Let’s continue with the theme of light. As hinted, we can’t go very far by trying to understand light (and this goes for the physical world as a whole) by imagining particles and fields, no matter how subtle, ‘made of’ consciousness and so on. This probably sounds insulting to the ears of the scientifically minded people of today. But it shouldn’t be if we understand the deeper reasons. Probably the most understandable analogy, mentioned many times, is that of dreaming. We can certainly try to explain our dreaming environment
from within our dreams, we can philosophize, make observations and so on. But from our waking perspective it is obvious that whatever dream-thoughts we patch up in this way will always miss something essential without which an entire world goes unsuspected and without which the dream world would never be what it is.
This is the kind of attitude we should equip ourselves with if we are to develop a proper understanding of reality. Please note – our dream world is understood from the standpoint of the waking not through fancy theories but by the simple fact that our waking consciousness in its very nature contains within itself the lower dreaming consciousness. This is key. We get a step closer to truth not when we assemble and contemplate the ‘right’ arrangement of abstract thoughts but when we use the thoughts, through their own consistency, as pointers towards the needed inner transformations. In a dream we can reach the logical conclusion that we’re dreaming but to step into lucidity we need a different inner gesture. The logical thoughts are the pointers but to step in that direction we need a different kind of activity. And those with experience with lucid dreaming know that sometimes we understand that we’re dreaming, yet this understanding doesn’t go far enough to incite the inner transformation which makes us lucid and allows us to begin transforming aspects of the dreamscape. This shows that our logical thoughts can still remain in a doubting mind. We need something more if we’re to truly transform.
The parallel between higher–ordinary consciousness and waking–dreaming, is limited, as it has been pointed out many times. The most important inadequacy is that in both waking and dreaming we deal with sensory-like experiences and intellectual thinking. This is not so in the case of higher consciousness. But nevertheless, the idea that with our thinking we can approach the threshold, even though we need different inner activity in order to cross it, remains valid in both cases and that’s why the analogy is admissible.
If we understand this analogy, we should be prepared that in order to understand the nature of light, we’ll have to approach a level of consciousness which by its own nature will give a different way to understand it. We shouldn’t imagine that this higher consciousness will simply give us the ‘right’ theory of light that we’ll then use in our intellectual life. In the same way, becoming lucid in a dream doesn’t provide us with some more fanciful means to understand the ‘dream photons’. Instead, it helps us understand dream light in a new, completely unexpected way. We have to equip ourselves with a similar attitude if we are to approach the true nature of physical light. Our intellect’s thirst for knowledge will be satisfied but not in the way it expects – as some clever arrangement of thoughts about photons.
If we understand all this we can begin using our thoughts in the proper way – as pointers to higher lucidity. If we simply stare at a source of light, a filter and a detector, it will be nearly impossible to approach the reality of light. It would be better to take our own inner experience of color as one pole and then try to think of the ways this experience is agitated. As the other pole, there’s no better choice but to think of the Sun. So we have our very simple experimental setup. We experience color sensations and think about the true nature of the Sun.
Then we can ask a question: in what ways can my experience of sunlight be effected? The most obvious is that if I stay in the basement I don’t experience sunlight. If I go out in nature, I’m bathed in it. So the first observation is that through our willing we change the configuration of our experimental setup and the sunlight can be filtered or not. This is of course quite obvious and doesn’t seem to explain anything but we have to pay attention to even such trivial details – the way we employ our spiritual activity has something to do with the fact whether we experience sunlight or not.
Now let’s imagine a similar experimental setup but take another human being as the other pole. We surely have color perceptions of the person but there’s more to a human being than that. In our interaction with other people we also exchange feelings and ideas. Thus if a person moves their hand, the sensory perception is not the whole story. We can only understand the movement if we understand the feelings and ideas behind it. To this everyone more or less agrees. But in our present culture it would sound absurd that we may need a similar attitude also in respect to the Sun. It’s not about anthropomorphizing the Sun, imagining it as a human-like personality with their whims, temperament, pretenses and so on but by being open that our understanding may remain forever incomplete if we stop only at our sense perceptions, in the same way it will remain incomplete if we dissect and analyze a moving hand without any interest in the feelings and meaningful motives of the person.
When we look at the hand gesture of a person we can understand it only as far as we can share in the feelings and ideas that motivate it. In the case of the Sun’s Intelligence, if we are to grasp anything of its true nature, we have to take a step in the orthogonal direction, towards higher lucidity. This is necessary because the spiritual processes that impress in our consciousness as light phenomena are of different order compared to our familiar human thinking, feeling, willing and perceiving. Now the really hard question is how can we approach this higher lucidity? Obviously, it can’t be reached with philosophizing alone, in the same way that in a dream it’s not enough to simply acknowledge that we’re dreaming. We need also the next step that lifts us orthogonally to the dream.
This is also why the fairy tales that Ashvin brought to attention have the power they do. In the end it is not about the concrete arrangement of images, as if they constitute a self-sufficient world but their ability to awaken the deeper strata of our soul, through which we’re lifted from the sensory spectrum. Here’s one more way to point our attention to something that is not immediately contained within the sensory plane.
In relativity it is known that for someone moving relative to us their clock ticks less time compared to ours. In the extreme case, when they move at the speed of light, it is as if their clock doesn’t tick at all. These things are very abstract so we’re looking at them only as fairy tales. The tale goes that a photon doesn’t experience any time. It takes zero time to reach from A to B even if they are infinitely far apart. Otherwise stated, it is as if a photon is everywhere at once. These things are really absurd for our rational intellect and it’s for this reason that physicists don’t really know what to do with them.
Interestingly, things wouldn’t be so baffling for men of the ancient times, as they still had an innate feeling for eternity. Modern man has completely lost that feeling. Today eternity is understood as an infinite amount of time, infinite duration (which seems scary because when taken anthropomorphically it sounds like infinite time of boredom). Now we need to resurrect the true understanding of eternity. As explained so far, this won’t be achieved by some clever arrangement of concepts like time, inertial frames of reference, photons, speed of light and so on. We’re using these only as a modern day fairy tale which should help us approach the higher levels of lucidity where things will be understood as implicit intuition in the state of consciousness itself.
If we think in the context of relativity, it seems that for light the world of spacetime collapses into a point. It’s not even a point because a point implies an infinitesimal something in a large space but here we don’t have surrounding space. Everything is everywhere all at once. Our more familiar experience in space and time can be thought of as analysis of this simultaneous potential. It’s like the points A and B are pulled apart so that they are separated by spacetime intervals and can be experienced in their relative becoming.
If we reflect on this idea, even though it is very abstract, we can conceive of a possibility to seek this timeless unity by somehow bringing As and Bs closer together. When we communicate with a person, when we get together in space, we have the chance to exchange thoughts and feelings in real time. If the person is on Mars it will take some twenty minutes for their message to reach us, which already reflects a past state. We know that from our Earthly perspective it takes about eight minutes for light to reach us from the Sun. From the sunlight’s perspective it doesn’t take any time to travel. We can use this idea as a starting point for meditation.
Hopefully it is sensed where all this is leading us. In our ordinary stream we move through spacetime states of being. Each state is a unique configuration of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and so on. If we simply analyze the perceptions and try to understand, for example, how light photons travel through space, how they are filtered and so on, we can build useful models but the essential nature of light remains outside our consciousness. We need the orthogonal action to move us closer to the spiritual essence of the Sun. In a way this means that we have to encompass an eight minute interval as something whole. To understand light we have to
coincide with it.
I’m using the eight minute interval only as a symbol here. I’m not suggesting some precise quantitative relations. Please bear that in mind. To understand something of the Sun world (Inspirative cognition) our ‘attention-span’ of consciousness has to become eight minutes. Only then we’re in position to experience the spiritual nature of the Sun world. This is not the same as simply squishing the events of eight minutes of our life into a panorama. For example, we can write down all our verbal thoughts that we think in eight minutes and this will turn out into some pages of text. The encompassing that we speak of is not simply stacking together these pages.
We can approach this with a comparison. A child can play for eight minutes with its toys. If it has to encompass that time in the above sense, it will be simply a compressed picture of its play. But we can think that there are also other intelligences at work of which the child has no clue. For example, the parents are largely responsible for the daily rhythm of the child. The child may not know this but after its eight minutes it may be put to bed. From its perspective these are just successions of worldly events. From the parents’ perspective this is spiritual activity based on certain understanding of what is appropriate for a developing child. The parents themselves are unknowingly within the context of education, economics, politics, world development as a whole. The point is that the encompassing of these spacetime intervals demands completely new forms of intuition. These are not simply compound intellectual intuitions but levels of consciousness which lift us orthogonally to everything we have previously known. Yet this lifting is not in order to fly away from our previous state but instead to complement it with new depths of consciousness which alone can grasp things in their true nature.
All of this can be connected with the fairy tale in Ashvin’s thread. We’re a poor lad with our intellectual cat. The Giant is our Imaginative geometry, our sense of what existence is. For example, when Eugene says that the whole World is imagined by Consciousness, this already implies certain relations between the supposed pure Consciousness and its imagined creations. It is precisely these relations which are part of the structure of the Giant – our Imaginative heritage. Being content with such a statement is like dreaming and saying “It’s all but a dream” but never actually attempting to find that orthogonal activity that can transform our be-ing into higher lucidity.
The Giant can’t simply encompass his eight minutes of experience. That will result in nothing more than the compressed picture of the child’s toys. To find the true eight minute interval the Giant has to burst as he contacts the Sun world.
Mysticism bursts the cat instead and remains in the lap of the Giant, who however, can be conscious of the Cosmos only in soul images. That’s why he can’t do otherwise but conceive that God simply imagines these images. On the other hand, when the Giant bursts we find that the cat indeed belongs to the Earthly world but there’s also something which projects and animates it all the way from the Sun world. That’s why in the other thread we’ve talked about the meaning of ‘through’.
If we burst the cat and remain with the Giant, we remain in quite inexplicable images. These are for which people today, with certain pride, say “there are simply no words for this. It’s a world incompatible with the cat.” Yet when things go towards the Sun, there
are words, even if very clumsy at first. The reason is that the higher and lower worlds remain connected in a musical gradient. This is part of the symbolism in the Caduceus.
The happenings in the Sun world can be ‘transduced’ or ‘spiraled down’ to cat gestures. That’s how it is at all possible to speak of these things like we do now. So what can we say then about this Sun world? Even only by analogy, we should anticipate that the level of consciousness that we find there lifts us orthogonally to our ordinary waking life. We come in contact with a more mature world which weaves the rhythms of our life, even if the Earthly child busy with playing knows nothing of it. In other words, when we contact the Sun world, we already live in something of the consciousness in which we live also after death until new birth. We understand something of our being that goes from incarnation to incarnation and needless to say, its perspective, goals and so on are quite different from what we usually imagine based on our Earthly life.
Even though the eight minute interval is taken as a symbol it can be used in meditation. We can start by trying to grasp what we think of in eight minutes. It might come as a surprise that very often we can’t remember much about what we thought just a minute ago. So the first step is to try and be the master of at least few-second intervals at a time. Then we can appreciate how little we really understand of the reasons why our thought jumps from here to there. Of course we may have our rationale about it, we may say “I’m interested in this, I like that” and so on but in the end so does the child say about its toys. We need completely different levels of intuition in order to understand the curvatures in which our play unfolds. This intuition doesn’t appear magically in the very same way that we don’t learn a language in a snap. Everything is developed slowly and gradually, enriching the intuitive palette little by little. So when we meditate we seek to unite with the essential Spirit that governs the streamlines of our becoming. It is as if the light of the Spirit begins to take shape in the Sun world and becomes more and more concrete towards the Earthly state. It is almost as if the ‘wavefunction’ of our Earthly is shaped in the leeway between Earth and the Sun. This is not meant in spatial terms but as ‘vertical’ levels of spiritual concretization. To reach higher consciousness means to attune to the intuitive processes that concretize the potential along the gradient.
We can’t simply inflate and encompass the higher orders of existence because in that way we’ll simply find a picture of our toys (the horizontal aspect). Instead, we start by concentration. We have to find the point in the head where we anchor the Caduceus. From there we should feel the higher Spirit as our teacher, as a Master. We need to feel the honest desire to share in its intuitive life, just like a child needs thirst for knowledge if it is to understand the forces that shape the world. Then from our point of concentration we cultivate that attentiveness, the openness that the point can only be understood when it is found to be lawfully embedded within the higher intervals. Completely new forms of intuition have to find their way into our consciousness if we are to grasp the topology of these intervals and much of our former being has to burst in the process. Most importantly, we should in no way imagine that the Sun world is simply something that exists in our imagination. This would be simply the Giant self-proclaiming his absoluteness. When we meditate, when we try to bring our Earthly center A and the Solar center B into simultaneity, we have to feel that we approach a world that is greater than our consciousness in every possible way. That’s really why the Giant has to burst. He can’t contain what’s greater than him. Instead his Imaginative nature bursts and sacrifices itself to become the Cosmic background so to speak.
Of course we have said almost nothing about how all this relates to the experience of physical light but we can’t do otherwise than prepare the proper perspective. Otherwise we’ll continually snap back to errors like trying to explain the dream world through interaction of dream photons. And I repeat that it’s not that there’s no justification to speak of these photons. I’m not saying that they are pure illusions, completely unsupported by anything of experience. It’s only that the truly satisfying understanding of their true nature can come only when we strive to understand the higher waking state. Then our understanding of light will become much more spiritual in nature. Light has all to do with resonance, with attunement between states of being. It’s like a rubber band that connects the As and Bs in their original unity. Thus the only way to understand light in its essence is by finding resonances between states of being. For example, a person may love us but we may be too self-centered to notice this. There's a filter in between us. The light of the person doesn’t reach us. It’s similar with the Sun. When we start to meditate and seek the resonance with the Solar intervals, we find that there are many filters that prevent that light from flowing. We find all the excuses to focus on the spacetime states in the vicinity of the Earthly spectrum. This sounds outrageous to the modern scientific mind but we learn infinitely more about light and filters when we investigate how and why we filter the light of our Higher Solar Being from elucidating the spacetime intervals within which our Earthly life manifests. When we understand these things then we can also approach the question of physical light, which we’ll find that is still all about spiritual relations yet at different scales.