The Luminous Splendor of the Colorless Light of Emptiness
“He tumbled over and over, wrapping his wings tightly around his head to try to protect himself from the fall. He continued to fall upside-down, downside-up. Faster and faster, deeper and deeper, he plunged into the abyss.
Again the Great One must have been with him even still, for slowly his senses faded away leaving only this simple instruction to fill his reality,
‘Eagerlet, fly or die you must chose now.’
Was it a whispered voice? A feeling? A thought? He couldn’t tell, but he did know that it was a sensation like he had never experienced before. He somehow knew that he had been given a choice to live or die in this moment and whatever he chose would be the best choice for him. He wondered, ‘What is it like being dead?’ and a great sense of peace came over him, he felt as though he was slowly slipping into a luminous void. For what seemed a long time he drifted deeper and deeper into the splendor of the colorless light as he willingly and gently began to let go of a life that never really seemed to welcome him anyway.
A formless energy suddenly sprang from the depths of his heart that formed a thought, which forced a great deep breath, which out of nothingness gave birth to these words,
‘FLY!!! I choose to fly!’”
Excerpted from: Who Do You Think You Are? by Rick Nichols
This experience by Eagerlet, our hero from Who Do You Think You Are is described In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, as “the luminous splendor of the colorless light of Emptiness,” and it means, “your own true self.” Once you experience that you will forever know exactly who you really are.
In Goethe’s poem, The Holy Longing, he speaks of it in this way, “And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”
So how do we “die and so to grow”? We let go of clinging to the “things of life” and allow ourselves to fall into the shear beauty of who we really are. We finely surrender to the divinity that is our divine birthright and never again hide from the world.
