Working with Light - Illumination II
by
Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Inspired by the vision of
Hazrat Inayat Khan
| Hail to the company of all who have become mad and drunk with desire for the world of Light, with their passionate love for the majesty of the Light of Lights, and who, in their ecstasy, have become like the Seven Poles of the world.—Shihab ud-Din Suhrawardi
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Editor's Note: You may wish to review the steps of working with light that were outlined in the previous lesson. We begin this lesson with a second step in developing light in the glance.
Glance (continued)
4) Envision yourself as being a luminous mind. Entertain luminous thoughts. This requires one to purify emotions from resentment.
It is not good enough to envision light. One needs to cleanse one's psyche from its defilement owing to concupiscence, greed, resentment and guile. The key is to love people who make themselves difficult to love: clear the mirror of the soul by cleansing the mind with the light of the heavens.
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
The great obstacle to be overcome in meditation is the false ego or Nafs.
For the light of the soul shines in the heart and is reflected in the mind.
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Ibn 'Arabi:
And through His self-disclosure in radiant light, He makes manifest the incapacity for the eyes and the power of the rational faculties, preferring them over the eyes.
The world of the unseen is perceived through the eyes of insight just as the world of the visible is perceived by sight. When these two lights come together, unseen things are unveiled as they are in themselves and as they are in existence.
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Stalking Light Beyond Matter
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
| The more deeply we study matter, the more proofs shall we find of intelligence working through the whole process of continual unfoldment.
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5) Discover a whole hierarchy of the higher frequencies of light in the many-tiered areas of your aura.
Reality appears as a virtuality that becomes an actuality in the existential condition. Light is a particularly important factor in our lives because it acts as a bridge between matter and, beyond our perception, the ineffable. It furnishes us with clues giving vent to the unknown, enabling us to decode the paradoxes regarding the higher spheres and life after life that so baffle us. Perhaps we could already start preparing for this right away, now. It would mean trying to stalk light as far as we can reach beyond its perceptual existential condition.
Practice
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To reconnoiter the higher levels of your aura, in your meditation, try to stalk light as far as you can reach and even further beyond your perceptual outreach.
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Najm ud-Din Razi:
| Then the light of dawn rises on the soul in such a way that that part of the paramount realities emanating from the constellations and the angels, who are their prototypes, predominates in it.
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Najm ud-Din Kubra:
| Each time a light rises up from you, a light descends upon you. When the substance of light has grown in you, then it is the substance of the light in Heaven which yearns for you, is attracted by your light and it descends towards you.
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Practice
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Now transmute your aura itself beyond what one commonly understands as physical light. Perhaps a clue to this world could be in representing to yourself higher frequencies of light, such as blue, then mauve, violet, then ultraviolet, and imagine that this continues beyond the visible range. Do not limit light to what you perceive.
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Physicists never cease to be amazed by the paradoxical way in which light behaves when they try to track it down in laboratory experiments. They can only ascertain and measure what happens at the instant it interacts with their instruments, but light eschews giving any clues as to its behavior before, after or between the measurements. It seems a misnomer to call light matter, even though it is an electromagnetic phenomenon, because unlike any other form of matter, it does not have mass. It provides us with a useful model about the relationship between reality and actuality—the Universe and the cosmos. Reality escapes any efforts on our part to track it down beyond the existential, perceptual world we commonly know. This familiar world looks like the cross-section of a multiple, multi-dimensional and many-tiered Universe of which we only know what intersects it. We are baffled, stymied by the unknown, and ever wish to decipher the secret of the mysterious unknown that affects us in such uncanny ways when we stalk light beyond its physical appearance.
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
| In its finer aspect the supreme Spirit is the light of intelligence, and in its dense aspect the radiance of all objects.
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| The expression of man's countenance is the light of intelligence in its dense form.
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The Heavenly Spectator
6) There is yet a further step: identify yourself with being a pure luminous intelligence and consider your aura is its infrastructure.
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
| The divine light has shone upon the mineral and vegetable kingdoms; and there too it has shown its phenomena, although its full radiance has been reached only in man. It can be seen in the developed intelligence.
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Practice
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Now, rather than identifying yourself with your aura, you will identify yourself with the light of intelligence. Imagine that the physical substance of your body, subtle body and aura is just an infrastructure to sustain an altogether different, non-physical, kind of light which the Sufis call the Nur aqil, the "light of intelligence."
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The Sufis distinguish between the "light that sees" and the "light that is seen."
Hazrat Inayat Khan:
| One direction is the light that sees, the other is the light that is seen, and the third is the light that shows all things.
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Identify yourself with your intelligence that adumbrates your aura and subtle body and physical body that are infrastructures. This is what is meant by the "light upon a light" in the Qur'an Sharif. Identify with luminous intelligence—the witness in the heavens—and illuminate your eyes with that non-physical light.
Qur'an:
God is the light of the heavens and the earth,
He is likened to a niche in which a lamp is burning.
This lamp is in a crystal,
Likened unto a starry pearl,
Which hails from a blessed tree,
An olive tree that neither is of the East or the West
Whose oil burns without even touching the fire.
It is a light upon a light.
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Ibn 'Arabi:
| Were it not for the light that belongs to the souls, there could be no witnessing, since witnessing only takes place when two lights come together.
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| The object of vision which is the Real, is light, while that through which the perceiver perceives Him is light. Hence light becomes included in light. It is as it returns to the root from which it became manifest.
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| As long as I am not a light, I cannot perceive anything of this knowledge.
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