The Unfading Light

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The pathway in the woods is an image that invites us to the search to know the interior Light. The interior Light is not visible in the painting nor is it ever visible to us but it is experienced internally within and around us. It is experienced as an interior, non-rational knowing of fundamental personal value. The physicist David Bohm wrote that “the light is the fundamental activity in which our existence has its ground.” It is beyond the time of our daily world although that does not mean it is spatially distant.

It is remarkable that Augustine made a careful distinction when he wrote: “I entered, and beheld, with the mysterious eye of my soul the Light that never changes, above the eye of my soul, above my intelligence. It was not the common light which all flesh can see, nor was it greater yet of the same kind, as if the light of day were to grow brighter and brighter and flood all space. It was not like this, but altogether different from all such things.” Augustine wrote that the Light was not above his intelligence “in the same way as oil is above water, or heaven above earth; but it was higher because it made me, and I was lower because made by it.”