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'.

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 . . . the grosser manifest feature depends upon the subtler aspects. 

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 To this end, the motion of the physical body is superseded . . . the dhikr has become internal. The temple of celestial light 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 . . . it is just like seeing the root when contemplating a 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.
