1. This Little Light of Mine
This is the season of darkness; this is the season of light. On December 8, 2013, I wrote a little essay, "Have Yourself A Merry (Little!)Christmas," https://thomasdorsett.blogspot.com/2013/12/have-yourself-merry-little-chhristmas. "How to stay serene and happy, while those around you are caught up in Christmas rush?" is the article's theme. It depicts a scene of madness. I was waiting with bags of groceries for Nirmala to pick me up in the car. Shoppers everywhere! There was no parking space; we had parked several blocks way. The parking lot, in which I was standing, was full; cars kept on circling, drivers were desperately seeking an opportunity to park and shop. Traffic around the parking area was reduced to a snail's pace. The din of cars honking was everywhere. The people who rushed by looked obsessed--and unhappy. I struck up a conversation with a woman waiting, like me, for someone to pick her up.
We had a memorable conversation. We decided that the way to enjoy the holidays, and life in general, was to tone things down, be thankful for little things, to lower expectations, to live in the joy of the moment.
Those were the days! The parking lot is gone--condominiums have taken its place--and a virus has been sedulously picking up humans as if it was an evil, invisible kid picking up pieces of stolen candy.
Not only is the parking lot gone, but the adjacent mall (I imagine) is empty. This is going to be a very different Christmas. The pandemic has shattered plans of family get-togethers. Many people are without jobs. Empty stomachs; empty malls.
Why am I feeling guilty? Because I am feeling happy. Even serene. As a senior citizen who has several underlying conditions, I have remained at home, except for masked excursions for groceries. So far I have escaped the deadly virus, so far. But that's not the only reason why I feel happy.
I am one of the lucky ones. There is a lot of suffering going on, I know, and I hope the light at the end of the tunnel, the vaccine, will soon restore health and a sense of well-being. How can I, albeit sympathetic to the plight of others, still manage to feel good?
2. Let there Be Light
As I write this, we are only two days away from the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. It is cold; it is gloomy. It is easy to feel cold and gloomy as well. What better way to counteract surrounding dark than to celebrate days of increasing light, at the height of light's relative lack, by bringing light into the house, by bringing light within?
I do what many people do--decorate and light a Christmas tree. It doesn't have to be a tree in order to celebrate a festival of lights, however, a large, festive menorah would do as well. The important thing is an extra-abundance of photons.
I am spiritual--I perform Buddhist meditation twice daily--but not Christian. I used to worry that setting up a tree would be inconsistent with my identity, but I realize now that this was silly. Bringing a tree inside the home was, after all, a pagan custom adopted by Christians. The gospel of light belongs to all; it illuminates all creeds.
I think mostly everyone suffers from at least a mild form of SAD, seasonal affective disorder, sadness caused by reduced light in winter. For me, contemplating a lit tree in a dark room is a source of delight.
Light is said to increase serotonin, a hormone which lifts mood. It also gets me to thinking, that is, contemplating...
3.A Little Bit of Physics
A founding father of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, once stated that if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't. The most mysterious of all quantum particles is, I think, the photon, the source of light.
Everything we know can be classified as a thing. Books, boulders, stars--even in the strictest sense, persons. (Everything inside a human, brains included, is composed of elements found elsewhere in the environment as well). Even thoughts, chemicals
stored in neurons, are things. And all things have mass. Except the photon!
How can something, depending on observation, sometimes behave like matter, sometime like a wave of energy? This wavicle-oxymoron is an impossibility. Yet light has achieved it!
An oxymoron is the photon, a massless thing. But here the oxymoron isn't used as a literary device, such as the oxymoron "bittersweet" denoting mixed emotions, such as "Parting is such sweet sorrow." As far as I know, the massless photon is the only example where an oxymoron has no emotional, that is, human connotation .
A thingless thing--how can we imagine something like the photon? We don't have to--they are all over the place, the very foundation of vision.
Light is even weirder. As Einstein's theory of relativity teaches, during acceleration time dilates and space shrinks. We cannot ever go faster than the speed of light, because as we approach 186,000 miles per second, the matter being accelerated approaches an infinite weight; it would take an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light. Impossible! Yet light has done just that! Another way of saying it is that as an object is accelerated, space is converted into time. At the speed of light, space has become nothing, zero, while time has stopped--And another way of saying time has stopped is saying that it has reached eternity, the state of infinite time-dilatation.
Open your eyes--Eternity is always right in front of your nose!
4. Photons and Symbolism
A line by the 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan has always impressed me: "I saw Eternity the other night." Now we know that this statement is literally true--provided he wrote it by candlelight!
In the West, light is very close to God, if not God. In Genesis, God gets the universe going by declaring "Fiat Lux," "Let there be Light." (In the East, enlightenment comes by meditating, closing the eyes and listening. In this tradition the drumbeat, the dhamuru, is the symbol of creation. --See my blog about Nataraja, The Cosmic Dance, https://thomasdorsett.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-cosmic-dance.html.)
Milton brilliantly described the connection between divinity and light in the following excerpt from Paradise Lost:
Hail, holy light, offspring of Heav'n first-born,
Or of the' Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Beautiful words, signifying a beautiful and literal truth. There is also a problem here, of course. Theistic religions take the concept of God as a person literally. For me, it is metaphor. Yes, God is light, but every photon is exactly alike. (As Jesus of Nazareth pointed out, light shines on both good and evil, making no distinction between them). Finding a personal God in light is a literal confusion, a true oxymoron.
Conclusion
Lighting up one's house, say, with a Christmas tree, is a wonderful source of delight, especially during the darkest time of the year. The presence of light warms, the concept of light enlightens.
My favorite word for the divine is the ancient Tamil word, Kadavul, which literally means "Outside/Inside." Taking light inside is like inviting Kadavul into your home. (This inside/outside dichotomy is a way of indicating what some of us intuit but none of us understand: light (outside) and love (inside) are basically the same thing, as expressed by the statement, God is love).
Light can warm us, and thus cheer us up, but it is impersonal. The missing piece in this puzzle, what makes mystery personal, is relationship. Schiller, in his immortal poem which became the text of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, perhaps said it best;
Wer ein holdes Weib errugen,
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
That's exactly what we've been doing. The two most important things in life, which are mystically related, light and love, are everywhere and free.
More light at the time of the 2020 winter solstice informs me that this horrible pandemic is coming to an end. The light of the human mind has produced a vaccine in record time, a secular miracle of sorts. No wonder I'm feeling serene!
If you're not feeling serene, which during these dark times is understandable, try adding more light--and love--into your life. You won't regret it.
Addendum
I forgot to include one of the most famous references to light of all, the niche sura from the Quran. Here it is an excerpt:
God is the Light of the heavens and the earth.
His light like a lamp within a niche, of glass like a brilliant star,
Lit from a blessed tree, an olive tree, not from the east nor from the west,
Whose oil would burn and glow even without fire.
Lift upon Light!
God guides to His light whom He wills,,,
Simply superb. I understood the physics part cos am beginning to see the light within too
ReplyDeleteThank you Tom uncle.
It's brilliant