Take a moment and remember all the places you’ve gone swimming. Remember all the swimming you’ve done out doors, in sunlight, where the water is shallow, clear, and you can see the patterns of sunlight on the bottom. It might be a beach, or a lake, or a swimming pool, but the sunlight is refracted by the surface of the water and collects into ever moving patterns of light. Ribbons of light that intersect in brighter blobs making a network that depends on the patterns of waves above.
When I was in college and studying physics I always had a sense that this was an image of how energy collects to form particles, which move and interact, always changing. I never “worked out” this metaphor in detail, but have often remembered it since. There is a field of energy that exists everywhere, and the particles are just denser places. There is light everywhere on the bottom of a pool, but it’s collected, focused by the waves into brighter ribbons and blobs, into forms and particles.
Later I studied yoga and my teacher spoke about how consciousness became denser as it came out from Source and into the physical. He spoke as if there were planes, or levels with interfaces which could reflect and refract consciousness as it emerged, helping to give it form. This is what happens at the surface of the water, the interface with the air above, and the light which was uniform is refracted and reflected and takes on form and pattern as it enters the water and shines onto the bottom.
Spirit infuses matter, as the light shines into the water. It projects into matter, but is refracted in ways that produce form. It is denser in some places, bright and noticeable, and less so in others, but never absent, only relatively less present.
When the water becomes still the patterns fade, the light is everywhere the same, until a breeze comes or a swimmer moves, and waves are formed and the pattern of light and dark reappears. Perhaps this it how the mind works, creating patterns, dramas, and dreams; by refracting the light of spirit into brighter and less bright, light and shadow we may call it. When the thoughts and emotions still and the surface calms, spirit can shine evenly into us. The forms disappear, and we may miss the variety, the beauty of the patterns, but the stillness allows peace and an un-refracted experience of the divine.
In your mind’s eye, or the next time you go swimming under the sun, notice these patterns and let your being remember how spirit infuses you as the sunlight does the water. Notice what images or metaphors arise for you.
(© 8/2010)
