Here is the introduction to Michael Gray’s post above, from the CCI Facebook website:
Author Michael Gray has written a Blog entitled “Into the Light’, in which he reveals: “When I was two years old, I drowned in Lake Ontario, and I sometimes wonder if I had something like the experience that adults the world round have reported… I wonder if this is more a fantasy born of unrealized longings than anything that pertains to the phenomena of light as we know it, here and now, in this world. Those of us gifted with sight can attest to the importance of light in our travels among the things and people of this world. It makes sense to appreciate the presence of light in our lives. And it is comforting to hear that a version of the light we know—transformed into a welcoming warmth in place of the light of a sun we don’t dare look at directly—may one day welcome us into its arms. It is comforting to hear that this kind of light is almost universally reported in near-death experiences.”
Later he mentions “light– the medium that carries…understanding, clarity, and caring.” And I then experienced a flash… I recalled Rinpoche writing in Chapter 15, of the book, ‘Time, Space, and Knowledge,’ [perhaps one of the most important chapters of all the TSK books.] Rinpoche writes equating clarity and knowingness…
“We have seen that open-ended clarity can be found even within the obstructing presence of ordinary knowing—and in ordinary ‘not-knowing’ and confusion, as well. Both ‘ordinary knowing’ and its correlate ‘not-knowing’ can be thawed or cultivated to yield this luminescent quality. By working with appearance, refining this quality of clarity in everything, it becomes possible to use this clarity itself rather than ‘mind’ and ‘things’ as our orienting guide. As a result, our view of reality changes still further. It no longer seems broken up by knowings, lapses of knowing, confusion, limits to knowledge, and so on; nor is it apportioned into space, time, or discrete identities or substances.
There is no longer a ‘looker,’ but instead, only a ‘knowingness’ which can see more broadly, from all sides and points of view at once. More precisely, the ‘knowing’ clarity does not radiate from a center, but is rather in everything, and everything is in it. There is neither an ‘outside’ nor an ‘inside’ in the ordinary sense, but rather a pervasive and intimate ‘in’ or ‘within’ as an open-ended knowingness.” TSK p. 281-2
Please continue reading the post above…