Light

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

“The heart is the dwelling place of God; or, in another terminology, 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

“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

“As the self nature [of the Ground] is spontaneously present it transcends the [ontic] limit of a nihilistic non-existence, being the completely pure being-as-such of the empty luminous Light.” — Klong chen pa

“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.” — Rick Strassman’s DMT 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.” — Rick Strassman’s DMT 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

One night, a few months after my NDE, I had a dream:

I am sitting on the couch in my apartment, my belly is ripped open, everything hurts and burns there, I am bleeding, acute torment is completely taking over me, I am doused with cold sweat, breathing heavily and realize that this is the end. Somewhere far away, as if a thousand miles away, someone is calling 911 and in a terrible voice screaming that I am dying. My gaze settles on the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, its lamps are shining brightly, the light is refracted in the faceted pieces of crystal, and the shining, idle and mundane, seems to be completely disproportionate to what is happening to me. Suddenly, when my suffering reaches an unbearable limit, through the electric light I begin to see a completely different — alive — Light which seems to have always been there behind a veil and now breaks through to me, into me. The bright, quiet, and pure white Light of absolute truth, freedom, love, and beauty. Perfection. And the brighter the Light shines through the veil of electric light, the more clearly I realize that the Light is shining from my heart, that it is my Ultimate Self. My suffering fades away as the Light grows brighter and brighter, everything around me dissolves in it, everything I know about myself, what I think of as my self dissolves in it. And at the very last line, on the verge of dissolving completely into the Light, I suddenly realize that this is not a dream, I become terrified of losing my individual self forever, and the next moment I “wake up”.

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