The Inner Light is not seen with the eyes, neither is it something visualized. Some people do visualize or imagine colours in their meditation, but that's not what we're talking about here. I used to believe that the Inner Light and Sound are aspects of a spiritual energy that is always there and we can tap into when we meditate. The idea is that it is divine in origin.
After I left Lifewave I read a book called Journey of Insight Meditation by Eric Lerner. He was a Buddhist but he knew about the Inner Light and encountered it in his meditation. Buddhists call it 'nimitta'. His understanding was limited, but his book showed me that Theravada Buddhist development is very different from the sort of development that I was familiar with from Lifewave.
In Hinduism there are many beliefs, but a dominant one is the idea that we each have an Atman. The Atman is our consciousness, which is not the same thing as our mind. The Atman seems to be separate from Brahman, but this is an illusion that we can overcome. Brahman is the universal or primordial consciousness. This is the teaching of Shankara, one of the most prominent Hindu teachers.
I have never believed in God, but I was willing to accept the possibility of the existence of Brahman. Although 'Brahman' may be translated as 'God', they are not the same. God is a being who has thoughts and feelings, likes and dislikes. Brahman is pure Consciousness.
My interest in the book Journey of Insight Meditation led me to read the books of Buddhists Daniel M Ingram and Culadasa. Culadasa has a lot to say about nimitta. He doesn't explain it as a spiritual force, divine in origin, though. To Culadasa, when the mind has become pacified it begins to function in a different way.
This is from Culadasa's book The Mind Illuminated page 238
"With the senses fully pacified, all but the most intrusive external sounds fade away, and auditory awareness is often dominated by an inner sound; all visual imagery ceases, and the visual sense is often dominated by an inner light;"
Culadasa explains how the Inner Light can develop and how it can be used to enter into different altered states of consciousness. One of these altered states is called by Buddhists the Sphere of Infinite Space, which is the same as the 'going beyond form' or 'Second Initiation' of Lifewave. It is also called the 5th jhana, the first of the formless or arupa jhanas. Jhana is the Pali word for the various altered states of consciousness, and the 5th of them is the subject of my next post.
Below I have quoted someone from a forum called mungojelly who explains very convincingly what the Inner Light actually is.
"There's two different things called "the breath," one which can't sustain jhana and one which can. The actual breath sensations coming from your body are inconsistent, random, patchy, confusing, intermittent. Attending to these actual sensations only creates as much as access concentration, because new breath sensations hit you unpredictably and incline you towards discursive thought.
Along with these actual sensations there is a consistent steady internal model of the breath, created by the mind in the process of attending to the external sensations. That model is the "nimitta" which can produce jhana, because it can be steadily present, because it is produced inside the mind-- you can produce more and more of it, "strengthen" and "purify" it, so that you have more to concentrate on. The external sensations can't be intensified like that, they come and go. So you must latch instead onto this model, which can be made very intense so that your attention on it can be very stable.
The point here is to distinguish two layers of your perception, which usually are so tightly coupled that they seem like one and the same thing. There's actual flickering streams of perceptions coming in through your sense gates, that's one layer, and then also there's an internal model which is continually being corrected using those sensations.
This model is a mental tool that we're constantly using to interpret sensory data. But it's not actually limited by that data. In order to be able to match any data that comes in, the model is just made of infinitely flexible thoughtstuff. It's like clay that can be molded into anything. In response to sensations we're always habitually adjusting the clay model to rationalize the sensations. Oh, there's a sensation over there? Hmm, well then I guess the body must actually be over here like this, does that fit better? We adjust the model until the sensations coming in align with it, we keep the model dancing along with the sensations, so that we have an idea of what we're in the process of being/doing rather than being in a fuzzy haze of various disconnected sensations.
So that's why this is tricky. You're trying to tell the difference between two things that are the same thing. One actually is the sensations of breath or whatever. The other one is pretending to be the sensations of breath. This is very convenient, usually, because you don't want to be aware of this distinction usually, you want to move your body around and do things and not think in terms of the various body-like representations in your mind just in terms of the body as one integrated real thing as if you had access to it as a whole coherent thing at once instead of through the weird telegraph network of your nerves, it's a useful handle for the mind, that's the point. But then it's annoyingly seamless when it comes time to try to hack into it. :/
So what they mean by saying "nimitta" is any sign that what you're looking at isn't the meditation object after all, but its representation. Becoming light is one stereotypical example of this that happens to people often. This doesn't mean seeing light with your eyes normally, but the breath itself turning into light, which is just the sort of clue you're looking for that something's off. Breath sensations shouldn't really be light, but the modelling clay that you're working with is the same clay used for modelling sight, so it can slip. It's making guesses about what the breath is like, predicting it, modelling it, but you can catch it being flat out wrong. It's just like, um, IDK, is the breath a glowing light now? And usually if that happens for a moment some sensation immediately contradicts it like, um, no, the breath isn't light at all, weird question. But instead you're there paying moment-to-moment attention and you catch it doing that and say, what's this? Aha, got you.
I describe it as perception having two parts, a guesser and a checker. The guesser only has questions, and the checker only has answers. Specifically it seems what the checker says is "no" when the guesser guesses wrong. The more wrong it is the more it shouts "NO! WRONG! CORRECT THIS!" This makes sense because we're talking about maintaining a model. It's a model of your whole body and mind and perception, so lots of different stuff to juggle. You don't need a bunch of noise coming back from the checker saying "YES! You still have an elbow! YES! You still have a little toe!" Instead for efficiency's sake what makes sense is to just give corrections as things change. If a guess is seriously wrong, the checker will shout how wrong it is, but as guesses get more correct, the checker gets quieter about how wrong they are, until when they're exactly right the checker doesn't respond at all.
So this is the ancient hack we're applying to this system: If you simply turn the checker off, any guess you make seems right. If a "no" never comes from the checker to correct our model, then that feels exactly the same as if every guess was already spot on and it just didn't need to correct anything. If the sensations coming in from outside aren't allowed to check the model, we can gain direct control of the thoughtstuff that it's made of, and use all of it for the purpose of meditation (instead of the much smaller amount we'd been able to use before).
The best possible use of that thoughtstuff is of course to use all of it directly for meditation-- this is the 4th jhana. In the scriptures Buddha is said to have used this jhana to attain enlightenment, which makes sense because while technically you could use any jhana, your odds are better using all of the thoughtstuff just for that and not for anything else. But obviously since your normal experience is to use it for maintaining the sensation of having a body, suddenly using it all to meditate with instead is so disorienting that it's recommended you get to that point only very very slowly."
If all of the above sounds implausible then read what the physicist Carlo Rovelli has written in his book Helgoland about the nature of seeing. Page 162. "The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see."
No comments:
Post a Comment