Light!

For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.
Psalm 36:9

Dear Friends,

Last week we worked with Meister Eckhart's "The eye through which I see God is the same as the eye through which God sees me." 

That which sees me is what is known as light; that which I see is light; and I am myself the light.  This, at any rate, has been the assertion of most of the world's religions in some aspect of their origin.

You'll see above a quotation from Psalm 36, which says something about the living light, and puts the fundamental epistemological conundrum through some more of its paces.  Our focus today is the last bit: to recognize that what we see is light.

Thomas Aquinas put it this way: The reality of things is itself their light.

He means that our everyday sense that the objects around us are real is the form we can currently bear of their enormous and sacred significance (their light).  The world, the things, are real, but normal consciousness gives us only a faint sense of their reality and almost no sense of their light.  That is, they don't mean much to us; they seem to be things rather than enormous meanings. 

How can we shift this, open to the light that the things really are?  We have tried a few perceptual exercises in the past, and will get back to those again, but today we'll first discuss, then meditate, the Aquinas sentence as a meditation in itself, referring to all terrestrial objects severally and together.  The challenge, as always, is to arrive where we can affirm the validity of the sentence from our direct experience.

We make it approachable for ourselves initially by turning our minds to those moments when a thing or scene "spoke" to us.  When it meant more than a strict enumeration of its physical characteristics would give us.  This may be a mere sentimental overlay on the phenomena of the world, but it is a beginning, a start and a stab in the right direction.  We are going to where the objects and situations do not carry meaning, but are expressive radiance through and through. 

with love,
Michael