Eternal Wellspring of Love, Light, and Life

 

In the summer of 1978, when I was 31, I fell asleep after reading this passage from Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi:

Shortly after my healing through the potency of the guru’s picture, I had an influential spiritual vision. Sitting on my bed one morning, I fell into a deep reverie.

“What is behind the darkness of closed eyes?” This probing thought came powerfully into my mind. An immense flash of light at once manifested to my inward gaze. Divine shapes of saints, sitting in meditation posture in mountain caves, formed like miniature cinema pictures on the large screen of radiance within my forehead.

“Who are you?” I spoke aloud.

“We are the Himalayan yogis.” The celestial response is difficult to describe; my heart was thrilled.

“Ah, I long to go to the Himalayas and become like you!” The vision vanished, but the silvery beams expanded in ever-widening circles to infinity.

“What is this wondrous glow?”

“I am Ishwara. I am Light.” The voice was as murmuring clouds.

“I want to be one with Thee!”

Out of the slow dwindling of my divine ecstasy, I salvaged a permanent legacy of inspiration to seek God. “He is eternal, ever-new Joy!” This memory persisted long after the day of rapture.

I suddenly found myself in an interior space with twelve sages in a circle, all focused on an endless column of living white light that was in the middle of the circle. One of the sages sent a ray of consciousness to me: "What do you want to know?" Immediately I responded: "How can I help?"

Namaste: I salute Jesus Christ in you

Rudolf Steiner:  "'O Man, know yourself!' Yes, this longing must grow inwardly. We must seek for the wellspring that lives in the human soul."

*   *   *   *   *

I gaze into the Darkness.
In it there arises Light—
Living Light!
Who is this Light in the Darkness?
It is I myself in my reality.
This reality of the ‘I’
Does not enter into my earthly life.
I am but a picture of it.
But I shall find it again
When with good will for the Spirit
I shall have passed through the Gate of Death.

Entering ever and again into a meditative saying of this kind, we can confront the Darkness. We realize that here on Earth we are only a picture of our true Being—that our true Being never comes down into the earthly life. Yet in the midst of the Darkness, through our good will towards the Spirit, a Light can dawn upon us, of which we may in truth confess: This Light am I myself in my reality."

The quintessential Maha-Vakya: "ES IST ICH"

Rudolf Steiner:  "In older languages the self was not specifically designated, for it was contained within the verb. The 'I' was not directly mentioned. The verb was used to show what one was doing, and this was what indicated that one was speaking about oneself. There was no name for the self. It only came about in later times that the human being gave his self a name, and in our German language that name [ich] contains the initials of Jesus Christ, which is an important symbolic fact." [Iesus CHristus: ICH]

Continued: My dharma is penance

Sources: September 2, 1923. GA 228

September 6, 1924. Recapitulation Lesson One.

Artist: Arild Rosenkrantz

Thank you, Robin Mitchell!