But he had seen it again on Lila tonight and he had seen it very strongly back in Kingston. That’s sort of what got him into all this. It told him there was something of importance here. It told him to wake up and not go by the book in dealing with her.
He didn’t think of this light as some sort of supernatural occurrence that had no grounding in physical reality. In fact he was sure it was grounded in physical reality. But nobody sees it because the cultural definition of what is real and what is unreal filters out the Dharmakaya light from twentieth-century American reality just as surely as time is filtered out of Hopi reality, and green-yellow differences mean nothing to the Natchez.
He couldn’t demonstrate it scientifically, because you couldn’t predict when it was going to occur and thus couldn’t set up an experiment to test for it. But, without any experimental testing, he thought that the light was nothing more than an involuntary widening of the iris of the eyes of the observer that lets in extra light and makes things look brighter, a kind of hallucinatory light produced by optic stimulation, somewhat like the light that comes when one stares at something too long. Like eye blinks, it’s assumed to be an irrelevant interruption of what one really sees, or it’s assumed to be a subjective phenomenon, which is unreal, as opposed to an objective phenomenon, which is real.
But despite filtering by the cultural immune system, references to this light occur in many places, scattered, disconnected, and unrelated. Lamps are sometimes used as symbols of learning. Why should they be? A torch, like the old Blake school torch, is sometimes used as a symbol of idealistic inspiration. When we suddenly understand something we say, I’ve seen the light, or, It has dawned on me. When a cartoonist wants to show someone getting a great idea he puts an electric light bulb over the character’s head. Everybody understands instantly what this symbol means. Why? Where did it come from? It can’t be very old because there weren’t any electric bulbs much before this century. What have electric light bulbs got to do with new ideas? Why doesn’t the cartoonist ever have to explain what he means by that light bulb? Why does everybody know what he means?
In other cultures, or in the religious literature of our past, where the immune system of objectivity is weak or non-existent, reference to this light is everywhere, from the Protestant hymn, Lead Kindly Light, to the halos of the saints. The central terms of Western mysticism, enlightenment, and illumination refer to it directly. Darsana, a fundamental Hindu form of religious instruction, means giving of light. Descriptions of Zen sartori mention it. It is referred to extensively in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Aldous Huxley referred to it as part of the mescaline experience. Phædrus remembered it from the time with Dusenberry at the peyote meeting, although he had assumed that it was just an optical illusion produced by the drug and not of any great importance.
Proust wrote about it in Remembrance of Things Past. In El Greco’s Nativity the Dharmakaya light emanating from the Christ child provides the only illumination there is. El Greco was thought by some to have defective eyesight because he painted this light. But in his portrait of Cardinal Guevara, the prosecutor of the Spanish Inquisition, the lace and silks of the cardinal’s robes are done with exquisite objective luster but the light is completely absent. El Greco didn’t have to paint it. He painted what he saw.
Once when Phædrus was standing in one of the galleries of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he saw on one wall a huge painting of the Buddha and nearby were some paintings of Christian saints. He noticed again something he had thought about before. Although the Buddhists and Christians had no historic contact with one another they both painted halos. The halos weren’t the same size. The Buddhists painted great big ones, sometimes surrounding the person’s whole body, while the Christian ones were smaller and in back of the person’s head or over it. It seemed to mean the two religions weren’t copying one another or they would have made the halos the same size. But they were both painting something they were seeing separately, which implied that that something they were painting had a real, independent existence.
Then as Phædrus was thinking this he noticed one painting in the corner and thought, There. What the others are just painting symbolically he is actually showing. They’re seeing it second-hand. He’s seeing it first hand.
It was a painting of Christ with no halo at all. But the clouds in the sky behind his head were slightly lighter near his head than farther away. And the sky near his head was lighter too. That was all. But that was the real illumination, no objective thing at all, just a shift in intensity of light. Phædrus stepped up to the canvas to read the name-plate at the bottom. It was El Greco again.
Our culture immunizes us against giving much importance to all this because the light has no objective reality. That means it’s just some subjective and therefore unreal phenomenon. In a Metaphysics of Quality, however, this light is important because it often appears associated with undefined auspiciousness, that is, with Dynamic Quality. It signals a Dynamic intrusion upon a static situation. When there is a letting go of static patterns the light occurs. It is often accompanied by a feeling of relaxation because static patterns have been jarred loose.
He thought it was probably the light that infants see when their world is still fresh and whole, before consciousness differentiates it into patterns; a light into which everything fades at death. Accounts of people who have had a near death experience have referred to this white light as something very beautiful and compelling from which they didn’t want to return. The light would occur during the breakup of the static patterns of the person’s intellect as it returned into the pure Dynamic Quality from which it had emerged in infancy.
During Phædrus' time of insanity when he had wandered freely outside the limits of cultural reality, this light had been a valued companion, pointing out things to him that he would otherwise have missed, appearing at an event his rational thought had indicated was unimportant, but which he would later discover had been more important than he had known. Other times it had occurred at events he could not figure out the importance of, but which had left him wondering.
He saw it once on a small kitten. After that for a long time the kitten followed him wherever he went and he wondered if the kitten saw it too.
He had seen it once around a tiger in a zoo. The tiger had suddenly looked at him with what seemed like surprise and had come over to the bars for a closer look. Then the illumination began to appear around the tiger’s face. That was all. Afterward, that experience associated itself with William Blake’s Tiger! Tiger! burning bright.
The eyes had blazed with what seemed to be inner light.
27
In the dream he thought someone was shooting at him, and then he realized no this was no dream. Someone was pounding on the boat hull.
OK! he shouted. Just a minute. It must be the marina attendant wanting to get paid or something.
He got up and, in his pajamas, slid the hatch cover open. It was someone he didn’t know. He was black, with a big grin on his face and a white tunic that was so bright and clean it knocked out everything else. He looked like he’d just stepped off an Uncle Ben’s rice package.