. I have a short paper with examples of people I instructed getting some striking results. It might help to turn the planet on to the great light that pervades the universe.
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