"Ojai Christmas" by Sandy Jones
www.woodsongjournals.com

NOTES FROM WOODSONG
by
William Samuel

MORE ABOUT LIGHT

Dear Reader, hold onto your hat! The world scene and its history have never been the WHOLE of Truth’s light. For each of us, it is certain the half-truth that lies in the human concept of time and space will soon be exploded. The knowledge of LIGHT discloses the cosmic mystery.

It is the holiday season and its special Light of Christmas again. How quickly the years pass, each with its memories. It seems that time marches on irrevocably. “The moving finger writes,” the poet says, “and having writ, moves on.” But now, in the December of a measurable span, we begin to hear science saying things about time that only mystics have said: that time isn’t an absolute; that time is relative; that time is only applicable to certain limited areas—even time’s movement in one direction may, under certain circumstances, be reversed! These ideas are presently emerging from science’s examination of the nature of simple light—sunlight, candle light, laser light, all forms of the same light that even now illumines the words on this page.

Sitting here considering what to write about light/Light and how to present it, I’m literally overwhelmed by the task I’ve set for myself. There is so much to say about Light but nearly all of it defies the telling. What can I present in the space of a few pages of a subject whose roots permeate all experience on the earth, embracing everything we have ever thought and done? For each of us, our entire personal history has had but one purpose behind it: discovery of the Light of the Eternal.

This is so and I KNOW it is so with a conviction I’ve never known before. No hyperbole here. We move an inch toward the discernment of Light and Light rushes a thousand miles in our direction to disclose itself and its already present secrets. The Light of Life comes with a conviction so staunch that neither sensual nor intellectual testimony to the contrary can deny it forever.

But how to write of Light? There lies the problem. It INSISTS on paradox, analogy and parallel. There is a metaphysical inversion at the place of perception (Awareness) and until that inversion “happens” for each of us there is little conscious understanding of the perception. But the grand and paradoxical wonder is, no conscious understanding is necessary! The Truth is the truth is the Truth whether it is understood by a fumbling sense of humanhood or not. From the Truth’s standpoint, there is no fumbling sense of humanhood—albeit there seems to be, and continues to seem so even when its impossibility is finally understood.

Thence, one continues to address the chimera in whatever terms seem capable of lessening is distortion—perhaps even removing them. It seems to me, the sign of this in one’s “personal experience on earth” would be a statement of word and deed so well done that no doubt could possibly remain of the Ineffable and its only-ness. Where are the words that can to that!? Words alone can’t, but Light can!

I have battled with the limitation of words for years, it seems, but it is precisely this struggle that has brought me to understand things about Light I could not have fathomed otherwise. The limit of words is precisely analogous to the limit of ordinary light. We use one to gain insight into the other and to explain certain features of it—not much different from the physicist’s use of arithmetic to understand the action of particles.

In another parallel, I first understood how slow moving sound waves could be made to create a three dimension image of an image—then used that information to deduce that moving light would do the same thing faster and more clearly. Matter is an image of an image, reduced to time and space. The reduction to time and space is not the Original Image, but it says something about it. To know the Original, we examine its images. To understand Light, we examine light. To examine light is to learn, almost serendipitously, whatever information it includes in the moment of time. Jesus used this logic when he made the simple statement, “Know what is before your eyes, then that which is hidden will be revealed there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed; and nothing covered that will not be uncovered.” But again, an intellectually bewildering paradox presents itself: One finds the most direct way to understand time and space is to go to Godhead and Its Self-knowing (Light!) wherein neither time nor space exist as real.

Reader, don’t you dare be frustrated by this mess of words. (More will come clear with the next reading.) WE ALL COME TO “UNDERSTAND” EXACTLY AS WE ARE SUPPOSED TO! Just because the chickens in the incubator do not understand light doesn’t mean they are not bathed in it continually. If, for some reason the incubator light flickers for moment, every chick in the bunch will KNOW it has been standing in the light. Our fears are the flicker.

Christianity addresses the “metaphysical inversion” in the most direct way. It puts it in terms of turning around and looking in the opposite direction—repentance. Yes, we turn from total absorption on the world scene and its history to look in the opposite direction, toward First Cause, within Godhead. Doing that, one quickly happens on the solipsistic paradox that perceives other “turn arounds” happening simultaneously: inside/outside, above/below, firs/last, male/female and finally (?) Light/light. Jesus spoke of these also but all he had to say about them was not included in the Bible. It was no easier to write of these things then than it is now.

Cosmologically speaking, to understand light takes us back to the very beginning of space and time. On the first day, the first recorded words of God said, “Let there be light:” and there was light. Present cosmologists of the scientific variety have reversed the order of creation, so to speak, taking their view of the created world of matter back to its first moments, discovering that everything is, indeed, made of light. Every element that constitutes the universe is light-in-motion which has been slowed or arrested into specific patterns by an unknowable “super implicate order” whose domain exists beyond the limits of time and space, hence beyond the ability of science (intellect) to understand. Scientists have taken matter back very nearly to its “beginning” in space and time. How near? In the June, 1983 National Geographic (p 710) we read that science’s confirmation of Big Bang “has taken it back in time to a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth of a billionth of trillionth of a trillionth of second”! And at that moment, the entire universe of matter (millions of trillions of huge stars et al) “was compressed into a space many times smaller than a single proton of an atom.” How about those apples? Such conclusions are as close as the intellect can come to comprehending something from nothing and time from timelessness. These things have been given much publicity in recent issues of prestigious publications to which the reader may refer.

In the days ahead, we will read much of the wonders of light and things it is capable of accomplishing. Perhaps this Christmas someone may send a beautiful card to you with an intricate pattern cut into it by light itself. Oh, for that matter every photograph we have ever seen has been etched by light. Every card we have ever held is made of light slowed into form by the grandest cosmic mystery of all—spaceless, timeless Light of light.

What is light? Science doesn’t know. Scientists can measure it and they know some of the things it will do. But exactly what it is remains as much a mystery now as it was to the ancients who must have marveled at the stars and marked the passage of the moon through the night skies. Now, at last it is becoming known that light is the MEASURE of the Universe and the energy of that action. There is no division between “spiritual” light and “material” light for there is no matter in light. Light has no mass. Yes, ALL light is spiritual, albeit limited—because it is not ALL there is to Illimitable Being, to Godhead and its Self-knowledge as Awareness, any more than words can be all there is to the image they describe. The light we see is the measure of measureless Implicate Order, Godhead.

Measure means “knowledge of” or “information about” something—so, in the simplest, most direct way, light is the measure of Godhead, information of the Ineffable. Information to or for whom? For GOD’S own Self-knowing. The awareness that reads these words is the perception of light/Light going on, God’s Self-knowledge HAPPENING. The WHERE is in (and as) awareness, the WHAT is knowledge of the qualities and attributes of Godhead, as well as knowledge of the qualities and attributes of awareness. Awareness (life) lives and moves and has its being WITHIN Godhead—Wisdom itself, Life itself, immortal and eternal!

This Season marks the timeless Moment when immaculate awareness comes to free us from the mistaken worship of the graven IMAGES of limited light in order to recognize the “FATHER of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.”

So we sit loose and enjoy. As God’s Self-satisfaction—Contentment—we are free to do just that. God’s light is enfolded within the awareness that sees Christmas lights twinkling, that watches the evening sky with starlight gleaming. In the same way the “words” are “information,” just so is light unfolding the wisdom and knowledge of God within us. Who is “us”? SELF-AWARENESS of the Infinite Eternal.

Life runs in Light because Life is that light. The searching soul that struggles to see, skirts the edges of shadows, plumbs the darkened valleys of hidden hills and measures the forms of opaqueness. But for each of us, in each one’s time, the experience examined, the shadows searched, leads us to the Light, the Light to the Godhead. The shadows are gone, having let us see SO WE KNOW WE SEE the immeasurable allness of Light.

Joyful Holiday to you all, William Samuel (1983)

If you would like further guidance in understanding any of William Samuel's work based on Self discover you are welcome to contact me, Sandy Jones - samuelandfriends@gmail.com - Ojai, California -