Here is a thought experiment for you.
Suppose that you are a kind of transmitter and receiver. Just for the sake of argument – and you can modify the metaphor as much as you like – that your heart is constantly sending and receiving beams of white light, which are the currents, threads, attractions, and repulsions of the web of wyrd, the vast interconnectedness of existence.
This gift of being a vessel of light is pretty handy, because everything else is also such a thing. Imagine all of existence as a vast lattice of interconnection. Call it cosmic fornication, or universal empathy, or even (if you’re a glass-half-empty sort) the unending savagery and strife of existence. Hey, it’s your metaphor, you can do whatever you like with it.
Uh oh, now it gets more complex. You know that heart of yours? Turns out that it is a prism. So every time white light hits it, seven beams of rainbow color spray forth, Dark Side of the Moon style. Suddenly we have this riotous panoply of color bursting from our chest. And, oh, everything is spraying this stuff all over the place. It is possible that actually there is nothing at all but light, in ever more complex refractions and hues.
And all of this light is communication, did I mention that? It is. How much of it are you aware of right now? Probably not so much. Can you feel the sensations right now as you, for example, scrunch your toes together? Can you feel the floor or your shoes or whatever against your feet? Can you feel the light from your screen hitting your retinas, plunging down your optic nerves, turning into words? Maybe you can now.
Chances are that, if you’re like me, most of the time you’re so deeply inside this endless torrent of sensation that you completely take it for granted. You become utterly habituated. This infinite magical matrix of existence, and we become habituated and bored by it! We resent its inconveniences, its inefficiencies. We become armored. The armor prevents the entry and exit of light. Which means we start to deaden.
This deadening does not reduce our yearning for the light’s nourishment, variety, and beauty. We become misers, greedily hoarding what little sparks we can grasp. The more we tighten around the pathetic bits of color left to us, the more they wash free of our possession. For light is not property.
Here the tragedy is in full swing, a vicious cycle of clutching and scarcity. A whole universe of abundant, multi-colored light! And we glower in the shadows, resentful, wounded, blaming everyone and everything else. Eventually the light hurts our once glorious senses, and we cannot even bear it, so now we are greedy for a thing of scarcity that we have taught ourselves to hate.
Need this be the end of our story? Or might we somehow begin to become willing to do something different? To hazard the slightest risk of vulnerability. Oh, and maybe a little bit of scaled psychic armor comes free and we feel good. And maybe that feeling good is frightening, and it feels like what the grey-minded authorities are always telling us is sinful and wrong. So we shrink back.
Perhaps, however, that little taste of our prismatic birthright is too good to forget, to abandon. And so, with great care, with false starts, mistakes, setbacks, we begin a quest for the prism-heart. And then for the light that it emits and receives. And for the whole, vast, interconnected cosmos that the light literally is.
This requires us to recover the sensitivity of our organs – of our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, mind. Our nervous system has to gradually be completely re-calibrated, reorganized. We fear we are losing ourselves, and we have to mourn the loss of our captor, our miser self, for we are victims of Stockholm Syndrome. It is important to honor even the poisoned, barren parts of ourselves, to mourn the loss of the one who causes our self-inflicted wounds.
Is there an end to the story? Chances are, you’ve been making your own metaphor up this whole time, and now my words are gibberish. And if your own metaphor is telling you what you need to hear, then that’s better than if you slavishly molded yourself to my little tale. What happens as more of the prismatic light enters our life? This business of becoming is no certain thing. I am a worshiper of mystery, however, and so I can do aught but follow on.
