Highlights

One of the most powerful guiding images of the intellectual and spiritual life in the West has been light.

the light came generally come to be understood as illuminating the things of the world -- where there is light, or when we (knowing subjects) find ways to access light, we can then see the more world clearly and truly.

This image of light has shaped our religious (and actually also our non-religious) understandings of in what consists salvation -- that is to say how we achieve a sense of meaning, harmony and belonging to God and/or Nature.

Outside the Bible the locus classicus of this image is for us, of course, Plato's _Republic _(Book 7) in which he offers us his famous metaphors of the cave and the sun.

But I say that our culture was once upon a time able to deliver over to me something that we might call an assured knowing of all reality because this story was also supposed to offer us assurance that this present world -- which we often felt to be shadowy, confused and apparently imperfect in so many ways -- was grounded, underwritten and given meaning and genuine substance by another transcendent clear, coherent and perfect world. Thanks to light -- whether Christ/God or reason -- we were assured that somehow (in prayer or the practice of the empirical sciences) we were able to "turn around" and see this more perfect more real world of God and/or Nature -- we could 'cash' this shadowy world for the pure gold of Heaven, the really real world.

But the power of this metaphor relied upon the idea that reality included human minds were able to receive accurate representations of the world out there. External reality was understood to impress itself upon the mind rather like a seal is able to impress its image upon soft wax. The impression the mind receives is not the original but there was -- when you believed this picture of reality -- a very precise and accurate relationship between the world and my mind's representation of it.

The trouble is that for a number of reasons, both scientific and philosophical, we late twentieth and early twenty-first-century Westerners have slowly been discovering that we can nowhere produce the original of the world to be able to encash this metaphor at any level other than the everyday and commonsensical. After Nietzsche in philosophy and after Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg et. al. in scientific circles it became increasingly apparent that there is no way we can observe the world from outside -- there is no view-from-nowhere. In all kinds of ways we have begun to understand that we always-already-are-in-the-world and have discovered that it is not possible to separate us as knowing subjects (soft wax) from the world of things (seals).

The word 'light' in German is (das) Licht but Licht also means 'clear'. From it we get the word die Lichtung which means a 'clearing'. Heidegger noticed this and he used to gesture towards another way we live with (use) the image of light (and also, therefore, clearing).

Without the light there could be no seeing, but without first the clearing there could be no confluence of light to make that seeing possible. And now think of that clearing as an event rather than as an enduring feature of the landscape; hear the word "clearing" as a gerund rather than as a noun. In that clearing-event whatever appears, appears. The clearing (clear-ing) gathers the light in virtue of which whatever is seen -- the thing -- can be seen for what it is' (James C. Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things, Penn State Press 1996, p. 181).

For those minded to follow this thought up there are powerful resonances here with Zen Buddhist thinking. As Shunryu Suzuki reminds us Dogen-zenji once said "every activity is a flashing into the vast phenomenal world. Each existence is another expression of the quality of being itself" (Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Weatherhill, Boston 2009, p. 104).

The light/clearing is not an object of knowledge but an event that includes you and everything else flashing into the vast universe.

What is required for_ us_ to 'know' the world now is (or so it seems to me and many others) for us to engage in some kind of sustained, disciplined, embodied mindful practice. Mindfulness Meditation, Chi Kung - or Zhan zhuang 站桩) and Sitting Meditation are my own preferred practices -- there are others of course.

I am minded to use the metaphor as Christ being the light of the world as an encouraging expression of this embodied practice in which a person reveals him or herself (and therefore all beings) to be a light/clearing that is "a flashing into the vast universe" and which makes it possible for anything at all to appear.

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References

Brown, Andrew James. “Imagine a Clearing into Which the Light Pours.” Caute, 6 Sept. 2010, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2010/09/imagine-clearing-into-which-light-pours_06.html.