Where is your light?

(No. 148) Light is the source of everything

Photo by Sean Sinclair on Unsplash

I’m thinking about light — from the sun, our screens, our hearts and our bulbs — and how it influences all aspects of aging. All aspects of life, in fact.

Several years ago I roamed rural Uganda speaking to people who lived without electricity, meaning their only light came from lanterns or candles burning fat or oil. I was writing a book about energy poverty with the CEO of a huge electricity utility company, and these Ugandans would never be able to read the book in their homes at night. Their light resembled the light Americans lived by until about 100 years ago -- a century. At night their rooms became dimly lit hideaways, lit by flickers of flame that offered no hope for reading, chopping, washing or entertaining, or, sometimes, the glow of a cellphone burning precious battery time. Darkness just fell, and that was that.

One afternoon I crossed the Victoria Nile (in a van, driving over a bridge, my North American imagination filled with crocodiles from Peter Beard photographs), and stopped at a roadside collection of food stalls huddled on a barren dirt plot. I ate a plate of beans and chopped greens at one stand. As I ate, I gazed at the cooking fire, which seemed alive, ever shifting, jumping with heat. I realized that the flames spitting up from the chunks of charcoal had originally been beams of sunlight falling on a tree. That energy was stored in the tree and remained there when it was cut down. The logs were then burned slowly in an air-tight oven in a process that removes certain gasses, and byproducts of wood, leaving high density carbon charcoal. That charcoal was desirable for cooking because it burned evenly, slowly, at high temperatures with little flame, but was less dense and toxic than coal. In mysterious ways, the charcoal had retained the light of the sun, which it now released to heat the beans. That meant that the beans were heated by sunlight that had fallen decades, or even centuries, before.

This is why I call the sunlight that created this fire the foundation of all the technologies that follow. The fire under my beans was first shaped by nature, to take the form of a tree. And that tree was shaped by humans, to take the form of logs that in turn were shaped into charcoal. That charcoal was turned into fire to heat the beans. Sunlight has been transforming the earth for hundreds of millions of years. The moment humans used it to cook, paint, build or get warm, it became a technology.

When I’ve mentioned to scientists that I believe light is the first technology, they invariably stop for a moment to consider this novel concept, and then dismiss it. The general definition of technology is “science or knowledge put into practical use to solve problems or invent useful tools,” as yourdictionary.com put it. Light fits this definition, in that since the first humans we have attempted to control light to further the fulfillment of our needs and desires. I see light as a gift, especially the first light, whenever and wherever that may have been. But I also see it as a way of making the world a better place for all of us.

When I was in my late 30s, I spent a year in an Andean cloud forest, writing a book and feeling how it was to live in an old wooden cabin with no electricity, only candlelight and the occasional beam of a battery powered flashlight. Often I’d spend late afternoons on a nearby ridge, in a building I called “The Hammock Hut.” It was there that I discovered the light holes inside my consciousness.

Discover your own light holes

You can discover them, too, the next time you have 10 minutes to spare. Situate yourself in a comfortable place, close your eyes and let your thoughts drift, much as you might if you were beginning to meditate. Be aware of the blackness caused by your closed eyelids, and the colors that might appear around the edges.  Many images and colors might cross your sightless eyes. Eventually, a hole, or an opening, will appear. Try to enter this hole within you closed eyes, and follow it where it leads.

This is the tricky part, because you need to will yourself at the same time you are relaxing about where to go. If you overthink it, the hole will disappear. It might take a few tries, but eventually you will be in a tunnel of some sort, moving down, taking detours, going here and there. At some point you will come into a dazzling room filled with bright light. There might be a person or two there, or animals. But surely there will be colors and plants and perhaps a stream. 

I was mesmerized the first time I saw this room, which changed in small ways every time I visited it. The light was so pure and so inviting. I wondered where it came from, and I started searching for the answers. Light turned out to be a much larger project than I’d imagined, with implications for every action in our world. 

That was the beginning of my discovery that light itself is a powerful tool for self transformation. These days I begin each day reciting the prayer for light that is said to have been uttered by the Prophet Mohammed. I am not Muslim, but I believe this prayer contains the answer to nearly every question, the fulfillment of every need. 

Prayer for Light

Oh God, Give us light in our hearts,

Light in our eyes, light in our ears,

Light on our right, light on our left,

Light above us, light beneath us,

Light before us, light behind us;

And make thou for us light. 

Light in our tongues, light in our sinews,

Light in our flesh, light in our blood,

Light in our hair, light in our intellects,

Light in our brains,

Light in our bodies, light in our souls,

And magnify for us light!

Oh God, bestow upon us light!

I want light. I want to share light with you. I want to share my understanding of how the sun and other forms of light improve our health, give us pleasure, build our societies and bring some of us closer to spiritual fulfillment. I want to explain the sun, x-rays, lamps, computers, clothes washing whiteners, device screens. The rainbows, the pale skies blue even at night, the mystics, the electricity, the gamma rays, quantum physics, the fires, EZ bake ovens and all the bioluminescent creatures, like fireflies, that cross our paths. All of these are containers for light.

Whether or not you’ve ever stopped to think about it, light is the source of everything you cherish -- or fear -- in life. Light is the basis of all life and knowledge, and it seems that it might inform our death, based on the many reports of near death experiences. That is one thing we will not know for sure until the inevitable happens.