Turning the Crystal Ever So Slightly
Turning the Crystal Ever So Slightly
On the light that passes through us, what remains within us, and the possibility of participating in its direction.
On the spiritual path, one often imagines that the goal is to find the light. But in my own singular journey, poised between a Lacan for whom God could be dead and yet still speaking from the unconscious, and a Kabbalah in which the divine seems to pass through everything, I am beginning to suspect that the problem was never finding the light.
The light is always there.
The problem is noticing it.
We live surrounded by things we barely register. People, words, ideas, gestures, and events pass before us without truly entering our world. And then, suddenly, something does enter. Something shines. One person among thousands. A sentence we cannot forget. A loss. A humiliation. A question that returns again and again.
Why does this shine for me?
When something begins to shine, something in us is set in motion. We recognize there something of our own, something we feel to be missing. And it is precisely this absence that sets desire in motion: to draw closer, to understand, to possess, to recover, to be recognized, to know more. Sometimes that desire takes the form of love. Sometimes of curiosity. Sometimes of fear. Sometimes of a question that will not leave us in peace.
We believe that what shines will make us whole. But the journey ends by returning us to ourselves. No object ever fully satisfies, because in what we seek there is always something that exceeds the object itself. The object changes. The question remains: what in me am I seeking there?
Perhaps because it was never really the object itself that we were seeking. We were seeking the glow: the light that, for an instant, passed through it and made it shine for us. No object can hold that glow forever. The light moves on, finds another form, appears somewhere else. And that light which reaches us through things is the light of which the mystics speak.
At times the light arrives clearly, as health, beauty, abundance, or knowledge, and then it seems easy to receive. At other times it arrives darkened, like a dark light so intense that it blinds, taking the form of a loss, an illness, a fundamental contradiction, a humiliation, or a pain strong enough to split us in two.
If the divine passes through everything, then darkness too cannot stand wholly outside the light. Dark light would then be light in its most difficult form to recognize.
The question, then, is not how to find the light. It is what we do with it when it arrives and burns our skin.
Kabbalah has a word that helps me think through all this: bittul, ביטול. It is often translated as self annulment. Applied to the self, it always felt difficult to me. To annul the self seemed to mean disappearing, becoming insignificant, giving up what makes us singular.
Now I am beginning to understand it otherwise.
The ordinary self tends to appropriate everything: my knowledge, my pain, my merit, my desire, my illumination. What we receive quickly becomes property, and what we feel to be our property easily becomes confused with what we believe ourselves to be.
But if the light does not begin in me, then I cannot proclaim myself its source. The light is not mine. Wisdom is not mine. Even what I give does not arise entirely from me.
It passes through me.
In the tradition, bittul comes to mean the annulment of the self before the infinite: nothing exists wholly apart from the Ein Sof (the Endless), not even I. But this can also be read another way. Bittul would not mean disappearing, but relinquishing a claim: the claim that we are the origin, the owners, and the final destination of what passes through us.
We are not the light. We are one of the places where light takes form.
Kabbalah speaks of the human being as a vessel capable of receiving light. But an image closer to me is that of the crystal. The crystal receives the light, lets part of it pass through, and alters its trajectory. So too can we think of the human psyche.
The crystal does not produce the light, nor can it claim it as its own. But neither is it passive. Our history, our childhood, our desires, our wounds, and our particular way of seeing all participate in what happens to what we receive.
Light enters a crystal.
And something happens.
We have all felt it at some point. Something ends outside us and yet continues within: a conversation, a loss, a decision, a word spoken years ago.
We return to it because we hope to understand something more. Sometimes we do. But there comes a moment when we stop discovering and begin simply repeating.
Not every thought transforms. Some thoughts open a possibility. Others turn in upon themselves, keeping an experience circling inside us.
A betrayal makes us expect another betrayal. An abandonment makes every distance suspicious. A humiliation can make us detect contempt even where there is none.
And the world knows nothing of our wound.
The world keeps arriving with new people, new gestures, new possibilities, but we are no longer the same crystal. Something passed through us and left a mark.
That is inevitable. Something of what we receive remains within us. A loss leaves memory behind. Love leaves a way of seeing. A humiliation may leave shame or rage. Even knowledge changes the structure that receives it.
The problem is not that something remains. The problem begins when what remained starts to occupy everything and ends by being confused with our identity.
Then we no longer have a pain. We become the pain.
That is where movement comes to a halt.
When light passes through a crystal, one thing does not happen to it alone. Part of it is reflected at the surface and returns without ever entering. Part of it is absorbed, and its energy is transformed, for example into heat. Part of it passes through and emerges on the other side refracted, at another angle. The structure of the crystal participates in everything that happens to that light.
The same is true of us.
We can reflect it, giving back to the world what we received almost without having touched it. We are humiliated and we humiliate. We are abandoned and learn to abandon before we can be abandoned again. We are insulted and we insult. The light touches the surface and rebounds. It returns to the world in the same form in which it arrived, without having passed through anything in us.
We can absorb it. And in part this is inevitable. When light is absorbed, it ceases to continue as light and its energy is transformed, for example into heat or into a chemical reaction. Something similar happens in us. An experience may become sadness, fear, shame, resentment, knowledge, or even pride. What was received no longer continues in the same form, yet it continues to act within us. The problem arises when that transformation remains enclosed within the self and begins to be confused with what we are. Then what we received stops circulating and ends by feeding the same structure again and again. Absorption is inevitable. Remaining trapped in what has been absorbed is not.
We can refract it. We can let it enter, pass through our history, our wounds, our desires, what we know and what we still do not understand, and then let it emerge in another direction. The light passes through us, we are changed by it, and we take part in the trajectory it will follow afterward.
The question is what we do next.
Spiritual movement appears when we manage to refract the light in such a way that it returns to the world better than it arrived to us.
But that does not happen automatically.
A wound can become compassion or cruelty. A humiliation can become humility or the desire to humiliate. Knowledge can open a door or close itself into dogma.
That something changes does not mean it changes for the better.
That is why doing something with what we receive does not consist simply in changing it. It consists in participating in its direction.
A loss can become music. A wound can become a boundary we did not know how to set before. Something that almost destroyed us may end up, years later, becoming the capacity to recognize another person’s pain.
Then what happened to us begins to cease being only ours.
We receive. We are affected. We transform. We give back.
And the light goes on.
All this seems relatively simple when what we receive is love, beauty, knowledge, or recognition.
The difficulty appears when what arrives hurts.
A loss can reveal a dependency we did not know we had. A humiliation can show us how much we needed the gaze of another. An illness can place before us the desire to live. A separation can reveal a form of love we manage to recognize only when what we loved is no longer there.
Pain does not only hurt. It also reveals.
And sometimes it reveals in a way no gentle light could ever have achieved.
Kabbalists speak of descents that serve ascent. I understand more and more why. There are positions from which we might never have moved had something not broken them apart.
Dark light can do precisely that. It strikes, disorients, shatters an image we held of ourselves, and makes it impossible to go on as before.
I know this because something of that dark light touched me once, as it does everyone. It split my soul in two. And then the reconstruction began.
I did not understand right away why it had happened. Nor do I need to pretend that the pain stopped hurting. But I can recognize that something I would have preferred to avoid ended by forcing me to look at places I had not looked before, to ask questions I had not asked before, and to rebuild a different relation to myself, to others, and to what I call the Infinite.
Lacanians say, when faced with what happens to us, that “one must do something with it.”
I understand that phrase better and better.
Something arrived. Something passed through me. Something remained in me. But the journey of the light does not have to end in me.
Life arrives with its colored lights, and we do with them what we can. We do not choose everything that will touch us. Nor do we choose at once what will remain within us. But we can learn to recognize how our crystal responds, and in doing so learn not to arrest the light that passes through us.
There are times when we react before we have even seen what is happening. Something touches an old wound and the rest unfolds almost on its own. We interpret, respond, defend ourselves, repeat.
And afterward we call all that reality.
That is why stopping can be one of the most important acts. Not stopping the light, but interrupting for a moment our habitual response and looking at what is happening before giving back to the world exactly what we received.
Thought is useful so long as it opens a possibility that was not there before. When it returns again and again to the same question, it ceases to produce anything new and becomes a closed circuit.
Sometimes it is enough to recognize the point where we usually close ourselves off and turn the crystal a few degrees. Not to escape what happened. Not to pretend it did not hurt. Not to become again who we were before. Only enough so that the light does not return to the world by exactly the same path through which it arrived.
Because whatever truly passes through us leaves marks. Turning the crystal does not mean erasing them, but learning to orient ourselves by them.
Receive without possessing. Let yourself be affected without turning every experience into identity. Transform without proclaiming yourself the origin. Give without believing that what you give was born whole from you.
Perhaps bittul is precisely this. Not disappearing. Not becoming a surface on which nothing leaves a trace. But ceasing to believe that everything passing through us must end in us.
I am not the light.
I am the place where it may enter, leave a mark, change direction, and continue.
This essay continues a series on light, desire, and Kabbalah. On the descent of light and its return as meaning, The Light that Reveals the Tree. On why evil is trapped light, and not its absence, The Lamp of Evil.
If this text resonated with you, leave a like.
Comments
Post a Comment