According to both physics and yoga, the whole universe is nothing more than light interacting with itself—creating as it does both space and time and the seemingly separate particles and people that fill it. Physicists describe this dance with equations and yogis with mandalas, but what their symbols are pointing to seem to me to be exactly the same. My spiritual teacher, Swami Radha, described it in
a poem:
The original Light
reflections in different pulses.
The countless powers of the Divine.
The Divine Mind’s pulsation
after a penetration to the core.
Narrowness—a point of Light.
First the goddess innate,
a sensation of expansion of mind,
then a goddess of greater dimensions.
The physicist starts with an all-pervading field of something related to electricity/light, the yogini with a single point to focus her mind on. In both cases the underlying energy is tremendous, but is only revealed if one focuses to sizes much smaller than an atom. The Bhagavad Gita refers to this energy as “like a thousand suns,” while physicists speak of ordinary energies increased by a trillion-fold—ten times over!
Whatever it is, compared to its brilliance, our everyday world is only a pale shadow. To give rise to the world we know, enormous forces have to almost exactly cancel each other out, like the two sides of an evenly matched tug-of-war. For the physicist, this means that negative and positive charges have to just balance. For the yogi, that the pure power of consciousness holds itself back from creating every possible world at once, in order to allow something more definite and concrete to emerge.
But these tremendous creative energies, even while holding themselves closely in check, cannot help but throb and vibrate. The cancellations are never quite exact, so something moves or comes into being only to be pushed back or to wink out of existence an instant later. This is the pulsation that my teacher is talking about in her poem, and it gives us a glimpse of the power and unity that underlies the everyday world. The Kashmiri yogis call it spanda—that which throbs. In another guise, a physicist might call it the uncertainty principle, but it seems to me in essence that they’re talking about the same thing.
One interesting thing about this underlying energy is that it arises from the implicit power of light first to create and then to interact with what it has created. The uncertainty principle allows particles and light to briefly be created out of “nothing,” and it is the interactions of these “virtual” particles that give rise to the enormous energies.
What this means for us is that both yogis and physicists agree that behind the ordinary surface of things, there is an entirely different world and set of forces.
How might we get a glimpse of this, or at least the vibration it creates?
The Kashmiri yogis suggest looking in the space between thoughts, emotions, and perceptions—and to allow something different to emerge through the cracks. This is meant not to be an esoteric idea, but a daily practice.
Recently, when my mind was stuck wondering about how to respond to what seemed an indirect invitation, I started pacing about. I noticed a narrow beam of sunlight striking a macramé wall hanging and turning a small piece of each successive string into an intense point of light. And the thought arose: “Follow the points of light. Trust that you’ll find the next one when you need it.” These points were all in a straight line, so I decided to be direct and open and not worry about the complications.
It’s hard to say where this thought came from, but one clue is that it brought with it a feeling of clarity and joy—a feeling of being reconnected to something larger than my little self. It felt like a glimpse of a wholer, brighter world than the narrow loop of worry that my mind had been caught up in.
Swami Radha’s poem also seems to be referring to a specific spiritual practice aimed at getting a glimpse of this hidden world. It involves the experience of first trying to focus the mind on a candle or the point at the centre of a mandala and then feeling its pulsation as it bounces off this centre—and usually gets deflected into distracting thoughts and images. The next step is becoming aware of the feeling of the act of will it takes to keep refocusing, while being open to any inspirations that emerge. Focus … expand to distraction … focus … expand to distraction … focus … focus … focus … expand to insight/inspiration! Trying to find the goddess within, and then letting that feeling expand to include both the broader and inner worlds.
Notice the play of pulsation/vibration here. Inspiration is nothing we can directly will or command. Like breathing, we can only keep focusing in and opening up, bouncing the ball of attention, and looking in the cracks. Why doing this can open our hearts to something very different, my mind can’t explain. I just know from experience that it sometimes does. The trick is to accept and be grateful for even the smallest glimmers of connection—realizing that, like the stars in the sky, they are signposts to a much wider and wholer universe.
1 From Swami Sivananda Radha, “Light Truth,” When You First Called Me Radha: Poems (Kootenay Bay, BC: Timeless Books, 2005), 28.
