The Stature of Being is Light

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The Stature of Being is Light

    Kate Parrot:  It is a real blessing to gather together this morning and to say a few words to you. I would like to focus our attention this morning on the luminous quality of life. We are naturally attracted to and responsive to radiance. We notice when a person exudes radiance, in that light literally comes out of them, particularly from the eyes. We translate radiance into metaphors that involve references to light. When our minds are illumined with knowledge, we say that we light up with an idea. We notice that pregnant women glow with a radiant quality. We notice too the luminosity of other forms of life. For instance, the lettuce that comes from our local organic farm has a particularly luminous quality. The green of the leaves exudes an abundance of life spirit, which has been generated by the accurate expression of the farmer who planted and nurtured the crop and produced those radiant, green leaves.

    Mostly human beings are drawn to other luminous beings without knowing why. With refinement of our own substance we become more sensitive to what precisely it is that is so attractive to us. This refinement involves recognizing the qualities of our own luminosity of Being, which is natural and inherent in each of us, part of our own true nature. Then choosing to express that luminosity at all times, in all places, under all circumstances as best as we know how. The key there is that choice factor, of choosing to express that luminosity.

    I'd like to read a short passage from a text on a kind of Buddhist teaching called Dzogchen, which is part of the oldest lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, originating in about the eighth century. Dzogchen was historically a secret and esoteric kind of teaching, typically taught to practitioners of Buddhism who squirreled themselves away in caves for many years of practice, sometimes twenty or thirty years of preparatory practice. Nowadays a number of Buddhist teachers and masters are teaching Dzogchen more freely and texts are more widely available because it is felt that these modern times call for the spread of this kind of knowledge. This text is from a book called The Golden Letter, with translation and commentary by John Reynolds:

    "Dzogchen involves no practices or rules. It does not involve concerted effort like bodybuilding, a kind of mental muscle development, nor the acquisition of some skill that we do not at present possess. Rather it is a matter of relaxing all our tensions and rigidities of body, speech and mind that cause disturbances and distractions. It is a state of being totally relaxed but totally alert. Having relaxed our tensions totally, this allows what is already present from the very beginning to manifest of itself freely and spontaneously. It is all very simple, almost too simple. That is why it is not easily understood."

    So one might ask, what are the qualities of what is already naturally present that we can express freely when we abide in this relaxed and aware state? We could also say, what is the Tone that we experience as our own conscious expression of Life? We can come to know the qualities of Life as a ceaseless, creative, intelligent movement driven by the energy of Love. The experience of spontaneous self-expression, which one could call the Tone of Life, is luminous radiation. It is the light-filled expression of life in and through each one of us. Even right now we can put our collective attention on these qualities of the current of Life, which each of us knows through our own inner experience and which we are focusing and magnifying collectively right now.

    The Dzogchen teachings describe the quality of Being as having three aspects. First, an open spaciousness and profound silence or stillness. Second, a clear luminosity. Third, an all-pervasive inexhaustible energy. It is the second, the quality of luminosity, that I would like to emphasize: "Everything that arises as manifest phenomena, consisting of sounds, lights and rays, whether with pure vision on our part or impure vision, is part of one's own potentiality, the manifesting of the energy of one's intrinsic awareness. What seems to manifest outside the individual in external space is actually what is within oneself in the internal space of the individual. This inner light represents the inherent, translucent radiance of one's own primordial state."

    So the opportunity that each of us has is to become increasingly familiar and intimate with the qualities of this internal radiance, or inner light, to recognize that the luminosity that we experience in the world around us-the glow of the pregnant woman or the radiance of the organic leaves of lettuce-is actually an expression of our own inner luminosity. It is the same luminosity, and we can choose to express this moment by moment as we relax into the true expression of Being. It seems almost too simple, and at the same time immediately recognizable as inherently true, part of our birthright, and the true purpose of our living

    Bill Isaacs:  The true expression of living is light. We've been considering the nature of identity and its vastness, its over-arching presence in every aspect of Being, every cell, every atom, every organism. As the consideration of identity expands, vision expands. The light comes on. The light, of course, is shining throughout already, but what has been missing in human beings has been a perception of it. The cosmos is already filled. The question is, what is the nature of our experience and perception?

    I wanted to begin with a passage, a familiar one, from one of the Psalms:

    When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet. (Psalm 8:3-6).

    The true stature of man is light. As we come in humility to begin to rediscover this immense stature, not only individually but all together, we begin to participate consciously again in the re-creative processes of life. The stature of human beings has not been particularly large. What is considered stature tends to have more to do for most people, and I'm sure at times anyway, to most of us, with form, the accumulation of form, of things.

    Perhaps it has also had to do with the accumulation of thoughts. I remember a professor of mine from Oxford years ago who said glowingly, "A good student is one with a well-stocked mind." At the time that struck me as problematic! I was endeavoring to "unstock" my mind in order to begin to be perceptive to something else. The stock of knowledge has been a measure of stature for human beings. But as we have been reflecting, knowing has something to do not with looking into form, but listening to the vibrational ranges emerging out of the invisible.

    The mind of human beings, of humanity, has become involved in this immediate range of things. It is a little bit like falling into the movie screen. As Kate was indicating, what we see is a projection of what is within us. To the degree that we are blended in form, we tend to recycle a certain range of experience and there appears therefore no way out. As we know, our experience can shift as our mind is restored, reattuned to this invisible flow.

    Most of the thinking that human beings do is individual. But in fact, the Whole is thinking. It is interesting to pause for a moment to feel the rhythm of the Whole thinking. There is a grandeur to it, an ease, and an immensity and simplicity at the same time. Participating in these ranges is exciting and does involve a certain kind of emptying out. Much of the time we are busy managing logistics, working at the level of coordinating forms. We don't make much space to participate with the ranges where you could say we really belong. As a result, the translation of the invisible through us is disturbed, or partial. There is huge power in all this.

    Recently reports following the oil spill in the Gulf (which has had a disturbing effect on many people and certainly on the environment) have remarked that somehow a great deal of the oil, which is one of the largest spills ever, has simply disappeared. There is some debate as to whether it is dispersed into incredibly small and hard to detect molecules or has just evaporated. But the general consensus emerging is that a good portion of it, perhaps as much as half or even three quarters of it, has evaporated or is in the process of being consumed by bacteria. There is no doubt some of it is going to collect and do damage; but for the scale of disturbance that was anticipated, the level of immediacy of recovery and the speed of it has been almost shocking.

    Whether this proves out or not, all this did strike me as a symbol of the pollution in human consciousness. There is always the question of how it could ever all be dealt with. There seems often to more of it than can be handled. Some of this pollution is at the level of physical substance, but there are other ranges as well.

    We've been speaking over the last few weeks about the nature of thought. Thoughts are things. What is interesting about thought is that thought accumulates. It doesn't just disappear. All of us are subject to, and are participating in, the accumulative thoughts of human consciousness. It takes some doing to disentangle oneself and begin to rise out of all that. I'm always curious how we can see young children-in conflict-ridden places like the West Bank or once upon a time in Northern Ireland-embodying almost instantly the emotional and mental patterns of stereotyping of the other side. They are simply being imprinted with these thought patterns. Much of this is acting upon us all the time, sometimes unwittingly. It is an interesting question, how can all of this be deconditioned?

    The radiance of the Sun seems to have had something to do with the rapid evaporation of the oil in the Gulf. I think the same principle applies to the collective pollution, the collective thought of human beings. To bathe the thoughts and feelings we have in a radiant Tone that emerges from us, swallows and transforms these factors. All of that is no match for the radiation.

    Activating more and more of this collective circuitry in which we all are participating I suspect has a multiplier effect on this reconditioning process. Ultimately, all of it is experienced within me, within each of us holographically-one whole transforming energy.

    The quest to understand how to function has been a longstanding one for human beings. This relates to the notion of true knowing, the emergence of true understanding. There is a longstanding myth that twenty-three hundred years ago, a library was constructed in Egypt-the Library of Alexandria. In this library supposedly were gathered all the books of the world, all the scrolls, treatises, texts. There are conflicting reports about how much was gathered there. Some suggest the scrolls numbered in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. One story was that the scrolls were collected from their origin, copied, and then the copies sent back to their owners. There are even more esoteric stories about wisdom accumulated there from very ancient sources. Then sometime around 50 B.C. the Library was destroyed by fire, and all the grand halls, listening rooms, and places for speaking and viewing vanished. The idea that there was once a place that did accumulate all knowledge, all the wisdom of the world, and then that it somehow was lost, has been a source of disturbance.

    I think this quest for knowledge accumulated in a single place is a symbol of how human beings have imagined knowledge works. We have the equivalent today in Google. I heard recently that in 2006 there were 2.7 billion searches per month on Google. This past year there were 31 billion searches per month. Someone quipped, "To whom were all these questions asked Before Google?" (B.G.)

    The real issue lies somewhat deeper. The true libraries of Alexandria do exist, but they are the window of Being itself. Access to all knowledge is not a function of accumulating facts, but of letting the flow of Being move through us. Absolute knowledge is already present. It doesn't need to be collected or accumulated. We already participate in it-conveniently, only in the portion and measure that we need right now.

    The transformation of understanding emerges as identity lifts out of the range of form and the accumulation of things and of thoughts, and into the radiance, the luminosity of Being. There is a true science at this level also, one that had been lost and is only just beginning to reemerge into awareness. The Libraries of Alexandria were merely an echo of the cosmic reality of absolute knowledge that never left, and in which we are actually meant to participate. Our job at the moment is to regenerate the substance that gives us the library card, the access, to the already existing flows of fine substance at every level everywhere. Clearly this substance is not all the same. The diversity of form that we see is mirrored, or barely mirrors, the vast diversity of invisible vibrational form, a mere fraction, I suspect, of what is actually present.

    What is Man, that thou art mindful of him? Mankind is the consciousness of the Archangel, of Being, and is meant to function with true stature, the stature of light. It is our birthright and our remarkable opportunity to allow preoccupations with other ranges to dissipate, and let the full window of understanding be opened. It is not that we leave the earth, but participate in the earth with the experience and perception of the realms of light.

    I am very grateful that I have the opportunity, along with all of us, to recondition and shift the accumulated inheritance that has been consistently mistranslating experience. As that happens, the shifts, and the speed with which those shifts occur, can be surprising. And at the same time the experience is quite natural, acceptable. It is a great joy to be able to participate with all of you in this way.