Week 16 – Light-Sensing

My focus this week is something I was about to write about last week, until I got carried away writing poetry (!) Last week’s assignment of reading Haanel’s Master Keys Part 15 I found extremely insightful. My offering of last week was a consequence of reading paragraphs 16 to 23 (by paragraph 20 I was inspired with the invisible and invincible power of clothing thoughts in the form of words).

But it was paragraphs 24 and 25 that got me thinking…

24. There is a principle of mathematics, but none of error; there is a principle of health, but none of disease; there is a principle of light but none of darkness; and there is a principle of abundance, but none of poverty.
25. ….if we let in light there can be no darkness. Where there is abundance, there can be no poverty.

Forgive me if the following is obvious to you, but to me, it became something of a revelation.

Let’s start by using the principle of light, for this is the physically the most understandable principle Haanel used as the others were more abstract concepts.

We live in a world whereby darkness is turned to light by the flick of a switch – electromagnetic oscillations (or mains electricity) provides the energy to heat a filament or nowadays excite atoms inside a tube of gas to produce light. I’m sure you know that Edison created the first commercially viable electric light bulb. But he could not, for it is impossible, create a dark bulb. You cannot switch dark on, but only remove the light. Thus light is everything and darkness is actually nothing. Darkness is an absence of light to which we have attributed a word by which we give it status in its own right – as if darkness actually is something, when in fact it is “lightlessness”. Furthermore, the scale of everything between light and what we call darkness is just a case of the degree of light (the number of photons in a given volume of space).

In a deeper sense, I think Haanel, by way of introducing this concept in paragraph 23 when he talks of vitality in thought. The room is not light or dark, but rather has light or not, for darkness is the absence of light –in effect is nothing. Haanel talks of vitality in thought – either it has vitality (i.e., a positive, harmonious thought Universal mind) or it has nothing.

Vitality, like light, is energy it is the opposite of nothingness. Light can never be extinguished by darkness, but light always conquers darkness. The volume of “dark” space in the Universe vastly, literally astronomically, greater than the space taken up by stars but the light from stars which shone in the infancy of the Universe, over billions of years and mind-blowing distances still reaches our planet. Our telescopes collect that light and concentrate it for us to behold in awe. Light from across the Universe still reaches us because light conquers darkness. Similarly, vitality in our thoughts and words shines out – it cannot be destroyed, because its opposite is simply the lack of itself. It is, or it is not.

You may have heard that the opposite of love is not hate but apathy. Hate is a complicated emotion which can often be discovered to be attached to love for a person which perhaps has been betrayed, violated or desecrated in some fashion and is a reaction to love lost; but apathy, where the emotion is absent, is surely loveless-ness and anathema to the Universal mind. This is the stuff of a cold-blooded and calculated fall from all that is. Love – even bruised and scarred love – either is, or is not.

And so, like light, other principles such as abundance, health and many others each are vessels of vitality which, by the Law of Attraction, are either increased or decreased contingent to the clarity of visualization and the harmony of the thought with Universal Mind.

So opposites do not fight, a principle may present itself by degree as a light may dim or brighten, but however bright, the principle possesses energy –it possesses vitality by which it exists. And if anything is possessed, it may be given.

Thus the principles of abundance, health, love and kindness and many others are only manifest by their exchange. A huge rock may be raised high in the air; it has energy –potential energy, but it is not until the energy is utilised or given away, that its power may be seen. The rock exchanges potential energy for kinetic energy and may plunge with great force into the ground and its impact can felt. So it is with all good traits – their vitalities are not to be withheld but exchanged and to impact on our surrounding world.

As the Great Teacher said, “Do not hide your light under a bushel…”