Wellspring of the light within

Light we take to be an outsider, so that no adjective needs to attach itself to it like a title. Not its marital status, not an honorary degree like a doctorate, no declaration of profession or pedigree. We know its source – whether it’s 150 million kilometres away or the Pavlovian reaching out for a switchboard to enable seeing as soon as we enter a dark room, we know that it’s outside us. Occasionally, only a few times in our lives, we allow ourselves an adjective to clarify its location: ‘inner’ light, that thing without a switchboard or rotational movements that cause it to disappear, like how sunlight behaves on earth. It might even outlive us, as histories and hagiographies of the wise and saintly tell us. Whether this ‘inner light’ travels in straight lines like the rays outside us do we don’t know. That it doesn’t push up the bill on an electric meter we are sure.

Whatever the nature of the outside, the human expectation is for it to be well lit. It’s only a matter of scale and intensity – it could be heaven, temperate, perhaps Mediterranean, where all is outside, sun, sand, shore, sea, their sense and Celsius; it could be hell, hotter, fiercer, crazier, more importunate, simultaneously dry and tropical – but we should be able to see it. That’s the one condition we set in our negotiation with the outside. With our inside, where there is no sun or moon or kerosene lamp, where we have to believe that there are residential colonies of kidney and heart and lungs without being able to see them, there is a different relationship with light. Since no light enters these places, there can be no shadow either.

To such an intuitive understanding of our biology comes the confusion of Milton’s ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a hell of heaven...’ What is the architectural unit of the things we construct inside our mind? Inch, foot, yard, gaz, cottah? What is the electrical wiring in these places like – exposed or concealed? These questions, ridiculous as they might seem, come only because we struggle to find the source of the lamp that produces this thing that is praised as ‘inner light’ or ‘inner glow’. Where is this electric transformer? Is this ‘inner light’ a customised thing, or is it like LED lamps manufactured industrially?

The halo is the interstitial thing that connects this inner light with the muscles of the outside. Every religion seems to have a version of it: male gods, with these cloud-like attachments to their heads, so that one feels sorry for them and even worries for them, how they sleep with those lights on; women, allowed this inner light much later, only the pure and pious; infants, their inner light erupting from the tips of fingers or the eyes, their glint. Strange – and slightly comic – it is then that gods with so much inner light needed men to light lamps and candles for them to tide through their unending lives, guiding them through the darkest nights of the year and, occasionally, the mornings, as part of the rituals of obeisance and acknowledgement of their presence. Were the lamp and the candle a stand-in for the men (and women) of inner light?

Is the difference between the light outside and ‘inner light’ about the character of light itself? We can’t see light from the sun or moon accumulate, though it often seems to us that it does, like cream does on the skin of cooling milk. Is inner light like sedimentary stone, an inevitable accretion of years and lifetimes, the reason painters from various schools and cultures, while trying to communicate the experience of its radiance, have turned to the sheen of the sky, its age, or rather the sky’s agelessness? What about shadows, then? I’m not only thinking of the equivalent of those that travel with us as we move and meet the world, that disappear when light dies temporarily, I’m also thinking of what Jung called the ‘inner shadow’. Rabindranath Tagore, that most ardent worshipper of light, in “Alo aamar alo ogo...”, perhaps his most well-known song on the subject, writes about both these kinds of light – the light on the flowers and leaves, butterflies and streams, the field and the clouds, the outside, but also the light of praan and hriday, life, its vital energy, and the heart. I suppose these are the ‘inner’ equivalents of the torchlight, searchlight, and the lighthouse?

The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials.