Descent into Light

The statements, “The way up is the way down” (and its converse, “The way down is the way up.”), serve to illustrate the paradoxes and mysteries of travel and exchange along along the vertical axis. As practitioners of traditional wisdom we are invited to learn the mysteries of ascent into darkness and descent into light. It seems contrary, perhaps, but as we saw in the last contribution, darkness is only a word to describe the human mind’s inability to grasp the divine essence in its totality.

While the mind “goes black” in unknowing as one ascends beyond its capacities into God, the heart becomes light as one descends deeply to rest in the stillness of its own intimate spaces. There in communion one tastes the mystery of essence as Presence. As T.S. Eliot expressed this paradox in the Four Quartets “The darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.”

The deep interiority that is the heart is (to borrow a word from modern physics) “non-local.” It does not exist in space-time as such, but participates in and is entangled with the Heart of Ultimate Reality. The two (the human heart and the divine heart) share the same “space”--they are expressions of the same reality.

It is in that space that one comes to know both “light” and “dancing” (light in the darkness and dancing in the rest). The Presence of God is hidden in that secret place that is invisible to the mind’s eye (the eye of reasonable and rational knowing) but experienced in the heart, and it is descent into this hidden chamber that a soul is introduced to the imaginal dimensions of Paradise and to the hierarchy of the presences that inhabit it in worlds that unfold as “light upon light.”