by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan:Hail to the company of all who have become mad and drunk with desire for the world of Light, with their passionate love for the majesty of the Light of Lights, and who, in their ecstasy, have become like the Seven Poles of the world.-Shihab Ud-Din Suhrawardi.

with their passionate love for the majesty of the Light of Lights, and who, in their ecstasy, have become like the Seven Poles of the world.-Shihab Ud-Din Suhrawardi.

We have now reached a point where we are ready to work with light, starting with our own body. Draw your attention around your body. Instead of focussing on the magnetic field of your body, or subtle body, can you sense the glow, the effulgence radiating all around you?

Imagine that you are looking into a gorgeous sunrise in the mountains. Now draw your attention to your eyes. Do you notice that as soon as you draw attention to the light in your eyes, your eyes sparkle?

1) Identify yourself with the light counterpart of the fabric of your body.

Our bodies draw light from the environmental light, resorb it into our body cells and radiate it out in the environment. By being aware of it, you will absorb more light.

If you meditate at night, you will become aware of your relationship with the stars. You will realize that our aura is the light of the cosmos converged as us. When you sense the light surrounding your body, think that, “What I call my aura is the same as the light of the stars.” Our body does absorb light whether of the sun, the stars, a candle or electric light.

On the other hand, light crystallizes as matter – photons can convert into electrons and visa versa. A crystal absorbs light but it is itself light that has gelled. In physics waves can consolidate as ‘solitans.’ There are reasons to believe that the template configuring our embryo is a magnetic field. Light is of the nature of a magnetic field. Maybe we, already as embryos, draw the light of the stars in our mother’s womb.

Exalt in the captivating thought that this is the world to which you belong, that you are in exile on earth and that behind the image of your body, you are a being of light.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

2) Identify yourself with the light counterpart of not your body but your subtle body at all levels.

If you concentrate intensely on light in the environment and then draw your attention to the light surrounding your body, you will discover yourself as an effigy of light of great beauty. Your physical face will now appear as a mask through which your real being is trying to transpire. It seems like a scintillating kaleidoscopic array of pure effulgence, or the glow of a flame, or the awakening from the perspective of the human dimension of your being. One step will lead to a further one.

If you consider your consciousness as a focal point in space, light seems to radiate from a point located in space: the sun, the stars, a candle, an electric bulb. But when you turn within in your meditation, as your consciousness gets inverted, it is diffused, and consequently your representation of light has shifted; it is dispersed in an inverted space. Pir o Murshid Inayat Khan calls it “all-pervading light.” We need to clearly distinguish between the all-pervading nature of light as we turn within and the radiant light.

We find the same in the words of Ibn ‘Arabi:

Shihab ud-Din Suhrawardhi:

You will have noticed that the inner light does not radiate like a lamp for example, but is like a web where everything is intermeshed with everything else, like radio waves.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

It is its own light which shows it to us, and that light is its soul.

Najm ud-Din Razi:

3) Identify yourself with your glance.

After turning within, cast the inner light, the all-pervading light, forward through your eyes.

Hazrat Inayat Khan:

As the sense of sight is situated in the head, it then perceives the light when it is turned within; the brain and the sight, so charged with the light from within, see through life so deeply when turned on to the life without.

 

Ibn ‘Arabi: