III: Invisible Sun

There has to be an invisible Sun…

—The Police

Imagine a moment of experience where you suddenly discover that there’s an entirely new kind of Sun. A ‘local star’ whose light illumines and enlivens dimensions we never realized existed, because we’d never had conscious access to direct experience of them. Once we experience this ‘new light’, we’d immediately realize that this Sun had been rising and setting every single day — we simply hadn’t been equipped to notice. Throughout our lives, this ‘invisible Sun’ had always been just as important as the ‘Sun of light’ that gives life and energy to every being on Earth. It had been rising and setting just like the one in the sky — but in a dimension inside us, instead of outside. Can you imagine how startling this would be?

In terms of biological life, here on Earth, nothing is as important as the Sun. No Sun? No beings — no science, religion, math, thoughts — no experiencers at all. The discovery of ‘another kind of Sun’ would be at least as surprising as discovering you’d been capable of physical flight your whole life, and had simply neglected to notice the way to accomplish it, perhaps based on the common stories and beliefs about humans flying. That it requires a machine, for example. Or that ‘above the ground’ is the only dimension in which flight can occur.

How could it be that we’d fail or forget to notice something as obvious and important as a Star? The answer is relatively simple: for the adult mind, it’s far too shockingly bright in the place inside us where this Star lives. Beyond the wondrous relationship with our own imagination in childhood, the place where the inner Star rises and sets is almost always dark, and — and the sudden onset of incredible brightness is terrifying. Its presence is so overpowering that over time — with the constant urging of our cultures and elders — we come to associate it with either nonsense or death. During this process we assemble something like sunglasses to block it out, and as we do this, our relationship with ourselves, our world, and particularly our imagination changes dramatically.

But why would we block out an inner Sun? Consider a few analogies that may help us to get a clearer grasp of this situation. Earth is 4.5 billion years old (by our standards and common models). In general, throughout the history of the evolution of terrestrial organisms (with the possible exception of the last few hundred years), the sudden onset of extreme brightness meant either ‘extreme danger’, ‘god(s) are here’, or ‘you’re about to die’. All of those are pretty threatening, in general. Never did the daytime or nighttime rapidly change toward ‘sudden brightness’ unless something extremely important and probably dangerous was happening. Additionally, when these events did occur in the realm of regular sensing, the source was almost invariably ‘from above’ or ‘in the sky’. Every life form on Earth is aware that ‘big’ means ‘up the scale from us’ in terms of size, and relative importance. Thus ‘things from above’ don’t merely indicate the direction ‘up’ as we consider them to — they fundamentally indicate the direction ‘toward the source(s) of life’ first — anything else is, comparatively, an afterthought.

In general, the only time ‘sudden brightness’ occurred ‘naturally’ was during lightning. And this was an event of extreme violence, startling power, and celestial import. But suppose that the sudden onset of incredible brightness was generally associated with death — or the local arrival of God? It’s certainly a reasonable speculation. — life on Earth is founded in a direct relationship with the light of the Sun, and the sudden appearance of light, would be almost automatically related to the local appearance of the source of all light. Might not a childlike intelligence associate all light with the Sun, directly? And since that is, in fact, the primary ‘source of life’ on Earth, might not it additionally accrue the meaning and characters of ‘the Creator(s)’?

The problem is complex, but relatively simple to sketch. Animalian consciousness is mythic in essence, and childlike in its associations. This means that it is innocent of the models and ideas we currently believe and ascribe to phenomenon we consider to be ‘physical’. Animals, in general, associate the ‘sudden onset of brightness’ with the sudden local arrival of the primeval creative being — and incarnate beings associate that with ‘death’ — which all of us significantly hope to avoid.

An example might be of some use here. A friend of mine has an angelFish named Sarin. One night Sarin was playing around in the dark, in her tank, getting a bit of a massage from the bubbles rising from the filter. My friend watched for a while before turning the light on. At that point, Sarin ‘freaked out’ and began leaping around the tank, bouncing off the glass, until she finally buried her head in the gravel. My friend and I were initially puzzled by this, and we were concerned that something was wrong with Sarin. After I had some time to consider the matter in greater detail, I was startled by the realization that fish don’t have eyelids. They cannot in any way avoid the sudden onset of terrible brightness.

And then I had a flash of insight: we are like this. In the dimension of where the invisible Sun is, we have no eyelids — and the sudden onset of brightness is terrifying and alien all at once.

Over time, through our human experience, and the processes of enlanguaging and enculturation, we ‘assemble’ something like sunglasses, out of the flotsam and jetsam of knowledge and history. The departure from ‘childhood’ is merely the process of these accretions progressing to the point where most of the light from the inner Sun is blocked out. The character and functions of the glasses inherently prevent us from removing them — in part because we are not aware we are wearing them. So, in short, we all have a beloved ‘secret’ memory of this inner Sun — from infancy and early childhood — but we cannot admit it to the conscious aspect of ourselves. We’d have to revise almost all of what we believe and understand, as adults, and we’d also have to reevaluate almost every action in our history by entirely different standards than those we acted upon. This alone is a fairly threatening possibility for almost anyone. This is the internal portion of the story of forgetting. The external portion is more complex and far more powerful: everyone around us is constantly requiring that we act as if there cannot be an inner Sun — regardless of our personal experience or beliefs. Moreover, almost none of our common activities or experiences have anything to do with these dimensions inside us: by their very existence and ‘normalcy’ they inferentially deny the existence of the inner Sun. The combination of these two distinct effect-domains is overpowering, and almost no one can oppose such thoroughly entrenched momentum. It’s a very difficult matter to ‘swim upstream’ against what we are taught and what is demanded of us in our daily lives by the cultures we are immersed in. Very few of us indeed will ever have the experience of stepping entirely beyond those habits and demands. Interestingly, however, the fact that we’ve assembled sunglasses to block it out doesn’t mean much. Effectively, this only interferes with our awareness of the inner Sun — we’re still in constant contact with its light and effects — we simply can’t notice this — at least, not directly.