Radiance and Realization

Exploring the Relationship Between Radiance and Realization

Radiance is at the core of realization, the transformation of the soul, and the expression of one’s uniqueness.

Is radiance energy? It certainly seems dynamic in nature. Radiance is most often associated with light and heat, but also with love and affection – and electrical fields.

• Radiance: (noun) light or heat as emitted or reflected by something. Radiant :vividly bright and shining. Radiate: to proceed in a direct line from or toward a center; to send out rays, to shine brightly.
• Etymology of Radiance c. 1600, “brilliant light, brightness shooting in diverging rays or beams,” from radiant (adj.) or else from Medieval Latin radiantia “brightness,” from radiare “to beam, shine.”
• Synonyms for Radiance: brightness, brilliance, brilliancy, dazzle, effulgence, illumination, luminosity, luminousness, luster, splendor.
• Brilliance represents a light that is strong, often too strong to be agreeable, and marked by variation or play and penetration , such as the brilliance of a diamond.

Let’s begin with a profound understanding of radiance from what may be an unexpected source for many:

Radiance manifests in many different ways depending on the dimension of experience, but it always seems to be a form of emanation:

• an abstract but perceptible thing that issues or originates from a source
• the action or process of issuing from a source
• a tenuous substance or form of radiation given off by something.
• etymology (n.)- “act of flowing or issuing from an origin; emission; radiation; what issues, flows, or is given out from any substance or body;” 1560s, from Late Latin emanationem (nominative emanatio), noun of action from past-participle stem of Latin emanare “flow out, spring out of,” figuratively “arise, proceed from,” from assimilated form of ex “out” (see ex-) + manare “to flow,”

Here is a sense of the terrain addressed in this article:

• “The sun’s radiance pales compared to the radiance of the awakened soul.”
• “I saw the spark of divinity within and beheld the radiance that flows eternally from the Source.”
• “In stillness and silence, the radiance of Being can be felt. Let its warming light fill you and bathe you in understanding.”
• “As you advance along the path, you become purified until you reach the state of crystal clarity and radiance.”
• “When the inner eye perceives without judgment, one sees the radiance shining in all beings.”
• “The radiance of enlightenment manifests differently in each person, according to their essence and understanding.”

Radiance Unnoticed

Like air, radiance is all around us. We’re constantly radiating but may seldom be aware of it. We live in an electromagnetic field and our bodies produce an electromagnetic field. Our thoughts, body language, emotions, and presence radiate and constantly communicate our state to others. Our understanding of radiance may be limited due to our associating it with visible light, but what of awareness, the invisible, clear light that lights up “the everything?”

I don’t recall when I became aware of radiance. Indeed, I had many experiences of people “lighting up” and even noticed their radiance, but I didn’t look more closely into the phenomenon of radiance. At some point, after many years of spiritual practice and working with presence, I became aware of “me” as radiance. In fact, these days, I mostly know myself more as radiance than a body.

Here are a couple of personal experiences that deepened my curiosity about radiance. Perhaps they will inspire your exploration of you as radiance.

Radiance and the Human Aura

When I was a student of Eckankar, a woman taught me how to see the human aura, not with a lot of detail, but more as a radiance around the body. I never thought much about it and certainly never got into “reading” auras. Still, it became one of those “second-nature” abilities that showed up in many interactions. Sometimes, the thought of noticing a person’s aura arises, and I give it a little attention.

What I noticed over the years about paying attention to a person’s aura or radiance is it made me more sensitive, and more receptive to them. I also began to notice that I was “radiating.”

Radiance and Essential Parenting

I had been a student of the Diamond Approach for eight to ten years when this occurred while fully awake with eyes open:

I’m looking into a radiance of yellow-white light. I perceive a face in the light. It’s the face of my mother gazing at me. There is the radiance of light and love. The radiance of her gaze ignites and calls forth my radiance. I experience radiance coming from empty space within me, coming forward into me, permeating and embuing my experience with the immediacy of radiance. I experience radiance lighting up my eyes, my smile, my body, my being. Radiance is dancing with radiance – mother and son.

The Need for Mirroring

The baby needs to be seen in order to grow because he is incapable of seeing himself. The only possibility, then, is to be seen from the outside. This expresses itself as the need for mirroring. The baby needs the environment to mirror him so that he can come to know himself, and for his soul to grow and develop. For this unfolding to occur completely and harmoniously, the baby needs reflection from the pure awareness which is the mirror-like awareness. He needs to be seen with the clear, objective light characterized by the pure spiritual qualities: love, value, openness, compassion, strength, intelligence, joy, satisfaction, peacefulness, and so on. So optimal mirroring is celebrative, appreciative, admiring, empathic, attuned, understanding, and relational, expressing the essential qualities of the mirror-like awareness. It is this awareness that is needed for the mirroring. If it is available then the self has the opportunity to mature naturally, spontaneously, fully, and perfectly. – The Point of Existence by A. H. Almaas

Contraction and Resistance Flip Radiance into Suffering

I’d been in the Diamond Approach for maybe ten years. I was at my large group meeting in Vancouver, Canada. Jessica was teaching the weekend.

My nervous system is on fire – excruciating pain. It’s like there’s resistance in the wiring and ti’s heating up like a burner on an electric sotve. There’s radiance, but it’s turned inwards causing much distress and suffering.

I remember something similar to this happening a few years earlier when Michael was teaching a weekend on the Red Essence. We had been chanting RAM to charge up our systems – invoking the fire and expansiveness of aliveness. Michael gave us an introduction to Tummo breathing. Practicing Tummo over the next few months, I was able to precipitate the experience of my nervous system feeling like the resistant electric coil. As I practiced, I became aware that the radiant heat was cleaning out my nervous system, expanding my capacity to tolerate more amperes while the current met with less resistance.

Feeling the pain in Vancouver, I remembered being told that when I was a few years old, I stuck a bobby pin into an electrical socket – a very shocking experience! Recalling that experience, I relived the instantaneous reaction of my body constracting to mediate the overwhelm in my nervous system. As I remembered this, my body let go of a contraction it had been carrying for forty years. The radiance that had been stuck, reflecting back into my nervous system causing endless tension and suffering was, once again, free to flow outward as part of my extension and expression into this world.

The Radiance of Awareness

I am experiencing myself as an enormous, dense, solid-black obelisk in the vastenss of the Absolute. The obelisk is shiny black like polished onxy. My experience is like being a lighthouse because at the apex of the obelisk pure, brilliant, clear awareness is radiating, pulsating, emanating into the infinite. The nature of the radiant awareness is of absolute immediacy. It is like light without light, light before light. It lights everything up without exposing it to light. There is absolutely no resistance for this clear-light awareness to encounter. It is a radiance so pure, so clear that awareness itself is barely there – and the “there’ is the “everywhere.”

This is the radiance of the freedom to be.

The experience of the “lighthouse” is a fascinating combination of absolute density, absolute clarity, and the freedom of being. A. H. Almaas addresses it thusly:

In experiencing the absolute, we perceive a transparent and clear space, but dark, so dark it is absolutely black. The blackness is not a color, but the absence of light. In other words, nonconceptual awareness possesses light while the absolute is ontologically prior to light. They are both transcendent to being and nonbeing, but they differ in their relation to light. We can say that the absolute is the mystery prior to light, but at the same time the source of light. The first light that manifests in it is the nonconceptual light, pure awareness. In other words, both are empty of ultimate existence, but the absolute is much more empty. It is even empty of light, awareness, and hence can be experienced as cessation. Looking into pure awareness we see transparent and light-filled space, pervading all manifest forms, and constituting them. Looking into the absolute we first see darkness, but if we focus on it completely, our awareness spontaneously turns around and we find ourselves witnessing manifestation. We see the manifestation as possessing a ground of pure nonconceptual awareness, but this ground now appears as a manifestation within the absolute. – The Inner Journey Home, A. H. Almaas