The Light Within Us
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It’s been said that better questions lead us naturally to better answers, and that it’s in not knowing that we open the doorway to knowing. I’m Scott Lennox and you’re listening to The Beautiful Question, a consideration of things that truly matter in a complex world.
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What is it about light that arrests our attention and captures our imagination? Why is it that we so often overlook the light within ourselves?
Join me this week as we consider these and other questions that could serve to liberate us even more. Stay with me.
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Since the dawn of time, human beings have been captivated by light in all its forms. We stop to watch it slowly changing at sunrise or sunset. We grow spellbound as we gaze into it in a crackling fire and become transfixed as we stand in the dark looking up at shooting stars. We tell stories and write poems and songs about the light of the moon. Think of the heart-touching beauty Debussy and Beethoven created with Clair de Lune and Moonlight Sonata.
At any age, our hearts leap in childlike wonder at the sight of fireflies on a summer evening or the single shaft of sunlight that pierces the breaking clouds at the end of a storm. Something primal in us knows that we’re looking at the energy of life luminously revealing itself, and that in a very real sense, we’re looking at the most essential part of ourselves.
But unlike fireflies or the rising of the full moon or shooting stars, our light isn’t found in what can be seen with the eye. Neither is it found in what we think or feel, or in the things we do or the words we speak. Those are the reflections or manifestations of the light in us.
At the most fundamental level, our luminosity is found in the vibrating and scintillating nature of what we are. Light is the basic building block of which we are made. Everything else about us spills out from that source.
Yet, how often our own habits of thinking and emotion and behavior get in the way and block the light in us.
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Photo: TeamOne
Photo: TeamOne
I sometimes think of my own thinking habits functioning like the glass filters on my grandfather’s nautical quadrant. Long before radar or global positioning satellites, sextants and quadrants were the devices used by sailors to plot their position on the open ocean. Looking through the instrument’s eyepiece, an experienced navigator could focus on a star or on the sun and take a numerical reading. Then, comparing that reading to the previous one, they could calculate latitude and longitude with relative precision.
To prevent damaging the eye, a series of colored glass filters were mounted to the instrument to reduce the intensity of the sun’s light. In fact, if all the filters were put in place, no light could be seen at all, regardless how bright the source was.
My self-defeating thinking has often worked like those glass filters. When it happens, I’m not blocking myself from seeing the light of the sun but blocking the awareness of my own luminosity—the essence of my humanity. When I’m thinking that I’m not good enough, or that I’m never going to be successful, or that I’m not as good, smart, valuable, or capable as other people, can’t see my own light at all.
None of us can.
Thoughts like that always produce a distorted and diminished sense of self that leads to suffering in a variety of forms from numbness to depression to self-termination. The problem isn’t a lack of personal worth or luminosity or goodness, but a blocking of our perception of it.
Yet, isn’t it good to know that at any moment, when we relax our guardedness and the dark voice of our inner critic, we become flooded with light from the inside out.
This week, a friend sent an article citing research done at the University of Kassel in Germany. It showed that the chest area of the average person emits twenty photons of light per second. In contrast to that, the same area of someone who meditates on their heart center emits a hundred thousand photons per second—a five-thousand-fold increase in luminosity brought about by quietly and intentionally focusing on it.
Imagine what could happen if you were to liberate all of the light in you.
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This week’s Beautiful Questions are offered to help you do just that.
Question One: As you sit quietly, what do you notice about the ways you’ve been blocking your own inner light from moving freely?
Question Two: As you consciously choose to step out of your own way and allow your inner light to become liberated and more vibrant, where and in what ways will you focus it?
Question Three: For the next week, are you willing to spend a few minutes a day quietly envisioning the Light in you becoming stronger?
As you do, write and tell me about what happens. I’m always willing to listen.
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As I say each week,
My Light with Your Light!
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Thank you for joining me in these podcasts as we keep doing the things we can to respond to life in increasingly effective ways. As always, I’m open to your comments and feedback.
You can be further inspired by visiting my friends at Kosmos Journal. That’s K O S M O S Journal. Their mission is to inform, inspire, and engage global transformation in harmony with all life. You can easily find them online at Kosmos Journal dot O R G.
And at thebeautifulquestion.com, you can read the illustrated transcript of each podcast as you listen. You’ll also find an archive of all previous podcasts, including episodes three and four, guided relaxation audios that can help you practice letting go on a daily basis.
If you find these podcasts useful, don’t hesitate to share them or tell others about them. That’s a great way of helping me get a voice of calm and collaboration and balance and encouragement out into the world.
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I’m Scott Lennox, and this has been The Beautiful Question.
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The Beautiful Question is a One Light production, written, produced, and engineered by Scott Lennox at HeartRock Studios in Fort Worth, Texas, as a way of paying forward to life, being fully present, becoming better engaged with things that truly matter in a complex world, and committing to a healthier future for all of us.