Optical Fiber Sea Anemone Lamp

To decrease anxiety and find greater inner peace, we must accept that nothing is at stake. We must work to transcend our survival instinct, our fear of death.

Of course, different people, with different worldviews, will approach this in very different ways. Let us consider just one, using a beautiful and powerful analogy that can be extremely useful in meditation (or prayer).

(Below is an excerpt from: The Animal In The Mirror, Chapter 16)

He who perceives all beings as the Self, for him how can there be delusion or grief when he sees this Oneness everywhere?

— Isa-Upanishad, 7

The highest perspective in which nothing is at stake is the view that the Self and the Source are really One. In such a construct, self-respect and self-love, as well as respect and love for others, becomes automatic. If you see your Self as the Source, how could you not treat yourself with compassion and consideration? If you see others as the Source, how could you not treat them with the same?

A visual concept I use to meditate on this perspective is to imagine a round light or lamp covered in many long, thin tentacles, like a sea anemone. While each tentacle may seem like a separate part, it is continuous with the central body and with every other tentacle. The whole is one organism.

Imagine, now, that this lamp’s tentacles were long, thin, optical fibers, bringing a pin-point of the central light to a place some distance from the center, as in the image above.

Now, even though the points of light at the tips of the fibers are experienced as individual lights in different places, in truth, there is only One Light. Optical fibers only reflect light; they do not make more of it. It is the separation of the Light into many point-lights that is the illusion.

Those who see existence in this way know themselves as the Light, as Being one with the dynamic universal flow. That is the gateway to both inner peace and right action.

In the previous chapter we spoke of the quantum universe, in which, at the boundary of our body, we are in contact with the effects of the entire universe, across all of time and space. The universe’s boundary with us can be seen as the inverse of our boundary with the universe, like a stamp and its impression.

If we apply this to the optical fiber lamp, we can see the view from the light source in the center as the inverse of the view from the point-lights at the tips of the fibers. Knowing what we know of this lamp, it would make no sense for those point-lights to buy into the illusion that they are separate from the light source — or from each other — or to ask why the light source needs them or their experiences. It is them.

It would also make no sense for the Light in the Center to buy into the illusion that Its experience is separate from the experiences of the point-lights. They are all the same light, reflected.

Everything is a matter of vantage point. Of perspective.

The mirror-image of All-Experience is all of our discrete experiences; the inverse of the Source is the Self.

Within Siddhartha there slowly grew and ripened the knowledge of what wisdom really was and the goal of his long seeking. It was nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

— Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha