‘Angels fly because they take things lightly’

There are two meanings for the word ‘light’ in the English language. The first is ‘something that is not heavy; an easy burden’ and the other is that everyday source of illumination…’light’.

To consider ‘burdens’ first. In the West we tend to acquire information and knowledge at an early age, in a process known as ‘education’. The Victorian roots of this social ideal of free ‘education for all’ has evolved and developed but is still stuck in it’s original root ‘fact learning’ principle. Not useful facts such as what temperature to cook a lasagne but academic facts. Some young people must be highly bemused by this emphasis on information that bears no relation to ‘real life’. Even in later life, adults look back at their school curriculum and realise they have only ever used a tiny fraction of what they were taught.

My generation in the 1960’s, memorised basic multiplication tables and this at least has proved useful, but now most mental arithmetic is obsolete.

Higher education tends to move towards the ‘knowledge’ of things – that is connecting the dots that are the packets of information in order to make sense of things.

Yet the process is remorseless in as much as in an ‘information age’ there is no chance to pause for breath. Knowledge piles up in the library shelves of the mind and collects dust. There is an attempt at some point in life to form ‘opinions’ that cannot be taken down by ‘counter argument’ but it is not easy. There are two sides, we learn, to every conviction.

The very way that we are taught to think encourages the ‘taking of sides’ as politics, sports and even wars, mirror. We have to be in one camp or the other or we risk being in no camp at all.

All of this in my view creates a bonfire of the mind that is a type of collective psychosis. We are literally made ill in the mind, leading to depression in people of all ages and in it’s most extreme manifestation, suicide.

Now I am never one to shine light on a problem without having a personal suggestion as to what the solution might be, so here it comes. It involves challenging the very basic assumption that ‘the more you know the cleverer you are’. Memory ‘quiz shows’ on television…even the IQ test…re-enforce this assumption. The biggest swot gets the prize for remembering stuff but then runs into the green room and bursts into tears because there is no IQ for emotional intelligence. The ageing library in our heads of the unused and forgotten, is testament to how education heads us into unsatisfied and unfulfilled beings.

The technique I use now that I am ‘older and wiser’ is to deliberately ignore and forget most stuff. Like so much compost from the garden of life, I create a huge rotting pile of ‘information,’ and let it create heat on it’s own; somewhere where it will cause no harm.

I have come around to thinking that as children in quite a good place, mentally. We are good at questioning, we do not judge, we do not form opinions, we laugh and cry without fear of judgement and when we are hungry, eat.

A Zen master once wrote;

When I eat I eat, when I sleep I sleep.

Simplicity is a virtue that education demands we forget. And yet, humans enter this world with an infinite capacity for self understanding that has not come from books. The ‘University of Life’ has created many self taught geniuses who might never have risen above the formally educated. Those children who spent their school days looking out of the window can do very well for themselves because they have learnt the power or dreaming.

picture credit; The Marketing Desks

If we need a skill, we watch others and acquire it. It is this process of ‘absorption’ which is how we learn naturally. People living close to the land in ‘indigenous tribes’ never go to school but simply absorb all they need to know from the tribal elders.

Wise people, exude an air of calm and a capacity for understanding that is not directly proportional to the number of years that person has spent in education. Wisdom is more a river than a sea. It is constantly moving in speed and direction. It does not study itself or how close it is to it’s final destination, it just is.

So to move to the second meaning of ‘lightly’. Light is that part of the electromagnetic spectrum of energy which illuminates us physically. Our eyes seek light just as our minds seek illumination. When the mind acquires clarity, clarity acquires the mind, meaning; there is a process that takes humans far beyond any skills that they might be encouraged to learn in ‘normal life’.

And because our bodies are completely interconnected, the light which falls upon the eye and the mind also penetrates the heart. By this I do not necessarily mean emotions, although emotional intelligence is part of it, but the certainty of knowledge and the knowledge of certainty that is perceived through the heart.

As a human clutters the mind during the journey through life, like a monkey in a forest of fruit, so too becomes the heart full of nonsensical impressions. These express themselves primarily through the ego and that part of the mind Buddhists call ‘the monkey mind’. It never stops analysing and repeating words to itself, except when it uses the mouth to force other unsuspecting monkeys to listen to it’s own opinions.

You will intuit an ‘enlightened human being’ by the aura of silence and the gentle movements of that person’s body. They will always be completely present. This skill of operating in comparative emptiness to other human beings is needed for moving into parallel dimensional, places that are not apparent to those ‘over busily’ concerned with the physical world.

To the devout, there is only one other dimension worth living in which is the place occupied by Divine love. All other places encountered on this journey are regarded as similar to the ‘dunya’ or ‘maya’ of the physical world in that they have no value and are no more a destination than wind and waves are.

Just as humans can undergo this process of change in a lifetime, so can planets and stars and Universes, all of which have their own lifetimes, albeit on a completely different scale. The energy we know as light is part of the great spectrum of energy that pervades creation, and like all energy, it contains information on a scale incomparable to the largest library on earth.

When humans overcome the limitations of the physical world by becoming one with the physical world, they begin to have access to these ‘Oceans of Knowledge’. This knowledge of certainty is a mere by-product of the greater relationship with love and the loving Creator that is behind all the multiple veils of creation.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. Genesis 01:03