Monday, August 23, 2021

Aligning With the Living Light


Timely and relevant writings keep coming my way!

And they seem beautifully connected.

Yesterday, I casually picked up the latest issue of Lavender Magazine and found myself drawn to the following words of editor Andrew Stark. Indeed, I soon realized that Stark’s words serve as a wonderful follow-up to the insights of Jeff Foster – and my own related question of how to “hold everything in love” – that I shared in my last post.

The connection between positivity and general well-being is not a new concept. Park et al. (2016) wrote the following in an article for the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, “Evidence is accumulating that a happy, engaged, and fulfilling psychological and social life is not just a consequence of good health, it is what leads people to live a healthy and long life.” In other words, positivity and health go hand in hand.

Positivity in this sense is not merely the absence of negativity; it is the presence of self-love. If you exercise self-love, you create positive energy, thus sending that energy into the world. Think of it as a kind of light source, touching everything around you. And since we are all ambassadors of a cosmic consciousness, what Carl Sagan called “a way for the universe to know itself,” our self-love is also a gesture of universal peace. By loving yourself, the world is made better.

If flowers are, as Eckhart Tolle explains in A New Earth, “the enlightenment of the plant,” then we, too, are the enlightenment – or flowering – of a universal consciousness. And like flowers, we are colorful and exquisite.

Andrew Stark
Lavender Magazine
Issue 684, August 12-25, 2021
p. 8


Unfortunately, I do not know the name of the artist who created the beautiful image that opens this post. It’s an image that is very meaningful to me as I see it as representing the sacred or divine source (what Stark calls “cosmic consciousness”) that is both within and beyond us. In my view, the cultivating of “self-love,” i.e., the connecting to and living from one’s deepest Self, requires an openness to and relationship with this divine source, one which many people refer to as “God,” and which since ancient times and across religions and cultures, has been symbolized by light.

When I meditate for five minutes every morning at my prayer shrine, I trust that I am aligning my inner divine light (a light that’s one with my deepest, truest Self) with the “living light” (yet another name for the divine source). I understand this living light to be both within and beyond me, and as infusing all of creation. The image that opens this post is for me a beautiful representation of this alignment.

With the awareness that I am both aligned with and an embodiment of the sacred; that I am, in other words, with and of the living light, I am ready (blessed, if you will) to go out into my day and share through my words, actions, and presence this transforming light with others. I trust that this sharing cannot but help encourage others to get in touch with and live from (to whatever extent they’re able) their own inner light; their own source of and connection to the divine.

I appreciate and resonate with what Marianne Williamson says about the spiritual discipline and process I’ve highlighted in this post: “We can, through continued and sincere devotional practice,” she writes, “transmute the world of material form. We shall bring it into harmony with the structures of the living light. We shall live from that light and become that light. [In doing so, we are participating in what will] one day be known as the Great Transformation of the human race.”

May it be so!



NEXT: Mystical Participation


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
A Sacred Pause
Michael Morwood on the Divine Presence
The Light Within
No Stranger Am I
The Source Is Within You
Like the Sun
“There's Light in Love, You See”
Cultivating Stillness
Blue Yonder
Dancer Calvin Royal III: Stepping Into His Light
In the Dance of Light, Eyes of Fiery Passion
In the Garden of Spirituality – Marianne Williamson
In the Garden of Spirituality – Eckhart Tolle
Diarmuid O'MurchĂș on Our Capacity to Meditate
Thoughts on Christian Meditation | II | III | IV | V
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: Quote of the Day – February 8, 2013
Chadwick Boseman and That “Heavenly Light”

Opening image: Artist unknown.


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