This is not how it looks at first, when there may be just a single faint star in a dark night. This is how it may look eventually, when the Light is breaking through in earnest. “The path of the righteous is like a radiant light that grows brighter and brighter until it is high noon”, as someone said around 2500 years ago.

Over at the One Cosmos blog, I am learning that Fridtjof Schuon plagiarized me years before myself, only better: “Thus meditation may be compared not so much to a light kindled in a dark room, as to an opening made in the wall of that room to allow the light to enter — a light which preexists outside and is in no way produced by the action of piercing the wall….”

See, I tried to tell y’all! It is all about spiritual aperture science. We start with perhaps a pinhole crack in the cosmic egg, and then we latch on to it and as the light flows in, it grows stronger and stronger, until it becomes irresistible or nearly so.

I remember when I was a boy, in the small river or big stream that passed through our farm, there was a tongue of land that stuck out in the river. There stood a tree, clinging to a stone, and had stood since long before my time. One day, driven by my curiosity, I found the narrowest part of the miniature peninsula. There I pulled a line with a stick, making a tiny furrow that just a little water could run through. A few days later, the rock and its tree were an island in the river. (The tree, unfortunately, lost its life not long after due to this experiment.)

In our spiritual life (if any) it doesn’t go quite that fast. And the channel may need to be kept open “manually”, at least for a while. But this manual labor, as it were, is not what produces the Light.

Nor does prayer create holiness. Rather, there is a “pressure” of holiness so that it flows into our emptiness, if any.  Or you could say that when you pull the heavy curtains away from your window, this act does not create the sun outside.

This is what I believe, and I think I have good reason to. I am not a saint or guru, but neither is this just something I have read in some book and can parrot.

That’s why, to paraphrase Bob, you don’t need to make a god in your image in your head. Simply turning in the direction of Perfection, or Completion, or preferably both of the above, and looking in the dark for the tiniest crack. You don’t need to know what is on the other side until you see it. It is not like Moses, for instance, had the Torah when he started. The Light breaks through wherever there is a soft spot in some human heart, a crack in the shell of self centeredness. For most of us, of course, this happens through the words (and life) of those who have already been there and been done that to.

Or that’s how I see it tonight.