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The experience of sacred light can be found in all the world's great religious traditions. Perhaps the most famous example in the West of this phenomenon was the biblical account of Saint Paul's vision of light that occurred while he was on the road to Damascus (Acts 9).
Mircea Eliade, the historian of religions, writes in his thematic study of comparative religion The Two and the One:
Now all experiences of the supernatural light present this common denominator: anyone receiving such an experience undergoes a change of being: he acquires another mode of being which gives him access to the world of the spirit ... even in a Far-Westerner of the nineteenth century, a meeting with the light indicates a spiritual rebirth.
Experience of the sacred light when perceived in sufficient depth radically alters the world view of the experiencer. The following paragraph from Richard C. Bucke's 1901 classic book Cosmic Consciousness attempts to explain this altered view of the universe:
Like a flash there is presented to his consciousness a clear conception (a vision) in outline of the meaning and drift of the universe. He does not come to believe merely; but he sees and knows that the cosmos, which to the Self Conscious mind seems made up of dead matter, is in fact far otherwise - is in very truth a living presence. He sees that instead of men being, as it were, patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of nonliving substance, they are in reality specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life. He sees that the life which is within man is eternal; that the soul of man is as immortal as God is; that the universe is so built and ordered that without any preadventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle for the world is what we call love, and that the happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain. The person who passes through this experience will learn in a few minutes, or even moments, of its continuance more than in months and years of study, and he will learn much that no study ever taught or can teach. Especially does he obtain such a conception of the whole, or least of an immense whole, as dwarfs all conception, imagination, or speculation, springing from or belonging to ordinary Self Consciousness, such a conception as makes the old attempts to mentally grasp the universe and its meaning petty and even ridiculous.
The following set of experiences show some ways in which the sacred light is encountered during spiritual travel. Each illustrates how people encounter ecstatic states where they lose contact with the physical senses and enter entirely into another space which is one of the defining characteristics of spiritual travel.
From: The writings of Bistami, a Sufi Mystic:
While I was asleep, it seemed to me that I ascended to the Heavens in quest of God, seeking union with God most glorious, so that I might abide with Him forever, and I was tested by trial - God displayed before me gifts of all kinds, and offered me dominion over the whole heaven and yet I turned aside my eyes from this ... Then I ascended to the Second heaven and saw winged angles who fly a hundred thousand times each day to the earth to look upon the saints of God, and their faces shone like the sun ... An when God Most High realized the sincerity of my desire to seek Him, He turned me into a bird, and I went flying, past kingdom after kingdom, and screen after screen, and plane after plane, seas after seas, veils after veils, until behold, the angel of the Footstool of God met me with a pillar of light and said to me "Take it" and I took it, and lo, the heavens and all that were therein sought refuse in the shadow of my gnosis, and sought light in the light of my longing, yet all the angels seemed but as a gnat compared with the all-absorbing concern with the search for God. So I continued to fly, until I reached the Footstool of God, and lo, was met by angels, whose eyes were as the number of stars in the heavens, and from each eye shone forth light, and those lights became lamps, and I heard sounding forth from each lamp, "Glory to God", and "There is no God but God". Then I went on flying until I arrived at a sea of light, with waves beating against one another, and besides it, the light of the sun would seem dark, and upon the sea were ships of light, compared with which the light of those waters appeared to be darkness. I continued to cross seas upon seas, until I reached the greatest of seas, upon which stands the throne of the All-Merciful, and I went on swimming therein, until I beheld, looking from the Empyrean to the earth beneath, the Cherubim and those who bore the Throne of all whom God has created in Heaven and Earth, as less than a mustard seed floating between the Heavens and the earth, in comparison with the flight of my spirit in the quest for God. And when the Most Glorious perceived the sincerity of my desire to seek Him, He called to me and said: 'Oh my chosen one, approach onto me, and ascend to the heights of my glory, and the planes of my splendor, and sit upon the carpet of my holiness, so that thou may see the the work of my grace in my appointed time. Thou art My chosen, and My beloved, and My elect among the creatures'. And I began to melt away at that, as lead melts (in the heat of the fire). Then He gave me to drink from the Fountain of Grace in the Cup of Fellowship, and transformed me into a state beyond description, and brought me near unto Him, and so near did He bring me that I became nearer to Him than the spirit to the body. And I continued thus until I became even as souls of men had been in the state before existence was, and God abode in solitude apart, without created existence or space or direction or mode of being, may His glory be exalted and his Names sanctified.
From: The Tiger's Fang by Paul Twitchell:
Paul Twitchell, The Tiger's Fang (Menlo Park: The Illuminated Way Press, 1978), pps. 109-110
Then I saw it. You might say it was a mirage, a hallucination, a trick of this world. But then I did see it. The light of God! It was standing above all in the center of the world; the light was fuzzy, shiny and bright, not too bright, just enough. It hung in the center of the landscape within the empty space of this world, a great mass of light, so immense that I cannot describe it, gleaming in the gulf of space. While watching it I began to pray, not in words but in impressions. The scene passed and I felt myself moving gradually, a motion of going into something, a flowing like water. That is the closest description I can give. In a sense I was the same fluid as an atom of spirit. Yet it was motionless with an impression of watching, feeling the flow and the deep motion in every fiber of myself. The impulse went through me that the journey had ended. This was living in God. The music was keened, high and thin, as if coming from within myself. There was no seeing, no hearing, no feeling, just the knowledge that I was part of the absolute - just the intelligence that has power and freedom. Freedom! Yes, this was it. I never had this before. This was wonderful; the freedom to move as desired anywhere at any time. Then I knew that it wasn't the music that was heard but a suspension above me like an almost palpable thing; it faded, spiraled upward and became a part of the sound. Again it was there. It was the softest sound of breathing. I waited. "Who is there?" I sent out the vibratory command. The wave hung in the either. it moved out and came back like a bolt from space but I shook it off and waited. The light became very strong around me and I knew I was standing in the center of it, suspended in space, an atom within the light atoms; there was no distinguishing them. Nothing! That is all I can say! Nothing! I was part of that cloud of light, a flaming robe around me in the center of this blinding light. Something entered into my heart, and there was flaming bliss, a glorious light that was the devotion, the adoration, aspiration, reverence, the glory of God, and the divine grace which all writers speak about when becoming one with God. I stood in the center of a mighty, gigantic light, with the current throbbing and pulsing through me.
From: The Seventh Story Mountain by Thomas Merton
Quoted in Burnham's The Ecstatic Journey, (Ballantine Books, 1997), p. 199
But what a thing it was, this awareness, it was so intangible, and yet it struck me like a thunderclap. It was a light that was so bright that it had no relation to visible light and so profound and so intimate that it seemed like a neutralization of every lesser experience. And yet the thing that struck me most of all was that this light was in a certain sense ordinary - it was a light (and this was most of all what took my breath away) - that was offered to all, to everybody, and there was nothing fancy or strange about it. It was the light of faith deepened and reduced to an extreme and sudden obviousness.
From: Autobiography of a Yogi
Paramahamsa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship, 1974), pps. 109
Master possessed a transforming power; at his touch a great light broke upon my being, like a glory of countless blazing suns together. A flood of ineffable bliss overwhelmed my heart to the innermost core. It was late in the afternoon of the following day before I could bring myself to leave the hermitage.
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