Xmas lights, Xmas thoughts
It's December, and as I was walking up the hill toward my house my eye was caught by the xmas lights strung above the porch of my neighbors. And I thought isn’t it interesting how here as we approach the darkest time of the year we invoke light by festooning our houses and our trees with electric lights of color. As if we feel the need unconsciously to fight off the coming of the dark by generating our own light, and to ward off the coming of death, the death of the land, of the deciduous trees and plants, and the coldness of the dormant earth, by generating our own warmth and color and light and life.
And then seeing these simple homely xmas lights of my neighbors I felt that in fact the light that we are seeking, whose withdrawal we are countering with our little winter ritual, in fact comes from within us, within each of us as individuals, which is to say as distinct walking talking embodied nervous systems lit up with our own neural energy of sight and sense and thought.
We are the bringers of the light, not needing it from any source outside of us, it is we who bring it into the world and in some way it is our own inner light, and not some external source of illumination, that informs and reveals the entire panapoly of sense perceptions, the erotic and erratically unfathomable play of the world.
There is some idea like this in Indian cosmology and philosophy and physiology (which are only different sides of the same immense way of thought), that says that indriya, which is at the same time fire and light and our sense of sight, comes from within us, and it is our own fire essence that illuminates the world, allowing us to see. And in fact without our own inner fire, the sun itself would have no warmth or light for us.
So then I saw that our very nature is light and I thanked my senses and the whole world of sensory experience—for once, at least for one brief moment, not guarding myself against its vagaries and capacity to entrap and delude— but thanking my lucky stars that even in what seems to be darkness there is light and that that light is the energy of life that is always with us and always within us, and that we, each of us, bring it, like Prometheus bringing fire, to this world.
Merry Xmas!
And then seeing these simple homely xmas lights of my neighbors I felt that in fact the light that we are seeking, whose withdrawal we are countering with our little winter ritual, in fact comes from within us, within each of us as individuals, which is to say as distinct walking talking embodied nervous systems lit up with our own neural energy of sight and sense and thought.
We are the bringers of the light, not needing it from any source outside of us, it is we who bring it into the world and in some way it is our own inner light, and not some external source of illumination, that informs and reveals the entire panapoly of sense perceptions, the erotic and erratically unfathomable play of the world.
There is some idea like this in Indian cosmology and philosophy and physiology (which are only different sides of the same immense way of thought), that says that indriya, which is at the same time fire and light and our sense of sight, comes from within us, and it is our own fire essence that illuminates the world, allowing us to see. And in fact without our own inner fire, the sun itself would have no warmth or light for us.
So then I saw that our very nature is light and I thanked my senses and the whole world of sensory experience—for once, at least for one brief moment, not guarding myself against its vagaries and capacity to entrap and delude— but thanking my lucky stars that even in what seems to be darkness there is light and that that light is the energy of life that is always with us and always within us, and that we, each of us, bring it, like Prometheus bringing fire, to this world.
Merry Xmas!
posted by laffnowl at 9:57 AM
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