And there was light

In the beginning, there was light. On that point, religion and science agree.

There is, however, a slight disagreement over when and how the light was turned on. In the 17th century, protestant bishop James Ussher, by counting the begats, came to the conclusion that the world was created on Sunday, Oct. 23, 4004, BC.

(He also calculated that Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise on Monday, Nov. 10. Maybe that's why so many people dislike Mondays.)

Scientists are a little less precise. Research suggests the primeval atom exploded 13.8 billion years ago. But it didn't explode in the usual sense. When it went poof, it created space and time, and as a result, every person, no matter where they are, is the centre of the universe.

John Wheeler, a quantum physicist and colleague of Albert Einstein, also suggests, that this is a participatory universe; at the most basic level, we, along with said universe, create our reality.

We choose — consciously or otherwise — what we want, or don't want, and what we concentrate on manifests in our life.

What we think with repetition and emotion becomes our reality, no matter whether it's negative or positive, whether it's life enhancing or life restricting. We choose.

We come from this world like an apple from an apple tree. The tree's essence is in the apple, which contains the seeds to make more trees. So, too, do we contain the essence of the universe and propagate it.

We are one of the methods by which the universe creates more of itself.

If we accept that down to our DNA, the light dawns; our belief system creates the light of our understanding, or misunderstanding. Just as the power that flows into our homes is useless if we don't flip the light switch, so we stay in the darkness until we choose to light up.

When the universe was in its infancy, 380,000 or so years after that infinitesimally small something went bang, light was imprisoned by matter. Then, presto, in what is called the surface of last scattering, the free electrons, blockers of the light, were captured in atoms and photons flew free.

As above, so below. . . . We were born into light, went dark and now it is time to create our own surface of last scattering and, like the early universe, unshackle the photons from matter and allow our light to shine.

We shield our light, even from ourselves, but should heed the biblical injunction not to hide it under a bushel — or anything else.

There is even a theory that says if we could see rightly, we would see everyone as bodies of light, maybe as luminous beings as Don Juan saw people in the Carlos Castaneda books.

Biophoton theory suggests our bodies are made of light, but our senses are not fast enough to see it, like a movie, which is still pictures moving fast enough to appear as a continuous stream.

"Biophoton light is stored in the cells of the organism — more precisely, in the DNA molecules of their nuclei — and a dynamic web of light constantly released and absorbed by the DNA may connect cell organelles, cells, tissues, and organs within the body and serve as the organism's main communication network and as the principal regulating instance for all life processes," Marco Bischof writes in Biophotons: The Light In Our Cell.

That might stretch the fabric of belief until we remember that Einstein showed energy and matter are two versions of the same thing, and energy is a form of light.

Everything — our senses, our world, our friends, our family — tells us we are solid matter, but beneath the atoms holding hands to create us, there is a river of energy, a river of light.

A river runs through us.

Heraclitus said that we can't step into the same river twice, to which some wit added we can't step into the same river once. From the time our foot touches the top of the water until it settles firmly onto the bottom, volumes of water have rushed on. It is simply not the same river.

That is true of the river of us. We look in the mirror, bounce off a wall, feel the flesh and the bones beneath and think we are what the mirror reflects; that we are an older, bigger version of the child that came into this world X number of years ago.

There is little of the us of two years ago that still exists, other than memories. We look the same; have the same car, same clothes, same house, same spouse, same kids. Many have exactly the same thoughts, but the things that make up this us has been replaced and recycled.

All rivers run to the sea and rivers of light flow into the cosmic ocean; eventually the network holding the transient atoms into the web of us, will disintegrate.

We can, however, take some solace in the fact that the energy making us will be around as long as the universe — another trillion years or so. And maybe that will be recycled into a new universe.

Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a great healer in the 19th century and teacher of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, called the visible world “the shadow of wisdom's amusements,” that nature is only the outward projection of an inward activity far more real and enduring.

If we, as Quimby suggested, wipe clean the windows of our perception, we would see beyond this fiction of self and realize we are more than this bag of bones, this collection of memories, virtues and vices and that if we do not identify with what happens to mind and body, we will experience freedom.

If we get out of our own way and let the light shine, let what we already are manifest, if we stop fighting life and let it flow through us, it will wash away all that we are not — what we think we are -— and allow that which we already are to shine through.

“I will not wish thee riches, nor the glow of greatness, but that wherever thou go some weary heart shall gladden at thy smile, or shadowed life know sunshine for a while. And so thy path shall be a track of light, like angels' footsteps passing through the night.” — Words on a Church Wall in Upwaltham England.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.