Rudolph Bauer Ph.D. Author, Elizabeth Ebaugh, LCSW-C Editor
Awareness is light, both as source and as radiance. The medievalists would speak of light as source “lux” and as radiance “lumen”….luminescent brightness.
The light of awareness illuminates experience; the light of awareness illuminates itself. The actuality of light as source is within us and when focused within, it illuminates itself, intensifying the radiance of awareness.
Primordial awareness manifests itself in us as the radiance of our personal awareness, and primordial awareness also manifests our minds and our bodies. Primordial awareness manifests circumstances as well. Most surprisingly primordial awareness manifests all of our actions and all actions of the universe. Manifestation is action through luminous movement.
This light and the drama of the light is the drama of the unconcealment of concealment, the drama of the invisible becoming visible. The light is the brightness of the innermost experience of awareness (heart essence) as well as the brightness of experience of everyone and every event. The flesh is light. Both the light of awareness and the awareness of light have the quality of illumination making that which is invisible visible, and bringing forth itself as itself into visibility. The light has the amazing quality of penetration, or going throughness, spreading outness, extending out, letting translucidity through. The translucidity of the awareness field. The essence of brightness is transparency or translucidity…..luminous openness, luminous emptiness, luminous clearing…luminous space.
So brightness is that through which we see and hear and feel and know. Light is not only that which penetrates, but is also the throughness. The throughness of phenomena, (emptiness of phenomena or the openness of phenomena) which lets one see through, experience passing through and extending through. Radiance of awareness, the light of awareness, is transparency, is translucidity, and is trans- spaciousness. This light is the opening of awareness, the letting through of experience. The essence of the light and brightness is being transparent, so all phenomena are translucent as is the field. Translucidity is emptiness or spaciousness, openness. The brightness is another way of experiencing the nonduality and oneness of phenomena in and through dualistic appearance.
Light frees up everything. So to be attuned with the light and live within the field of light is the source of freedom. To become the light is to become the authentic self.
The light illuminates and frees affective states, deceptive states, and obscuring states. The light is always opening to the light. There is an allegiance to the natural light, a samaya of light that liberates you from everything. True detachment is a luminous expanse. The dark luminous light is the Throma Nagmo or dark mother.
The light frees up, as it lights up. It most fundamentally frees up and sets free everything that appears both in the day and in the night. The light makes a clearing, an opening. Like the opening in a forest, light and spaciousness are in complete oneness.
The light of personal awareness is the same light as the light of the primordial ground awareness. The light illuminates everything through and through. The light passes through dimensions. The light brings you in and the light takes you out. Your appearance or manifestation is the light appearing or manifesting as you. And your dissolving is the light dissolving as you, as this singular manifestation, singular time, in the duration of timeless awareness.
For some the light burns long, for some the light burns short, for some the light is so bright and for some the light is so dull. You are primordial awareness manifesting as yourself, as your innermost awareness. The more you enter the light of your awareness or the light of the other, the more you gain mastery of the light. A mind is the brightness of the light. However, the light can be experientially split off from the source. The light can also be
amplified through a particular function of the mind. This happens with vast infinity. Many states of fixation are a function of the brightness being located in one function of the mind and not in the “lux”, the source. Fixations of light organized by mind, the personal and cultural mind.
Freedom is bonding to illumination …bonding to the light through phenomena is freeing…samaya is bonding, samaya is bonding to the light, bonding to the light within ones being and to the light within beingness of beings. All phenomena are iconic openings to the light. Beings are iconic doorways of light. Within and through beings is light. To experience phenomena is to experience the light, the radiance of the light, or the shining of relative truth and absolute truth are in complete oneness.
The capacity to experience the light within self and within phenomena is natural liberation. Appearance and bliss, appearance and spaciousness, appearance and emptiness, appearance and radiance, appearance as time, as “lumen”, and timelessness as “lux”. Radiance and source, time and timelessness, form and emptiness. This capacity to bond is beyond attachment configurations; the bondedness of light to the light is love, pure love not bound by care. Being attached to the idea of light or the myth of light is not the knowingness of light which is nonconceptual and prerepresentational. Belief in light and the experience of light are two different kinds of knowing. The difference between direct perception and information.
When people live in the bond of the light of the awareness field, vajra kumara is present between them, within them, as them: unborn and undying. The phenomenon of a person is experienced in the field as primordial light which is unborn and undying. Timeless awareness as light manifesting the brightness of reality is magical realism. When timeless awareness manifests in time between one or more persons magical realism happens as the duration within timelessness awareness. All phenomena as they manifest are of unborn and undying nature of awareness.
This is the secret of Guhyagarbha Tantra.