Spirituality & Light - What/Why the connection?

Interesting heard this in a Sci-Fi show...something is happening culturally, or so I think...

"As we float from the shore
 Into the light
 Into the unknown
 Like thousands of lanterns 
 Glowing with grace
 In glorious silence
 Descending through space
 To a friend"


"After a storm
I wanna let go
Of the things that I’ve done
Without any worry
I wanna come home
Into the light
Into the unknown
I want to be shameless
Like the sun
Moving into you
Enter light"

Addition to the above thinking about all the religious aspects of the BSG remake, including their opening which also involved light:





"The eternal, earth, air, heaven
That glory, that resplendence of the sun
May we contemplate the brilliance of that light
May the sun inspire our minds."
 -Gayatri Mantra

More on the Gayatri mantra ->

The Gayatri mantra first appeared in the Rig Veda, an early Vedic text written between 1800 and 1500 BCE. It is mentioned in the Upanishads as an important ritual and in the Bhagavad Gita as the poem of the Divine. According to Douglas Brooks, PhD, a professor of religion at the University of Rochester and a teacher in the Rajanaka yoga tradition, the Gayatri is the most sacred phrase uttered in the Vedas. "It doesn't get more ancient, more sacred, than this. It's an ecstatic poetic moment."

The mantra is a hymn to Savitur, the sun god. According to Brooks, the sun in the mantra represents both the physical sun and the Divine in all things. "The Vedic mind doesn't separate the physical presence of the sun from its spiritual or symbolic meaning," he says.

Tying into this topic of Light and how it penetrates a certain side of Science Fiction, the actor who played Spock - Leonard Nimoy - was fascinated by - Shekhina - the Divine feminine of Judaic mysticism. He had a book about it:

The title comes from the feminine Hebrew word shekhinah, meaning the glory or radiance of God, or God's presence.

More from the man himself:

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far beyond the road I have begun,
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has an inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
 ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

=-=-=

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
 ~ Rilke

"The concept of this dimension of light, an archetypal dimension because it grounds every being in another self which keeps eternally ahead of him,can provide us with the key to a celestial world inhabited by figures who are constituted and governed in their being by a law of their own, a law with its very own logic. The responses we have just read refer to the twofold plane or twofold state of being which characterizes Mazdean ontology,and which is designated by the two terms menok and getik. We must take care not to reduce the contrast they express to a Platonic schema pure and simple. We are not dealing precisely with an opposition between idea and matter, or between the universal and the perceptible. Menok should, rather,be translated by a celestial, invisible, spiritual, but perfectly concrete state.Getik designates an earthly visible, material state, but of a matter which is in itself wholly luminous, a matter immaterial in relation to the matter that we actually know. For, and this is the peculiarly Mazdean conception,a transition to the state of getik means in itself not a fall but rather fulfillment and plenitude. The state of infirmity, of lesser being and darkness represented by the present condition of the material world, results not from its material condition as such but from the fact that it is the zone invaded by the demonic Contrary Powers, the arena of struggle and also the prize.


Here the stranger to this creation is not the God of Light but the Principle of Darkness. Redemption will bring the flowering of the 'tan i pasen', the"body to come," the corpus resurrection is; it does not tend to destroy the getik world, but to restore it to its luminous state, its archetypal dimension."
-Henri Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis

Light in the world, world in the mind
Mind in the heart, heart in the night
Pain in the day, strength in the pain
Light in the strength, world in the light
- Owen Barfield

Fruit in a blossom and petals in a seed
Reeds in a riverbed, music in a reed
Stars in a firmament shining in the night
Sun in a galaxy and planet in its light
Bones in the rosy blood like land in a sea
Marrow in a skeleton and I in me
- Owen Barfield 

Seeing the above poems got to me look at Owen Barfield's commentary on Light & Consciousness:

The Light of the World

Here again, in the case of the Light Ether, we get that special emphasis – of the principle within its own principle. Light Ether is the etheric in the etheric. Without going into the question how far it is possible to call any part of light “physical”, I suppose, then, we are not far astray, if we think of this light from the sun that comes flooding in on us through our eyes, when we wake in the morning, as a sort of gateway through which our consciousness can enter into an experience of the etheric world – if we think of light as, shall I say, the etheric par excellence. And that is why I begin by considering our experience of light from this point of view, by considering our experience of the etheric cosmos.

We must, however, distinguish experience of the etheric from ideas we may from about the etheric before we have any experience. These ideas are likely to be – in my case they certainly were – not truly ideas about the etheric at all, but only ideas about the effects of the etheric in the physical. I well remember reading about the etheric body in Rudolf Steiner’s book Theosophy, and getting from there the idea of the “formative forces” of which it is composed, and which keep the living physical bodies of plants and animals and men from collapsing like dead bodies. I thought of growing plants and, insensibly, there formed itself in my mind the picture of a kind of swelling, an expanding or inflating force – something like what happens when you blow up a bicycle tyre! This really remained with me for years, and I was often much troubled by various allusions to the etheric in other contexts – lectures and so forth – which did not seem to square with it. Particularly, when I was told that the etheric forces work inward from the periphery. This seemed to suggest that my previous imagination contained the opposite of the truth, and that I ought really to be thinking, not of expansion from within, but rather a kind of suction from without. But of course that was no nearer the truth; because I was really thinking all the time, not of etheric forces but of physical forces.

It is indeed very difficult for minds – trained, as ours have mostly been, to assume that there is nothing between a physical force, at one extreme, and an abstract idea at the other – to learn to imagine, or to realize in experience, something which is a force, and yet not a physical force; something whose influence is inward from the periphery, not outward from the centre; and yet which works upon that centre expansively and not contractingly. But when one has overcome this obstacle, at least in some degree; when one has begun, in some dim way, to realize the etheric as etheric, then one begins to move forward into a kind of new and more intimate relationship with the world of plants. One begins, for instance, to feel, like a sort of tenderness in one’s own heart, the infinite delicacy and tenderness that hovers about the growing point of the commonest weed. And at the same time – or it may well be later – it may come about that one will begin to feel a new, and again an intimate, relation with the light itself. One begins to perceive, or rather to feel, that the light itself – this light from the sum that comes to us through the senses – is etheric and that the etheric is a kind of light.

From Physics of the World Soul by M. Segall

For ancient poets like Homer, the Sun was a being of tremendous spiritual significance. The intense beauty of its rising and setting brought forth a dramatic display of the abiding moral and aesthetic harmony driving the cosmos. For ancient philosophers like Plato, the sun was similarly a sign of the highest Good, but its visible light was thought to be only partially responsible for the shower of colors drenching Earth and Sky.

Participating in the sunlit phenomena of the outer world was an inner noumenal light emanating from the eyes. Plato suggested that his inner light flows gently outward through the eyes from a psychic fire kindred to that animating the Sun. It meets and coalesces with the light of the Sun (or at night, with the Moon and other stars) to bring forth the beauty and splendor of the universe. Plato's was a participatory account of our knowledge of Nature wherein soul and world were understood to intermingle in each act of perception.

“Hermes bowed his head in thankfulness to the Great Dragon who had taught him so much, and begged to hear more concerning the ultimate of the human soul. So Poimandres resumed: "At death the material body of man is returned to the elements from which it came, and the invisible divine man ascends to the source from whence he came, namely the Eighth Sphere...

"Then, being naked of all the accumulations of the seven Rings, the soul comes to the Eighth Sphere, namely, the ring of the fixed stars. Here, freed of all illusion, it dwells in the Light and sings praises to the Father in a voice which only the pure of spirit may understand.

Behold, O Hermes, there is a great mystery in the Eighth Sphere, for the Milky Way is the seed-ground of souls, and from it they drop into the Rings, and to the Milky Way they return again from the wheels of Saturn. But some cannot climb the seven-runged ladder of the Rings. So they wander in darkness below and are swept into eternity with the illusion of sense and earthiness.

"The path to immortality is hard, and only a few find it. The rest await the Great Day when the wheels of the universe shall be stopped and the immortal sparks shall escape from the sheaths of substance. Woe unto those who wait, for they must return again, unconscious and unknowing, to the seed-ground of stars, and await a new beginning. Those who are saved by the light of the mystery which I have revealed unto you, O Hermes, and which I now bid you to establish among men, shall return again to the Father who dwelleth in the White Light, and shall deliver themselves up to the Light and shall be absorbed into the Light, and in the Light they shall become Powers in God. This is the Way of Good and is revealed only to them that have wisdom.”

― Thoth Hermes Trismegistus

Tolkien on Light, in his letter on why the LotR trilogy and Simarillion should be published together (can be found in the 2nd ed. of The Simarillion):

By the making of gems the sub-creative function of the Elves is chiefly symbolized, but the Silmarilli were more than just beautiful things as such. There was Light. There was the Light of Valinor made visible in the Two Trees of Silver and Gold. * These were slain by the Enemy out of malice, and Valinor was darkened, though from them, ere they died utterly, were derived the lights of Sun and Moon. (A marked difference here between these legends and most others is that the Sun is not a divine symbol, but a second-best thing, and the ‘light of the Sun’ (the world under the sun) become terms for a fallen world, and a dislocated imperfect vision).

But the chief artificer of the Elves (Fëanor) had imprisoned the Light of Valinor in the three supreme jewels, the Silmarilli, before the Trees were sullied or slain. This Light thus lived thereafter only in these gems. The fall of the Elves comes about through the possessive attitude of Fëanor and his seven sons to these gems. They are captured by the Enemy, set in his Iron Crown, and guarded in his impenetrable stronghold. The sons of Fëanor take a terrible and blasphemous oath of enmity and vengeance against all or any, even of the gods, who dares to claim any part or right in the Silmarilli. They pervert the greater part of their kindred, who rebel against the gods, and depart from paradise, and go to make hopeless war upon the Enemy. The first fruit of their fall is war in Paradise, the slaying of Elves by Elves, and this and their evil oath dogs all their later heroism, generating treacheries and undoing all victories. The Silmarillion is the history of the War of the Exiled Elves against the Enemy, which all takes place in the North-west of the world (Middle-earth). Several tales of victory and tragedy are caught up in it; but it ends with catastrophe, and the passing of the Ancient World, the world of the long First Age. The jewels are recovered (by the final intervention of the gods) only to be lost for ever to the Elves, one in the sea, one in the deeps of earth, and one as a star of heaven. This legendarium ends with a vision of the end of the world, its breaking and remaking, and the recovery of the Silmarilli and the ‘light before the Sun’ – after a final battle which owes, I suppose, more to the Norse vision of Ragnarök than to anything else, though it is not much like it.

Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Silmarillion . Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

“Hermes bowed his head in thankfulness to the Great Dragon who had taught him so much, and begged to hear more concerning the ultimate of the human soul. So Poimandres resumed: "At death the material body of man is returned to the elements from which it came, and the invisible divine man ascends to the source from whence he came, namely the Eighth Sphere...

"Then, being naked of all the accumulations of the seven Rings, the soul comes to the Eighth Sphere, namely, the ring of the fixed stars. Here, freed of all illusion, it dwells in the Light and sings praises to the Father in a voice which only the pure of spirit may understand.

Behold, O Hermes, there is a great mystery in the Eighth Sphere, for the Milky Way is the seed-ground of souls, and from it they drop into the Rings, and to the Milky Way they return again from the wheels of Saturn. But some cannot climb the seven-runged ladder of the Rings. So they wander in darkness below and are swept into eternity with the illusion of sense and earthiness.

"The path to immortality is hard, and only a few find it. The rest await the Great Day when the wheels of the universe shall be stopped and the immortal sparks shall escape from the sheaths of substance. Woe unto those who wait, for they must return again, unconscious and unknowing, to the seed-ground of stars, and await a new beginning. Those who are saved by the light of the mystery which I have revealed unto you, O Hermes, and which I now bid you to establish among men, shall return again to the Father who dwelleth in the White Light, and shall deliver themselves up to the Light and shall be absorbed into the Light, and in the Light they shall become Powers in God. This is the Way of Good and is revealed only to them that have wisdom.”

― Thoth Hermes Trismegistus

A few more interesting fragments since this is in the public domain:

Hermes, while wandering in a rocky and desolate place, gave himself over to meditation and prayer. Following the secret instructions of the Temple, he gradually freed his higher consciousness from the bondage of his bodily senses; and, thus released, his divine nature revealed to him the mysteries of the transcendental spheres. He beheld a figure, terrible and awe-inspiring. It was the Great Dragon, with wings stretching across the sky and light streaming in all directions from its body. The Great Dragon called Hermes by name, and asked him why he was meditated upon the World Mystery. Terrified by the spectacle, Hermes prostrated himself before the Dragon, asking it to reveal its identity. The great creature answered that it was Poimandres, the Mind of the Universe, the Creative Intelligence, and the Absolute Emperor of all. Hermes then asked Poimandres to disclose the nature of the universe and the constitution of the gods. The Dragon acquiesced, bidding Trismegistus hold its image in his mind.

Immediately the form of Poimandres changed. Where it had stood there was a glorious and pulsating Radiance. This Light was the spiritual nature of the Great Dragon itself. Hermes was "raised" into the midst of this Divine Effulgence and the universe of material things faded from his consciousness. Presently a great darkness descended and, expanding, swallowed up the Light. Everything was troubled. About Hermes swirled a mysterious watery substance which gave forth a smokelike vapor. The air was filled with inarticulate moanings and sighings which seemed to come from the Light swallowed up in the darkness. His mind told Hermes that the Light was the form of the spiritual universe and that the swirling darkness which had engulfed it represented material substance.

And the Word which appeared as a pillar of flame out of the darkness is the Son of God, born of the mystery of the Mind. The name of that Word is Reason. Reason is the offspring of Thought and Reason shall divide the Light from the darkness and establish Truth in the midst of the waters. Understand, O Hermes, and meditate deeply upon the mystery. That which in you see and hears is not of the earth, but is the Word of God incarnate. So it is said that Divine Light dwells in the midst of mortal darkness, and ignorance cannot divide them. The union of the Word and the Mind produces that mystery which is called Life. As the darkness without you is divided against itself, so the darkness within you is likewise divided. The Light and the fire which rise are the divine man, ascending in the path of the Word, and that which fails to ascend is the mortal man, which may not partake of immortality. Learn deeply of the Mind and its mystery, for therein lies the secret of immortality.

The Dragon again revealed its form to Hermes, and for a long time the two looked steadfastly one upon the other, eye to eye, so that Hermes trembled before the gaze of Poimandres. At the Word of the Dragon the heavens opened and the innumerable Light Powers were revealed, soaring through Cosmos on pinions of streaming fire. Hermes beheld the Spirits of the Stars, the Celestials controlling the Universe, and all those Powers which shine with the radiance of the One Fire, the glory of the Sovereign Mind. Hermes realized that the sight which he beheld was revealed to him only because Poimandres had spoken a Word. The Word was Reason, and by the Reason of the Word invisible things were made manifest. Divine Mind, the Dragon, continued its discourse:

The darkness below, receiving the hammer of the Word, was fashioned into an orderly universe. The elements separated into strata and each brought forth living creatures. The Supreme Being, the Mind, male and female, brought forth the Word; and the Word, suspended between Light and darkness, was delivered of another Mind called the Workman, the Master-Builder, or the Maker of Things.