What Is The "Light" Of Enlightenment? And How To Put It To Use!
Article by Carol E. McMahon, Ph.D.
We've all heard of it. Many have seen it. It's the light seen in deep meditation - the "light" of enlightenment. Its meaning to us has been symbolic. "Seeing the light;" "opening your eyes," and "awakening" are figures of speech, but we've been wrong here. There's more to this light than we realize. Understand its source and you can put it use; advance practice skill, and guide yourself straight to advanced meditation's great benefits. Here's what you need to know.
What Is The Light Of Enlightenment?
It can look as if a light turned on, brightening the room. "White light" has been reported. Major breakthrough to enlightenment is described as "ten suns shining." Such light might seem mystical, even imaginary, but it's an actual sensation. What causes it?
What Causes The Sensation Of Light?
The cause of the light will surprise you: it is attention. It works like this.
In eyes-open meditation (Zen practice for instance), good attention holds the eyes still. This creates a fixed retinal image that uses up photo pigment (like exposed photographic film), causing visual distortion in the form of light. Thus the light has a physical cause, and more importantly, you can produce it voluntarily with focused attention. You can produce it and use it to monitor attention - to 'see where you are going' and thus advance your practice. This is the new, highly efficient "feedback meditation" method - a power tool that sharpens with use and cuts through everything. Produce and make use of this light and you're guided in a straight line to your goal.
Guided By The Light - Guidance Better Than A Guru?
The guidance offered by the light is "feedback" - something psychologists know to be necessary for skill learning. The skill meditation requires is attention. Attention makes meditation work. The more focused and sustained your attention, the more benefit you gain.
Put another way: the less your mind wanders the more you benefit. Using the light as feedback you can hold! on to a ttention. (It's like having a built-in Guru monitor every moment of your meditation for accuracy.) The light tells you you're on target. Its disappearance alerts you to drifting away. Light provides the information you need for success. With the feedback method you produce and use it. Here's how it's done.
How To Produce Light
First you need a focusing point - a target for attention. A pea size bull's eye on a two inch round of paper will do (or even a spot on the floor). Specially designed discs that help create light, however (Focusing Discs), are freely available at the Straight Line Meditation website.
Place your disc on the floor; sit erect, and simply focus with a gentle gaze on the bull's eye. When distortion (light) appears, shift your attention to that. Hold on as you'd hold on to an anchor. Light anchors attention - assuring you meditation's "active ingredient." Here's how to use the light.
How To Use Light
It's been said "Go into the light." Beware this advice since it lets your mind wander. You'll soon lose feedback - your anchor for attention. Hold on to the light and it guides you straight to meditation's great benefits.
How The Light Guides You
The key to success is knowing this: when your mind wanders, your eyes wander and the light disappears. That's your (feedback) signal to get back on target. Return to the bull's eye; focus attention on the halo of light and re-anchor attention. With light to guide you, you'll never again be helpless in the face of a wandering mind. Build Concentration With Feedback
Without feedback, practice skill - your power of concentration develops slowly (if at all). Thus enlightenment is rare. Light guides the growth of your practice skill. Use feedback and you'll "see the light" in more ways than one.
About the AuthorAuthor Carol E. McMahon, Ph.D. (and contributor: Master Deac Cataldo), cordially invite you to sample enlightenment self-tests (http://www.TheBestWayToMeditate.com/EnlightenmentTests.aspx), and enjoy free use of Focusing Discs that assure instant success (http://www.StraightLineMeditation.com/FocusingDiscs.aspx). Visit our sites and discover meditation's true power.
Siddhar Baba Nataraj: Beyond Enlightenment
Enlightenment (Reis)
2008 newly remastered sound and expanded packaging including lyrics of Enlightenment, an album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison, released in 1990. It reached No. 5 on the UK charts. Exile/Polydor releases this album as part of a batch of two of the four catalogue reissues of Morrison's albums dated from 1971 through 2002. In "Enlightenment" Van once again ruminates on spiritual matters, but this is probably the most sober and matter-of-fact expression of his personal struggle toward understanding that he has ever offered. "I'm in the here and now and I'm meditating / But still I'm suffering," Morrison admits, "But that's my problem."Its title seems squarely in the pilgrim's camp, where much of Van Morrison's '80s music dwells, but 1990's Enlightenment offsets new glimpses of Morrison's oft-sought Avalon ("Avalon of the Heart") with darker confessions of human frailty and challenged faith. The opening "Real Real Gone" belies its hard-charging R&B verve (a welcome return to high-octane soul after his relatively becalmed, then-recent work) with admissions of weakness, and even the lyrical title song reveals confusion more than salvation. A few years later, such defeats might have prompted one of his crankier outbursts, but this set is brightened by the joyful reminiscences of "Youth of 1,000 Summers" and the epic "In the Days Before Rock 'n' Roll," in which Morrison's declamatory fervor is matched by poet Paul Durcan. The latter song is a gloriously apt Morrison moment, exulting in Little Richard as though he walked the same astral plane as William Blake--which, in Morrison's world, is exactly the point. --Sam Sutherland
Comments
Post a Comment