=kit054.txt

KIT 54 - The Temple of Celestial Light

In the previous issue, I presented the light of the aura in its
so-called physical (actually explicate) mode. But the explicate
mode of reality is a mere ripple in the ocean of the implicate.
Therefore what we experience as physical light is only a signal
(ayat) of what light really is.  This would give us a clue to what
the Sufis mean by the celestial light, and the early church
fathers (i.e., Gregory of Nycea) meant by the 'uncreated light'.
                            
[ The following group of 4 quotes are apparently all from DAVID
BOHM: ]

"One might consider what we generally call light: i.e., the light
absorbed by the cells from the environment, constituting the aura,
as waves. These waves are in the ocean of light that the Sufis
call the celestial spheres."

"There is a continual enfoldment of the whole in each region,
along with the unfoldment of each region into the whole again . .

"If you go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach something
very close to what you reach in the depths of the mind."

"Energy in the implicate state . . . the energy of empty space is
enormous; if you raise it, you get light, or if you raise it in a
way that makes reflection take place, it will become matter."

DR. DAVID BOHM

One may therefore build a temple of celestial light, fashion the
celestial counterpart of one's aura into a temple of celestial
light. To this end, the motion of the physical body is superseded
cannot brook the limitations in our thinking incurred by our
mental representation of our physical body. The compass of the
middle range needs to extend to the scale of the choreography of
the heavens. For this reason, the Mazdeans used to reach out in
their minds into the starry sky.

So one is experiencing the freedom and delight of being a being of
light at a cosmic scale. There is some sense of likeness with the
stars while one represents the stars as intermeshed in an ocean of
light rather than as specks studding the sky. To do this, one
needs mentally to drop the body as a shroud and enjoy the freedom
of gravity-less motion in space. Light (physical light) passes
through space without any resistance (though deflected by
gravity). At a certain stage, whirling like a dervish as Mevlana
Jelal ud Din Rumi taught his disciples to do, one identifies with
one's aura that drags the body in its rotation. The body can
remain still while the aura whirls.

At a further stage, we overcome our sense of space that is simply
a frame imposed upon reality by our finite minds. Then we are not
working with a temple of light endowed with a form or structure
any more, but with a luminous reality of pure splendor. This is in
what the Sufis call the sphere of Jabarut (splendor beyond
beauty). We think of the stars and better still the galaxies as
the mere explicitation of the unseen (covert, implicate) light of
the universe. Our consciousness reaches beyond our commonplace
representation of what we mean by the physical universe into the
perspective of the celestial spheres.

 "The light of dawn rises on the soul so that part of the
(predominating) realities emanating from the constellations and
from the angels who are their liturgies predominates in them."
SHIHABUDDIN SUHRAWARDI

At some point, the Sufis experience something more specific than
simply this immersion into the ocean of light subjacent to the
apparent light of the starry firmament that they ascribe to a
participation in the effulgence of the heavenly spheres, but
discover themselves as "the light that sees rather than the light
that can be seen." The stars are not just globes of effulgent
physical light manifesting a deeper subjacent orb of light, but
are as archangels endowed with a luminous consciousness.

 "Sometimes the apparition takes on human form, other times the
form of a constellation . . . When the blazing light lasts long,
it obliterates the form; the figures are taken away and the
individual visitation is effaced. At that point one understands
that what is effaced is giving way to something of a higher order
SHIHABUDDIN SUHRAWARDI

To reach into their consciousness, one needs to reverse the
commonplace way of thinking or experiencing. One switches one's
consciousness so that one discovers how the spheres of light
appear from the vantage point of the celestial archangels. In this
perspective, they appear as the epiphany of these beings - a
glowing extension or projection in the physical universe. The clue
is to hoist oneself through the celestial perspectives, eventually
reversing one's memory, shifting in the second dimension of time,
namely moving from transiency to transcendence, until one can
envision one's intelligence as of the same nature as the
intelligence of the archangels of the stars ('aql qahira), perhaps
an emanation of these.

Perhaps a most evocative description of this switch of perspective
is to be found in the words of a very rare and sublime Mazdean
sage who was also a Sufi initiate attached to Shihabuddin
Suhrawardi:

"When I passed in rapid flight from material bodies,
I drew near a pure and happy spirit;
With the eye of spirit I beheld spirit:
In every sphere and star, I beheld a spirit . . .
But when I reached a great elevation,
Splendor from the Almighty gave me light;
As the radiance increased, this individuality departed.
God only existed; there was no sign of me.
I no longer retained intellect or recollection or spirit;
I discovered all my secrets to be but shadows;
I then returned to the angelic intelligences.
And from these intelligences, I came back to the spirit;
And thus at last to bodies summoning me . . ."
AZAR KAIVAN

The wonderful thing about this is that all of a sudden, something
clicks in one's consciousness. One discovers one's true identity:
one is the real temple of God, beyond form, beyond space, beyond
time and beyond what one in one's limitation imagines to be light
- the temple of pure celestial splendor.

PRACTICES TO BUILD THE TEMPLE OF CELESTIAL LIGHT

            1) Start by going through, one by one systematically,
all the stages in the previous lesson (building the temple of
light).

            2) Shift your consciousness in such a way as to
imagine that you have awakened from the perspective of what
appeared as the physical world. There is realizing that the usual
was just a perspective determined by the focus of your
consciousness in a vantage point. What appeared as matter was
simply a construct or projection, like a hologram or the
projection of forms on a celluloid film appearing as shades of
light and shadow upon a screen.

            3) Now imagine the ocean, and grasp that the waves are
not fragments of the ocean, but the entire ocean emerges as each
wave; that the next swell is not the effect of the previous one
(as one infers from a cause and effect sequence), but it is again
the whole ocean that reappears in this new swell.

            4) Now represent to yourself that that which emerges
into your usual conscious perception as an object, for example a
tree, is like the wave. It is just the manifest signal of the way
the whole of reality appears squeezed as it were within the
limitation of the capacity of the tree to manifest it.

 "God discovers His perfection in the imperfection of the creature
flower."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN.

            5) Now imagine that you see lots of lights; for
example many candles, or stars. Imagine that behind the sense of
apparently solid (opaque) objects is a world of light; for example
the auras of those objects. For example, imagine flowers as
photographed by Walter Chapell, translucid, gossamer-like,
surrounded with a corona of flashing, diaphanous light. Now
imagine these flowers in their luminous appearance dove-tailing,
so that their auras intermesh. Their coronas do not have a
boundary, so they all interfuse in a light wave-interference
pattern.

            6) Now identify with your aura and imagine your own
aura being intermeshed:

                        a) with the auras of other beings,
including the trees,

                        b) with the auras of the planets and
stars.

            7) Now whirl your aura. Since it does not have a
boundary, the whole fabric of light of the universe is drawn into
a swirl amongst an infinite number of swirls in the boundless
vastness of space. One participates as a being of light in the
choreography of the heavens. By swirling the fabric of the
celestial light of which the stars are just a temporary
expression, you are building a temple of celestial light.

            8) Lie on your back and do 'yoni mudra', holding your
breath.

a) pay attention to the music of the spheres;

b) identify with your being as a being of celestial light - your
aura being only its limited manifestation;

c) concentrate on the beams projected from your eyes as the
explicitation in space of the celestial light that you really are.

            9) Now open your eyes, and look through your third
eye. You will encounter a maze of evanescent, elusive, nebulous
forms. - They are archetypal symbols whose objective seems to
reveal a paradoxical meaning to you that you need to decode.

            10) Now again take stock of the fact that you have
awakened from the commonplace diurnal perspective and realize that
this is indeed the way the universe is in reality. But as
everything criss-crosses everything else, it is much more
difficult to distinguish 'entities'.

" . . . a continual enfoldment of the whole in each region . . .
all entities . . . objects, forms as ordinarily seen are somewhat
stable independent and autonomous features . . . the order of the
world as a structure of things that are basically external to each
other comes out as secondary and emerges from the deeper implicate
order."
DR. DAVID BOHM.

            11) However, you can distinguish temporary formations
within this symphony of light that is the universe emerging and
fading back into their universal ground like the waves in the
ocean. It is as though, having awakened in sleep, your dreams
manifest the phenomena or circumstances of the 'outside world' in
their wider context.

            12) If you now make an effort to extricate yourself
from the dream perspective, and awaken in deep sleep, beyond the
state where there are forms or formations, then you will find
yourself accessing the consciousness of luminous beings. If you
focus upon a star, you will grasp how the being of the star
experiences that aspect of him/herself that you beheld in your
ordinary consciousness watching it from the vantage of Planet
Earth. It will now appear as the extension in space time of the
consciousness or intelligence of that being that is the star.

            13) You will now discover a kind of kinship with these
celestial beings, realizing that this is what you are essentially
and eternally. And in this dimension of your being, you have
inherited your celestial nature from these celestial beings. This
is where you have the deep roots of your being.

            14) The clue to this break-through is in shaking off
the memory of the existential perspective, and cleaving to the
memory of the whole universe, latent within your explicate memory.
It is the memory and therefore the grasping of significance rather
than events.

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