Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee - Alchemy of Light: Working with the Primal Energies of Life

1. WORKING WITH LIGHT

1. Quoted by Sarrj, Knowledge of God in Classical Sufism , p. 90.
   

2. The poet William Wordsworth describes this sad transition:

   Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
   Shades of the prison-house begin to close
   Upon the growing Boy
   But He beholds the light and whence it flows.
   He sees it in his joy;
   At length the Man perceives it die away,
   And fade into the light of common day.

   Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, ll. 66-76. Wordsworth Poetical Works.

3. In the words of al-Jln:

   It is not the stars that guide us but the divine light.... If only the lamp of divine secrets be kindled in your inner self the rest will come, either all at once or little by little.... The dark skies of unconsciousness will be lit by the divine presence and the peace and beauty of the full moon, which will rise from the horizon shedding light upon light , ever rising in the sky, passing through its appointed stages... until it shines in glory in the center of the sky, dispersing the darkness of heedlessness.... Your night of unconsciousness will then see the brightness of the day.... Then you will see from the horizon of Divine Reason the sun of inner knowledge rising. It is your private sun for you are the one whom Allh guides .... Finally, the knot will be untied... and the veils will lift and the shells will shatter, revealing the fine beneath the coarse; the truth will uncover her face.

   All this will begin when the mirror of your heart is cleansed. The light of Divine secrets will fall upon it if you are willing and ask for Him, from Him, with Him.

   Abd al-Qdir al-Jln, The Secret of Secrets , trans. Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti, pp. xlvii-xlviii.

2. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

1. St. Mark 8:36.
   
2. St. Matthew 5:14.
   
3. Najm al-Dn Kubr, quoted by Henry Corbin, Man of Light in Iranian Sufism , p. 73.
   
4. Ibid.
   
5. Saint Teresa of Avila delineates a similar process in her stages of prayer. She uses the image of a gardener watering his garden to describe these stages. At the beginning the gardener must make every effort to lift the water from the well, but slowly the effort of the gardener becomes less and less, until in the final stage there is no longer a gardener, only the Lord Himself soaking the garden in abundant rain.
   
6. Rm, trans. Coleman Barks, One-Handed Basket Weaving , p. 14.
   
7. Hadth.
   
8. Robert Wolff, Original Wisdom , pp. 174-175.
   
9. Among School Children, Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.
   

3. CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHANGE

1. Brother Lawrence (d. 1691) was a Carmelite lay brother, author of The Practice of the Presence of God: The Best Rule of Holy Life.
   
2. For example, there is a tradition that there is a spiritual center in Washington, DC situated under the Cathedral, and that the energy from this center belongs to the work of the capital.
   

4. IMAGES OF LIFE

1. Byzantium, Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats , p. 281.
   
2. William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth Poetical Works.
   
3. C. G. Jung, Psychological Reflections , p. 39.
   
4. Psalms 36:9.
   

5. CHANGING THE DREAM

1. Ode: We are the Music Makers.
   
2. An Offer They Cant Refuse , The Sun , September 2005, Issue 357, p. 11.
   
3. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the West in shamanism, but practising shamans do not play the central role in the life of our Western culture that is needed to guide and transform a whole civilization.
   
4. Before the 2005 tsunami that caused so much loss of life, the nomadic Moken sailors who live among the islands in the Andaman Sea, off Myanmar (Burma), recognized the signs of the coming disaster in the dolphins and other fish suddenly swimming to deeper water. So they too took their boats further from the shore and rode out the waves, unlike the Burmese fishermen who were not attentive to the signs of nature but stayed close to shore where they perished as their boats were wrecked by the tsunami. The Moken said of the Burmese fishermen, They were collecting squid, they were not looking at anything. They saw nothing, they looked at nothing. They dont know how to look.
   
5. And he showed me a pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and the Lamb. The Revelation of St. John the Divine 22:1.
   
6. And yet Christ being born in a stable should have prepared us for a new age to be born within the ordinary.
   
7. The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentation upon his life. Memories, Dreams, Reflections , p. 218.
   
8. Perseus cuts off the snake-filled head of Medusa by only looking at her in his shield, which symbolizes the reflective stance of consciousness.
   

6. THE ALCHEMY OF THE ARCHETYPAL WORLD

1. See Vaughan-Lee, Working with Oneness , ch. 8, Imagination (pp. 111-124), for a description of the traditional use of the imagination in exploring the archetypal world.
   
2. Shakespeares Othello shows how the green-eyed monster jealousy can destroy a brave and honorable man through a simple weakness in his character.
   
3. Of course the reverse is also true, as at a time of war when the warrior god evokes violent and destructive thought-forms.
   

7. WORKING WITH DIFFERENT DIMENSIONS

1. Hfez, The Song of Spring, Dance of Life , p. 12, adaptation.
   
2. There are also other worlds to which we have less direct access, like the world of the angels and the worlds of nature spirits and of other, darker entities, which are hidden from most people, though there are those who can see and communicate with them.
   
3. See Vaughan-Lee, Working with Oneness , pp. 112-114, for a description of active imaginations roots in alchemy and Sufism.
   
4. Irina Tweedie, Daughter of Fire , p. 813.
   
5. In some rare instances the individual who is taken into the world of the Self is unable or unwilling to return to ego-consciousness, as Suzanne Segal describes in her book Collision with the Infinite.
   
6. Daughter of Fire , p. 813.
   
7. Genesis 28:12-13.
8. Genesis 28:16.
   

8. THE WATERS OF LIFE

1. This is often experienced in a creative illness.
   

The Bible, Authorized Version. London: 1611.

Brother Lawrence. The Practice of the Presence of God: The Best Rule of a Holy Life. London: Samuel Baxter & Sons.

Corbin, Henry. The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism . London: Shambhala, 1978.

Hafez. Dance of Life , Trans. Michael Boylan and Wilberforce Clarke. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 1988.

Jami. This Heavenly Wine: Renditions from the Divan-e Jami. Renditions by Vraje Abramian. Prescott, AZ: Holm Press, 2006.

Jung, C. G. Collected Works . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

. Memories, Dreams, Reflections . London: Flamingo, 1983.

. Psychological Reflections . Ed. Jolande Jacobi. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953.

Perkins, John. An Offer They Cant Refuse. The Sun , September 2005, Issue 357.

Renard, John. Knowledge of God in Classical Sufism . Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004.

Rumi. One-Handed Basket Weaving . Trans. Coleman Barks. Athens, GA: Maypop Books, 1991.

Segal, Suzanne. Collision with the Infinite . San Diego, CA: Blue Dove Press, 1996.