NOEMAYA

In the realm of spirituality and philosophy, the exploration of metaphysical concepts often unveils profound connections between the tangible and the intangible. One such captivating analogy that transcends both worlds is the metaphysics of light—a captivating exploration of how light, with its dual nature of illumination and invisibility, mirrors the essence of Self as the source of Being and reality.

The Nature of Light: Illuminating the Visible, Concealing the Invisible

The sensible light is experienced as the source of vision, that which makes things visible to sight. Light itself is invisible, and must be so, for otherwise we won’t be able to see objects but would see sheer brightness. No one has ever seen light but all things are seen through it. To account for visual perception, we can divide the world into light and non-light, i.e. matter. Matter, speaking in a broader sense that science assigns to this term, is that which is perceived, that is, that which has perceptible form, and it is this form that reflects light and makes visual perception possible. In the absence of form or reflective matter, nothing can be seen though light is still present. Consider the empty space between planets and galaxies which we know is filled with light but is experienced as sheer darkness. Such darkness doesn’t indicate absence of light but rather the absence of form.

Form cannot be seen without light, and light is not known unless through form.

But how did we know about the existence of light if light cannot be seen and is inherently invisible? It’s the intellect’s ability to perceive absence that allows us to infer the presence of light. It is a fact of common experience that objects can be present but not seen. When sun sets and light recedes, the same objects that were visible in daylight, cease to be perceived; we can still touch them or “know” that they are there, but we cannot see them anymore. This obviously implies that visibility is not a property of visible objects, and hence must depend on something else that may or may not be present but its presence is the condition for the visibility of objects. Since visibility can appear and disappear while objects are physically present, light is posited as the element responsible for visibility.

But it’s equally true that without the presence of material objects, we wouldn’t’ be able to infer the presence of light, for light is made manifest, however indirectly, through interaction with, or more precisely through reflection from, non-light. What’s seen in this interplay of light and matter, is the sensible form but neither light itself nor the matter itself, only the form.

The Self, Atman, has a similar relationship with non-self, that which it makes known. Self, being itself invisible and unmanifest, makes things other than Self, i.e. intelligible forms, manifest; their becoming manifest here implies not sensible visibility but rather their very being. When light is presence, things are seen. When the Self is present, things are there.

Similar to the case where light can be present and shining while darkness reigns, which happens when there’s not matter to reflect the light, the Self also is and shines whether being is registered or not. A best example of such state is the state of deep sleep in which the Self is equally present as in other states but forms, i.e. identities of things, have merged back into undifferentiated state, so there’s no experience whatsoever. More about this state is discussed in the previous post here about Mandukya Upanishad.

However, there’s a limit to this analogy: whereas it’s possible to conceive of a situation where light is mostly absent while objects are present, it’s impossible to conceive of the Self as absent. Self is ever-present and all-pervasive. A logical proof of this is as following: when one tries to conceive of the absence of the Self, either nothing is conceived or something other than the self is conceived. Whether nothing is conceived or something, a not-Self, is conceived, it’s a being of some sort that is conceived, for we can say that the matter of conception is something that is. Conception is always a conception of something that is, whether in a physical, mental, or metaphysical sense. Since any conception is a getting hold of a being, the very possibility of the act of conception, itself an act and hence a being, necessitates the presence of the Self, for Self is that which bestows being, much like light that bestows visibility. To try to conceive of a world without a transcendent Self is to try to imagine a visible form without vision and light; the presence of light is necessarily implied even when we imagine a visible form.

Where there’s sight, there’s light. Where there’s being, there’s the Self. In fact, it’s the Being of the Self that we mistakenly attribute to phenomena of the world, simply because we cannot locate this Being anywhere else as Being has no place in space and time. As we don’t false attribute visibility to objects themselves simply because we cannot see light, it should be apparent that the Self, too, being the bestower of Being, is not another being but rather must transcend all beings and be apart from them, though we cannot capture it in the form of a being.

An even better substitute for the word “Being” is the sense of reality. Being has been cast into obscurity as a result of analysis and dissection by philosophers over millennia. Reality, on the other hand, is more original and detectable. If one reflects on wakefulness, one sees that wakefulness is a being awake to reality, to things that are experienced to be real. This is our most immediate experience, though we may after the fact begin to suspect whether things are real or not, but even in doing so it seems we have an innate understanding of reality or the sense of real-ness. Reality, realness, is not something we can define in terms of something else; we know it very well and recognize it when we see it; it’s known by itself and is self-evident.

However, this realness is something distinct from things. We don’t simply experience a world of objects and other subjects; we experience them as, at first, unquestionably real, as being-there. This all-pervading sense of reality that shines on all things, is known to us as it is and not through any mediation or additional cognitive process.

Even when we begin to suspect reality, it’s always the reality of a thing or phenomena that becomes questionable, not the sense of reality itself. In suspecting whether something is real, we have to take for granted the reality of the very act of suspecting, an act itself in the world. We can certainly conceive of a world whose objects are not real, but we cannot conceive of an experience with no sense of realness present in it. In so conceiving, the act of conceiving is that which has to bear the sense of reality. In short, we cannot do away with the sense of reality though we can withdraw it from the objects on which it’s shining. The fact that it’s possible to doubt the realness of all things but not the sense of realness itself, shows that the source of the sense of realness cannot be in the objects themselves but rather in the subject to whom objects appear.

It’s the subject’s reality that shines on appearances and makes them appear as if they were real or existing independently of the subject. This is similar to light that is itself invisible and doesn’t belong to visible object, but the visible object’s form appears to belong to the object itself. For example, we mistakenly consider shape and size as intrinsic properties of objects, but shape and size of the same object vary depending on the position and faculties of the subject. This doesn’t invalidate physics: physics and mathematics are sciences of the world; they present to us idealized versions of experience that are abstract and derivate with respect of our first-hand, phenomenological experience.

When we speak of metaphysics, we’re always in the realm of phenomenology and not idealized, abstract constructs of science that can never become objects of perceptual experience. For example, the space of physics is different from the space of perception. In physics, an object’s size is invariant as it moves in space, but this is never our experience in the space of perception: the shape and size of a perceptual object varies as we change our position with respect to it; it’s highly subject-dependent. But physics, similar to other sciences, describes a world deprived of the subject; it’s a subject-less world, though ironically science is itself a construct living in the mind of a given subject, i.e. the scientist.

When the subject, the permanent witness of experience, is sucked out of the world, the indispensable permanency of the Self is falsely projected on to the objects of the world and their properties. However, this object-permanency is un-constitutional in the absence of permanent subjects who can measure and compare these properties and arrive at invariant constructs.

Going back our analogy between light and reality, we see that the sense of realness always present in experience behaves in the same way that light does with regard to visibility. Sensible light illumines the visible forms without itself being illumined. The Self, the true subject, illumines phenomena by bestowing upon them the sense of reality without itself being known as a real thing or a being in the world. The reality of the objects, and above all the reality of the world itself, is nothing but the light of the Self. The Self is not something in the world; it’s the world that’s in the Self, and not so in a matter of being physically contained in It, for the world is not something physical but rather phenomenal. We can say that the world, as phenomenon, is contained in the Self in the same way that a thought is contained in the thinking that holds the thought.

The world is nothing but a phenomenon that appears to be real and independent of the subject precisely because the subject makes it so. It’s the nature of the subject to shine reality on that which is contained within it. So, anything the Self is directed to, is bound to appear as if it were independent of the Self. The light of the Self is the sense of reality, and hence when it shines it makes phenomena appear as real whereas this realness is that of the Self itself and not of the phenomena.

Consequently, we can say that the world-experience is a result of a confusion where the real-ness of the Self is mistakenly mixed in with or superimposed on appearances, and in making things appear as real, the Self itself becomes concealed or unreal, however only apparently. This gives us a positive direction in detecting the Self as the foundation of all reality and phenomena. In reflecting on our wakefulness, and using the analogy of light as a symbolic means for realization, we can attempt to see that though we are surrounded by real things, ourselves and our thoughts included, this realness of things is itself not a property of things; it’s not something in the table, the chair, the tree, or the space between them, no more than the light can said to belong to visible objects. The sense of reality is present wherever we turn. Even when we shut down our senses and begin to think or reflect, the realness of our thinking and reflecting is the realness of the invisible Self.

A common mistake would be to seek out the Self as something real behind all phenomena. The Self, however, is not a something metaphysically real; It’s not a thing. The Self is the very sense of realness that we find everywhere and in all things regardless of where we turn, whether outward or inward. The Self is shining of realness. It is the making-appear-as-real of non-Self.

Spiritual realization, therefore, is not a matter of seeking, for any seeking only delays realization. Seeking is the shifting of realness from one thing to another. Spiritual realization is in fact a matter seeing; it requires no attempt or no work, no thinking or analyzing. Spiritual realization is a seeing, in a flash of spiritual intuition, that the all-pervading realness present in all experience is distinct from all that appears, that the sense of reality is not something in the world or a property of it or any part of it; this sense of reality has no place or time or origin; it’s neither here nor there, neither mine nor yours; it just is as a flow of making-real, and is only falsely superimposed on empty appearances, apparently depriving the fullness of the Self and lending that fullness to the objects. Spiritual realization, then, is a matter of reclaiming the fullness of the Self by seeing that this fullness had never left the Subject but rather appeared to be misplaced on the phenomena of experience.

In summary, our metaphysical journey has shed light on the parallels between light, perception, and the profound essence of the Self. The exploration of the hidden nature of light and the unseen Self reveals a curious interdependence similar to the intricate relationship between perceptual vision and the perception of reality. Extending the analogy into our experience of wakefulness, we recognize the indispensable role of the subject in encountering reality. Through the lens of spiritual realization, we can shift focus from seeking to intuitive seeing, unveiling the constant presence of the Self which quietly and in concealment illuminates the ephemeral field of phenomena. This Self, the pure Subject, is nothing but the overwhelming sense of Reality that always surrounds us and we falsely call it the universe. Only in and through this seeing, can we reclaim the core of our being and the origin of all that is real.