Light

The word/concept “light” comes up frequently in my reading and contemplation. So I asked Google Drive to search my notes for any document containing the word. It pleases me that I can do this. It seems that each time I stumble across one of these excerpts, it’s fresh and newly relevant for where/what I am.

As long as you cling to the idea that only what has name and shape exists, the Supreme will appear to you non-existing. When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace — immersed in the deep silence of reality.#

There is only light and light is all. Everything else is but a picture made of light. Life and death, self and not-self — abandon all these ideas

Just as light destroys darkness by its very presence, so does the absolute destroy imagination.

In the immensity of consciousness a light appears, a tiny point that moves rapidly and traces shapes, thoughts and feelings, concepts and ideas, like a pen writing on paper. And the ink that leaves a trace is memory. You are that tiny point and by our movement the world is ever re-created. Stop moving, and there will be no world.

The light of consciousness passes through the film of memory and throws pictures on your brain. Because of the deficient and disordered state of your brain, what you perceive is distorted and coloured by feelings of like and dislike.

— I Am That  (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)


“If you look up at the faint smudge in the night sky that is really the distant, huge Andromeda galaxy, you might see light that, from your point of  view, took two million years to traverse hat vast intergalactic distance before it was absorbed in your retina and registered as an image. For a beam of light itself, however, things look different. Instead of radiating from some star in the Andromeda galaxy and racing through space for two million years, every single photon sees itself, metaphorically speaking, as born and instantaneously absorbed in your eye. It is one simple jump that takes no time at all, according to the theory of special relativity. That’s because, in the reference frame of a particle traveling at the speed of light, all distances shrink to zero and all time collapses to nothing. From its own perspective, the photon of light leaps instantaneously from there to here because distance has no place in its existence. We can almost say that the photon was created because it had someplace to land and, in an instant, it jumped from there to here, even across two million light years of space from our perspective.”

— The God Theory (Bernard Haisch)


“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”

“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.”

 — Ten Zen Questions (Susan Blackmore)

Jim Carrey on awakening


Mr. Carrey asks, “Who is it that’s aware that I’m thinking.” And answers the question but not in a way that most people would understand. If the question intrigues you I’d point you here, here and here. Like Mr. Carrey, “At least I know where I want to go.”

Forks in the road

To paraphrase SNL character Chico Escuela, “Life has been berry, berry good to me!” When I look back — something I’m trying to do less — I can’t help noticing the nodes. Those forks in the road where I had to chose which path to take. From my current vantage point, it’s tempting too say I wouldn’t be where I am today (a good place) had I chosen the other path at any point along the way. Yes, I might be in a “better” place, but it would be a different place. I’ve mapped out some of those nodes below. (Click the image for larger map)
For reason’s I can’t recall, I tried out for the high school musical and got the lead part. In college I switched my major from business to theater when it looked like falling grades my cost me my draft deferment. When Nixon froze the lottery — and I was no longer in danger of getting drafted — I dropped out of law school and got a job with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. I hated it and quit after a year and wound up working at a small town radio station.

On one of the nights I went to Tommy’s North End Cafe, I met my future wife (40+ years). She says it was the only time she had ever been there.

I burned out after ten years at the radio station and we moved to Albuquerque where I couldn’t get arrested. I went back to the radio station where Clyde Lear found me and brought me to work for his new company where I stayed for 29 years.

Like Harry Bosch, I don’t believe in coincidences. My life experience suggests there is a pattern to our individual realities. A process, intelligent beyond human understanding. As for those forks in the road, this from Random Walk by Lawrence Block:

“You did what you would have done, in a minute or in all eternity.”

still·ness /ˈstilnəs/ noun: the absence of movement or sound



The word comes up with some frequency when reading about meditation. We try to sit still… and allow the mind to become still. Applying the definition above, sound is pretty simple. We try to find a quiet place to meditate to avoid distracting sounds but some — I’ve read — can tune out the sounds around them. It’s the movement of our thoughts (non-stop) that seems to get in the way of stillness when meditating. And the only way to stop that movement is to silently observe thoughts as they come and go. Such awareness somehow… dissolves or  dissipates thoughts.

What, I wonder, would be the experience of such internal stillness? What would that be like? With which of our senses would we notice stillness? Not sure what stillness would look like. Assuming there were little or no sound to hear, what would mental stillness sound like? I’m tempted to say it’s more of a feeling than a sensation but “feeling” is a pretty slippery word. We all have feelings but we don’t know where they come from and we have no more control over them than we do thoughts. I think we need that sixth sense to experience Stillness: consciousness or, better still, awareness.

But stillness is a fragile state. Even the thought, “So, this is stillness” breaks the… spell? Like so much in meditation, “trying” gets in the way. “Alright everybody, BE STILL!” Doesn’t work. We don’t find stillness, stillness finds us.

 

Light

“Like a hole in the paper is both in the paper and yet not of the paper, so is the supreme state in the very centre of consciousness, and yet beyond consciousness. It is an opening in the mind through which the mind is flooded with light. The opening is not even the light, it is just an opening.”

“When you understand that names and shapes are hollow shells without any content whatsoever, and what is real is nameless and formless, pure energy of life and light of consciousness, you will be at peace — immersed in the deep silence of reality.”

“There is only light and light is all. Everything else is but a picture made of light. Life and death, self and not-self — abandon all these ideas. They are of no use to you. See the light and disregard the picture.”

“In the immensity of consciousness a light appears, a tiny point that moves rapidly and traces shapes, thoughts and feelings, concepts and ideas, like a pen writing on paper. And the ink that leaves a trace is memory. You are that tiny point and by our movement the world is ever re-created. Stop moving, and there will be no world.”
— I Am That (Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj)

“How can I look into the darkness, when looking makes it light?”
— Ten Zen Questions (Susan Blackmore)

“You are walking along a path at night, surrounded by a thick fog. But you have a powerful flashlight that cuts through the fog and creates a narrow, clear space in front of you. The fog is your life situation, which includes past and future; the flashlight is your conscious presence; the clear space is the Now.”
–The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)

True Detective (Season One): Philosophy of Rust Cohle


I was not a fan of what I think of as the early Matthew McConaughey but his later stuff really speaks to me. Mud (2012) and Dallas Buyers Club (2013). Top of my list is his portrayal of Rust Cohle in the first season (2014) of the HBO series True Detective. In the scene above (with Woody Harrelson) Rust shares his view of the cosmos.

All I know for sure

“All I know is that there is existence and there is awareness of existence. That’s all I know for sure. And I feel that life isn’t quite right. Instinctively I know that it should easier than it is. Why isn’t life quite right? Well, because there is an underlying fear of life – an underlying, constant unrightness. I don’t know this the way I know that there is existence and awareness of existence. But it makes sense to me. There is an underlying fear, a lie, a lens through which we live life.

— Beyond Kama (Kaushik)

How life happens

“Life is nothing but moments, and every moment is nothing but another culmination of the universe’s incalculable ripples. Out where we can’t see, they’re crossing and merging, bringing toward us new forms and experiences that are almost perfectly unpredictable. Yet the way we think about life seldom reflects that reality. We plan and worry and forecast and dread, all with an absurd sense of certainty, like we’re setting up snooker shots and we can see all the balls.”

David Cain