How can we learn to live in the light, more often, with better outcomes?
Let’s start with the physical reality of being lit from within, with a loving glow, and then work our way towards putting that into practice in everyday life. First of all, if you have had an experience like this, there is no reason to doubt its value or ‘truth’, because we are literally lit from within, just as all matter is aglow with life. Part of any modern concept of ‘enlightenment’ must include this physical reality: that all life radiates out from a cosmic conflagration in space, which is still happening everywhere, all the time. Light is associated with so many positive connotations because of this fundamental life-giving force. This is why an experience of inner light and its gnosis is so highly valued, whether it arrives spontaneously or is inspired by a particularly radiant sunrise or sunset, the romance of moonlight, the simple glint of a dewdrop on a leaf, sparkling in the breeze, or any other phenomenon.
However, despite learning from physics that everything is made from starlight, including our minds and bodies, the origin of consciousness still remains a sacred mystery. Being self-aware allows us to live a life filled with meaning and spiritual growth. Understanding how and why light has been used as the preeminent metaphor for consciousness – for our ability to think, to read these words, to consider them, weigh them up and decide where we stand in relation to them – can deepen our capacity to become more awake to the miracle of our lives as conscious beings.
I have also learnt, mainly from my experience of meditation practices, but also from neuroscience, that this realisation can improve with practice, just like everything else. As self-aware primates, we truly are the universe becoming aware of itself. Both our bodies and our minds are lit from within, in a way that overcomes the seeming separation of mind and matter. In fact, we are better off thinking of ourselves as a ‘bodymind’ that glows with life and consciousness, something the shamanic arts have always known. Experiencing this realisation can dissolve doubt and confusion, leaving spiritual generosity, forgiveness, understanding and gratitude in its wake.
Now, we need to rekindle the light within more than ever. In a ‘post-truth’ world riven with fake news and political corruption, media propaganda and data mining, we need trustworthy guidance. This will become increasingly important as climate chaos, resource wars and other forms of societal breakdown threaten us with correspondingly fierce internal storms of anxiety, depression and grief.
Such guidance is available to us, both as we grow in faith in our own personal abilities to discern right from wrong and in great stories filled with the power and authority of collective wisdom. These kinds of stories are traditionally called myths. Mythic lore is not merely the fanciful narratives we have been taught to mistrust, as if they were the childlike explanations of a universe that hadn’t yet been explained away by science. Myths are multidimensional universes of information, designed to enable us to manoeuvre through chaos and evolve beyond dangerous new circumstances. The mythic symbol of light is especially capable at conveying such information, when it is interpreted with respect, appreciation and familiarity.
‘That Inner Glow’ Retreat is now SOLD OUT. However, the book is forthcoming, so keep your eyes open for that later in the year!
It was really refreshing to have a conversation with my mate, Dr Thomas Bristow, an expert in ecopoetics, and Senior Editor of the journal i am also an editor for, PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature. Tom wanted to chat about what the Romantic poets – Blake, Yeats, Wordsworth, Byron and co – saw in nature, and in particular what they learnt from listening for the spiritual aspects of the earth. It was a fun yarn and we touched on many aspects of the subject matter, following a handful of questions, or prompts, in a free range flow. Tom called this chat ‘Romantic Vision’ and you can access the video of it here (no pressure, but Tom tells me this may only be posted for a limited amount of time).
But first, i must wonder aloud about the value of literary explorations, poetic conversations, appreciating the Romantics and attuning ourselves to our local ecosystem in an age of planetary destruction. There’s a point in the interview where i admit that Thich Nhat Hanh might be right: perhaps what we most need to do is to hear the earth crying. This is not a very good sales pitch. And it’s probably only true to a certain extent: we are also a miraculous incarnation of consciousness in a primate body, embodying the spirit of life in a fantastically rich way, a celebration waiting to be had. My point is that opening our minds to the Deep Listening that i suggest at the culmination of this chat is not necessarily going to make you happier, but it may very well help you to be liberated from some of the more innocuous yet pervasive limits of your mind. Worth a shot?
To get there, Tom and i talked over the resurgence of European myth in the 18th century, which inspired Romantic poets to personify or anthropomorphise the environment, as a means to address ‘nature’, to represent vast fields of energy, beyond the human scale, and to create textual events that trigger legacies of ecocentric writing and orality. If you’re interested in the historical development of Western consciousness, you might enjoy our riff on how Romanticism worked as a response to Enlightenment. My key term for this was the ‘suprarational,’ which i saw as an attempt to develop consciousness beyond the human, to include our ancient predilection for pantheism, or notion that intelligence is a quality of the universe, or another dimension, which arises with this one (or even as its prerequisite).
This reminded me of the intelligence we find in nature, which is revealed in the way plants reach for the sun, or animals know instinctively how to hunt prey or follow seasons or find their way back across entire oceans to their birthplace. I can’t help but feel that for all of our technological development, the modernised psyche is a truncated version of something that could be far greater, in scope, depth and alacrity. We need to incorporate reason into our toolbox but be ready for so much more, when we open our minds to a conversation beyond the merely human, with plants and animals and places.
“We are leaning our for love and we will lean that way forever” Leonard Cohen
This more open-minded consciousness could also perceive more beauty in the world and thereby require less stuff from human society and production. There’s more to say about how recognising spirit of place can help protect the natural world, but i’m writing that for the next issue of PAN, so i’ll keep the water nymphs and satyrs for then.
When we are alive to the ecomythic dimension of life, human consciousness opens up to what actually is arising in nature, which is other forms of intelligence. This can also be called animism, which indigenous people have always said is real, not metaphorical: spirit beings, spirits of place, and spiritual entities are all other types of intelligent beings, which exist but do not take physical bodies in this dimension with us. They represent life force, sometimes of that place, sometimes from beyond. If we want to learn from them, we have to put aside our historical, socialised self, and enter into a trance of timelessness, beyond our personal foibles and concerns. Even as we are thoroughly enmeshed in capitalism and colonisation, simply by being alive in the world today, we can turn our backs on the worst of it, the most obvious effects it has on our minds, and find ourselves as we also always were and are: trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth wrote in his Ode on Intimations of Immortality.
Any true Romantic knows how to love a storm
Tom asked how we get there. I can only humbly suggest we meditate in sand dunes, or under trees, or by a babbling brook (or, if you’re in urban lockdown, on a pot plant and its own mysterious urge to live). A great place to start is with Miriam Rose Ungunmerr, who made the practice of Deep Listening more accessible to the public, especially helpful for non-Aboriginal Australians living on this ancient land.
Then maybe, if we can quieten the voices of our humanity for long enough, we might be able to hear the muses still, as they sing the song of the earth, for those who will listen.
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When you’re in there, with those strong feelings, of confusion and angst, thrown about by waves of emotion or distracted by random thoughts, plagued by doubts about your lack of an effective game plan for life or just plain down … it feels like chaos. Imagine yourself in one of the darker corners of this image, or being tossed by one of the waves as it crashes off a spiralling wing of energy, or crushed as one finger of force presses down upon your local environment or mind/body. Your experience is all-encompassing, complete, true to the life and death of this existence, right now …
But there’s always another side. There’s always another dimension, an aspect of the experience that forces you to evolve, or asks you to be patient, or simply washes over and leaves you feeling … OK. Refreshed perhaps, or even just relieved. At their best, such experiences inspire us to reaffirm our faith in the goodness of the universe. Very often, they leave us feeling that on the other side of chaos there exists an underlying order, a way that life unfolds that we could not possibly have imagined would turn out for the best. Or, at least, could leave us feeling enlightened, awakened, deeper or stronger or just … more fortunate.
When you come out the other side, what seemed like a chaotic jumble may turn out to look like a beautiful piece of art. Or an infuriating waste of time. It might seem like a period of testing, followed by an experience of thankfulness, which goes beyond rational comprehension. No matter how we interpret events, fractals remind us that the beauty of life and the world, the earth and the stars and the subatomic dimensions and all of life in its unfolding, is there at the end … because it is always there within: within each twist and turn of life, each crushing defeat or seemingly cruel turn of fate.
So if you find this post feeling anxious or confused, angry or ignorant, sad or lost, have faith. Some kind of order follows; some kind of pattern appears; something will always return to make you feel thankful for your life. Faith isn’t just for the religious – in fact, it’s another case where religions have stamped their authority over something that is innate, natural to each of us. It is an archetypal experience, to use a Jungian term, which arises spontaneously in anyone who survives something they can see the brighter side of afterwards.
Link up to a fractal doing just that and boom! There you are too.
