The Heart Chan Paths

I was deeply honored to lead the Diamond Bar English session on July 13, 2008, as Brother JMJM and Sister Emily were out of town. I have been reading several books on the Zero-Point Field, Akashic Field, and Consciousness written by several well renowned physicists who are leaders in their field. While much of it was very interesting to me and some outside of my realm of comprehension, their descriptions of light and it’s properties struck a cord in me. I, like many Chan practitioners, often witness light during mediation sessions. Sometimes, it seems so bright that I feel I need to put on my Raybans. But wait, my eyes are closed! I’ve often wondered why there is this manifestation of light and I think I’ve found the answer. Here are my unedited lecture notes for this session. Maybe it will resonate with you too since light is both a particle and a wave. These represent just my opinions and thoughts. I don’t claim that they are right for everyone; they are right just for me.

Mystery of Light

“For the rest of my life, I want to reflect on what light is”

Albert Einstein

Chan Practice – Enlightenment: Gold, Green, Red, Purple, etc. So I’d like to talk about one of these four topics called light.

When you’re riding you bicycle at 10 mph and a car passes you at 30 mph, you perceive the car moving at 20 mph. Make sense?

Light moves at 186,000 miles per second (670 million mph) so if the faster you travel, the slower light will be relative to you? So if you’re on a train travelling at the speed of light and you turn on the train’s headlights, would the light reach someone faster or not? Two American Physicists, Michelson and Morley, in 1887, proved that is not the case. Whether you travel away or towards light, the relative speed is always the same.

In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper which explained this. That is, if you were to travel at 186,000 miles per second, light would still zoom by you not by 1 mph but by 186,000 miles per second.

When you travel at the speed of light, a couple of unique things happen also. One, time would come to a complete standstill. Two, length would shrink to nothing. Three, mass or weight would reach infinity. So, it does not seem that anything can attain the speed of light.

Nothing, that is, except light since it is not a material object as it’s mass is zero. So, from the point of view of light, Einstein’s equations predict that there is no distance and no time has elapsed. For example, in 1984 an astronomer recorded a flash in the night sky that was not there the night before. He witnessed a supernova which is a star that exploded when its fuel was spent. The supernova was calculated to have happened 170,000 years ago. That is, it took 170,000 years for the light to reach earth. During the 170,000 years on earth, dinosaurs became extinct, Neanderthal man came and went, Cro-Magnon man came and went, Homo Sapiens (us) showed up between 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. The amazing thing is that if you were riding on that beam of light, the amount of time passed is zero. At that speed, there is no time and space.

Why am I telling you this about light?

All this points to something very strange about light. Whatever light is, it exists in a realm where there is no before and no after. There is only now. There is a point of emission, corresponding point of absorption. The photon of light does not exist between the two points. So light is beyond space and time.

That’s why all the major religions of the world Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism frequently describe religious experiences in terms of light. I believe light is related to consciousness and it is this consciousness that resulted in energy and intelligence. This energy and intelligence created the strings, quarks, atoms, molecules, weak nuclear forces, strong nuclear forces, gravity, electromagnetism, and biological life. From the formless (total consciousness) came the form and the world we live in.