Light

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” — Jesus Christ

“For thousands of years philosophers in China, India, and the West have given utterance to a thought which is everywhere and at all times the same, though diverse in its expression: man can transcend the subject-object dichotomy and achieve a total union of subject and object, in which all objectness vanishes and the I is extinguished. Then authentic Being opens up to us, leaving behind it, as we awaken from our trance, a consciousness of profound and inexhaustible meaning. For him who has experienced it, this becoming One is the true awakening, and the awakening to consciousness in the subject-object dichotomy is more in the nature of sleep.” — Karl Jaspers

“The heart is the dwelling place of God; or, in another words, the heart is the mirror in which God reflects Himself. But this mirror must be polished by constant asceticism and constant acts of loving submission until all dust and rust have disappeared from its surface, and only then will it be able to reflect the eternal divine Light.” — Annemarie Schimmel

“Theosis is from the guard of the mind that he is raised to contemplation by the grace of God. The hesychast usually experiences the contemplation of God as light, the “uncreated light” of the theology of St. Gregory Palamas. … The uncreated light that the hesychast experiences is identified with the Holy Spirit. Experiences of the uncreated light are allied to the ‘acquisition of the Holy Spirit’.” — Wikipedia

“O nobly born, the time has now come for thee to seek the Path. Thy breathing is about to cease. In the past thy teacher hath set thee face to face with the сlear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the Bardo state…” — The Tibetan Book of the Dead

“In Tantric Buddhism there is a idea that every dying individual experiences awakening and contemplates the infinite clear Light of dharmakāya identical with his true Nature. The consolidation (which almost no one can achieve) of this experience means the attainment of buddhahood and the liberation from saṃsāra.” — Eugene Torchinov

“The clear Light is beyond ordinary consciousness; it is the ultimate nature of consciousness, the essence of [Transcendence] (śūnyatā), and the supreme source of all that exists.” — The Tibetan Book of the Dead

“The nature of consciousness, clear Light, is present in everyone. It is a pure state of being, always there, underlying everything else.” — Chögyam Trungpa

“There was no body or anything inside or outside. I was devoid of self, of thought, of time, of space, of a sense of separateness or ego, or of anything but the white Light. There are no symbols in my language that can begin to describe that sense of pure being, oneness, and ecstasy.” — Prof. Rick Strassman’s experiments anonymous volunteer

“[S]itting with my physical eyes closed, my inner eye moved through a beautiful spiralic tunnel. The walls of the tunnel seemed like a living iridescent mother-of-pearl, and it felt like a spiritual rebirth canal. I was in the darkness, spiraling toward the Light. The Light was God, infinite love and wisdom at the core of all being and reality. I had met the Ultimate Mystery and it gave me a reason to live.” — Alex Grey

“I saw how the white Light is all there is, and that this world is just shadows and plays of Light.” — Prof. Rick Strassman’s experiments anonymous volunteer

“How can one describe, as other than oneself, that which, when one saw it, seemed to be one with oneself? This is no doubt why in the [Eleusinian] Mysteries we are forbidden to reveal them to the uninitiated.” — Plotinus

A few months after my near-death experience, I had a dream. In this dream, I was sitting on a sofa in the living room of my apartment, my stomach was ripped open, everything hurt and burned there, I was bleeding, the heavy agony had completely taken over me, I was drenched in cold sweat, breathing heavily and realizing that it was the end. Somewhere far away, as if a thousand kilometers away from me, someone was calling 911 and shouting into the phone in a terrible voice that I was dying. My wandering gaze stopped at the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, its lamps shined brightly, the light refracted repeatedly in the faceted pieces of crystal, and this glow, idle and mundane, seemed completely disproportionate to what was happening to me. But suddenly, when my suffering had reached an unbearable limit, through this electric light I saw a very different — alive — light, which had always been there as if behind a veil and now began to break through to me, into me. Bright and pure white Light of absolute truth, freedom, love and beauty. Perfection. And the brighter it shone through the veil of electric light, the clearer I felt that this Light was actually shining from my heart, that it was my true Self. The suffering was fading, the Light was becoming brighter and brighter, everything around me was dissolving in it, I myself was dissolving in it — everything I knew about myself and what I thought I was. And at the last line I suddenly realized that this was not a dream, I became afraid of losing my individual self forever, and in this fear I “woke up”.

“At a distance you only see my Light. Come closer and know that I am You.” — Rumi