A Pure World

In this pure world, there is no sense of loss and of complicity in loss.”
Dynamics of Time and Space, by Tarthang Tulku.

This is an offer I can’t refuse. Even though this sentence appears in a context that doesn’t offer me a path I currently know how to walk, it lights up an intention to learn more about this pure world, so that I can linger in its outskirts.

The context in which it appears is a chapter about light, where physical light and the light of awareness are related, although different in how they come into our lives.

Physical light—according to particle physics–is the fundamental fabric of the cosmos. Whether it is the light shining in our window after its eight-minute journey across 93 million miles, from the Sun to our home on Planet Earth, or particles of light spinning around one another in vast fields of molecular space, an image of everything being light has become familiar in our modern world.

Viewing obstacles, and the solid constructs amidst which I pass my days, as swirling clouds of light moving in space—I take a deep breath and relax.

Relaxing with this image of a world that only seems solid helps me to explore my inner realm of thoughts and feelings. Are my mind and heart riding on streams of light too?

In a pure world, free of loss and complicity in loss, am I riding a freight train made of light particles? Could all that composes my body and mind, my thoughts and feelings, hopes and regrets, be woven from streams of light dancing in a twilight of becoming? Then what is there to regret? What proclamation of darkness, lamenting in a stream of light, has earned the right to rule my days and nights?

Whether it’s a passing siren invoking a memory of our loved-one being carried away, never to return; whether it’s a grim diagnosis after our years of questionable behavior; whether it’s a sense that we took a wrong turn at some juncture in our past; the desire for a pure world is not an attempt to avoid responsibility or a denial of the actual.

It’s not just our bodies that are moving through a world of physical illumination. It’s not just resonating vibrations on all levels of being lighting up fields of open space. It’s that our thoughts and dreams, our feelings and disappointments, are themselves light streaming through beginnings and endings. Who would not happily lighten the weight of before and forever after?

If this is to be believed, or even imagined, then we are free to steer the boat of our minds and hearts through the light, into the light. We don’t need to clutch onto the wheel of our overloaded barges of regret. If they should collide with what we see in front of us, the vast space in which particles of light spin out their destinies allows them to pass by each other unharmed.

Like the Titanic for which it was too late to turn even with a mile of open water separating it from the iceberg, we can slow down and relax. The water through which we sail will tell us who we are and for what purpose we are sailing.

We are nothing special in this realm of light. Why struggle to escape the inevitable? Even if we are living in a time of consequences, we are free to draw strength from the purity of what we tried to be and hoped would happen, even if it didn’t. In a life that was always more accidental than we knew at the time, we do not need to lower the light sail of our hearts, as we sail in a steady wind that has always been lighting our way.

2 comments to “A Pure World”
  1. “What proclamation of darkness, lamenting in a stream of light, has earned the right to rule my days and nights?” A empowering statement. that some survivors’ say about their loss.
    “We are nothing special in this realm of light.” I want to know more about this sentence~ I am going to email you a poem on light that we read in the moms support group yesterday.. I didn’t write it but wish I had!

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