[MF] Dharmakaya light

[Maggie Hettinger]

 From Lila Chapter 26

[“philosophology”; James:The Varieties of Religious Experience; the  
squirrel and the tree;
  "Man is always the measure of all things, even in matters of space  
and dimension. "
That includes the consideration of people like Lila.";
the philosophy of insanity;
"Some biological or social or Dynamic force has altered his judgment  
of quality. It has cause him to filter out what we call normal  
cultural intellectual patterns just as ruthlessly as our culture  
filters out his.";
kind psychiatrists;
Insanity is an intellectual pattern;
getting out of the insane asylum; insanity as culturally defined;
perception—coins, colors, “green flash” of the sun; Cleveland Harbor  
effect; cultural immune system; ]

Phaedrus recognized that there’s nothing immoral in a culture not  
being ready to accept something Dynamic. Static latching is necessary  
to sustain the gains the culture has made in the past. The solution  
is not to condemn the culture as stupid but to look for those factors  
that will make the new information acceptable: the keys. He thought  
of this Metaphysics of Quality as a key.

The Dharmakaya light. That was a huge area of human experience cut  
off by cultural filtering.
Over the years it also had become a burden to him, this knowledge  
about the light. It cut off a whole area of rational communion with  
others. It was not something that he could talk about without being  
slammed by the cultural immune system, being thought crazy, and with  
his record it was not good to invite that suspicion.
But he had seen it again on Lila tonight and he had seen it very  
strongly back in Kingston. That’s sort of what got him into all this.  
It told him there was something of importance here. It told him to  
wake up and not go by the book in dealing with her.

He didn’t think of this light as some sort of supernatural occurrence  
grounded in physical reality. In fact he was sure it was grounded in  
physical reality. But nobody sees it because the cultural definition  
of what is real and what is unreal filters out the Dharmakaya light  
from twentieth century American “reality” just as surely as time is  
filtered out of Hopi reality, and green-yellow differences mean  
nothing to the Natchez.

He couldn’t demonstrate it scientifically, because you couldn’t  
predict when it was going to occur and thus couldn’t set up an  
experiment to test for it. But, without any experimental testing, he  
thought that the light was nothing more than an involuntary widening  
of the iris of the eyes of the observer that lets in extra light and  
makes things look brighter, a kind of hallucinatory light produced by  
optic stimulation, somewhat like the light that comes when one stares  
at something too long. Like eye blinks, it’s assumed to be an  
irrelevant interruption of what one “really” sees, or it’s assumed to  
be a subjective phenomenon, which is unreal, as opposed to an  
objective phenomenon, which is real.

But despite filtering by the cultural immune system, references to  
this light occur in many places, scattered, disconnected, and  
unrelated. Lamps are sometimes used as symbols of learning. Why  
should they be? A torch, like the old Blake School torch, is  
sometimes used as a symbol of idealistic inspiration. When we  
suddenly understand something we say, “I’ve seen the light,” or, “It  
has dawned on me.” When a cartoonist wants to show someone getting a  
great idea he puts an electric light bulb over the character’s head.  
Everybody understands instantly what this symbol means. Why? Where  
did it come from? It can’t be very old because there weren’t any  
electric bulbs much before this century. What have electric light  
bulbs got to do with new ideas? Why doesn’t the cartoonist ever have  
to explain wheat he means by that light bulb? Why does everybody know  
what  he means?

In other cultures, or in the religious literature of our past, where  
the immune system of “objectivity” is weak or non-existent, reference  
to this light is everywhere, from the Protestant hymn, “Lead Kindly  
Light,” to the halos of the saint. The central terms of Western  
mysticism, “enlightenment,” and “illumination” refer to it directly.  
Darsana, a fundamental Hindu form of religious instruction, means  
“giving of light.” Descriptions of zen sartori mention it. Aldous  
Huxley referred to it as part of the mescaline experience. Phaedrus  
remembered it from the time with Dusenberry at the peyote meeting,  
although he had assumed that it was just an optical illusion produced  
by the drug and not of any great importance.

Proust wrote about it in “Remembrance of Things Past.” IN El Greco’s  
“Nativity” the Dharmakaya  light emanating from the Christ child  
provides the only illumination there is. El Greco was thought by some  
to have defective eyesight because he painted this light. But in his  
portrait of Cardinal Guevara, the prosecutor of the Spanish  
Inquisition, the lace and silks of the cardinal’s robes are done with  
exquisite “objective” luster but the light is completely absent.  El  
Greco didn’t have to paint it. He painted what he saw.

Once when Phaedrus was standing in one of the galleries of the Boston  
Museum of Fine Arts, he saw on one wall a huge painting of the Buddha  
and nearby were some paintings of Christian saints. He noticed again  
something he had thought about before. Although the Buddhists and  
Christians had no historic contact with one another they both painted  
halos. The halos weren’t the same size. The Buddhists painted great  
big ones, sometimes surrounding the person’s whole body, while the  
Christian ones were smaller and in back of the person’s head or over  
it. It seemed to mean the two religious weren’t’ copying one another  
or they would have made the halos the same size. But they were both  
painting something they were seeing separately, which implied that  
that “something they were painting had a real, independent existence.
Then as Phaedrus was thinking this he noticed one painting in the  
corner and thought, “There. What the others are just painting  
symbolically he is actually showing.  They’re seeing it second-hand.  
He’s seeing it first hand.”

It was a painting of Christ with no halo at all. But the clouds in  
the sky behind his head were slightly lighter near his head than  
farther away. And the sky near his head was lighter too. That was  
all. But that was the real illumination, no objective thing at all,  
just a shift in intensity of light. Phaedrus stepped up to the canvas  
to read the nameplate at the bottom. It was El Greco again.

Our culture immunizes us against giving much importance to all this  
because the light has no “objective” realty. That means’ it’s just  
some “subjective” and therefore unreal phenomenon. In a Metaphysics  
of Quality, however, this light is important because it often appears  
associated with undefined auspiciousness, that is, Dynamic Quality.  
It signals a Dynamic intrusion upon a static situation. When there is  
a letting go of static patterns the light occurs. It is often  
accompanied by a feeling of relaxation because static patterns have  
been jarred loose.

He thought it was probably the light that infants see when their  
world is still fresh and whole, before consciousness differentiates  
it into patterns; a light into which everything faces at death.  
Accounts of people who have had a “near death experience” have  
referred to this “white light” as something very beautiful and  
compelling from which they didn’t want to return. The light would  
occur during the breakup of the static patterns of the person’s  
intellect as it returned into the pure Dynamic Quality from which it  
had emerged in infancy. During Phaedrus’ time of inanity when he had  
wandered freely outside the limits of cultural reality, this light  
had been a valued companion, pointing out things to him that the  
would otherwise have missed, appearing at an event his rational  
thought had indicated was unimportant, but which he would later  
discover had been more important than he had known. Other times it  
had occurred at events he could not figure out the importance of, but  
which had left him wondering. He saw it once on a small kitten. After  
that for a long time the kitten had followed him wherever he went and  
he wondered if the kitten saw it too. He had seen it once around a  
tiger in a zoo. The tiger had suddenly looked at him with what seemed  
like surprise and had come over to the bars for a closer look. Then  
the illumination began to appear around the tiger’s face. That was  
all. Afterward, that experience associated itself with William  
Blake’s Tiger! tiger! burning bright.”

The eyes had blazed with what seemed to be inner light.