The Light - Steiner Books

Transcript

La Luce Quark Emmy 5/15/01 9:58 PM Page 1
The Light
(La Luce)
The Light
(La Luce)
An Introduction
to the
Creative Imagination
by
Massimo Scaligero
translated by
Eric L. Bisbocci
LINDISFARNE BOOKS
Translation Copyright © 2001 Eric L. Bisbocci
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without the written permission of the
publisher except for brief quotations embodied
in critical reviews and articles.
Published by Lindisfarne Books
P.O. Box 799, Great Barrington, MA 01230
www.lindisfarne.org
ISBN: 0-9701097-6-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scaligero, Massimo.
[Luce. English.]
La luce=(The light): an introduction to the creative imagination /
Massimo Scaligero; translated by Eric L. Bisbocci.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-9701097-6-8
1. Light body (Occultism) I. Title: Light
BF1442.L53 S3313 2001
133.8—dc 21
2001023396
Designed by
Studio 31, inc.
www.studio31.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the U.S.A.
Table of Contents
Translator’s Note
7
I. Darkness: The Leaven of Light
9
II. Thinking: The Light of the Earth
19
III. Forces of Opposition: Mediums
28
IV. Metaphysical Warmth
38
V. The Life of Light: Freedom
VI. Sense-free Thinking
45
64
VII. Meditation as a Path to Creative Imagination
VIII. Il Pensiero Pensante (The “Activity of Thinking”)
IX. Dialectics and Spiritual Science
X. The Magical Will: The “Void”
XI. The Threshold
158
115
140
XII. The Resurrection of Light
Notes
95
152
74
86
Translator’s Note
The translation of this work presented a number of
difficulties, the most challenging of which was how to
render the term pensiero pensante. Coined by Giovanni
Gentile, the founder of actualism, pensiero pensante is
usually translated as either the “activity of thinking,” as
has been done in this work, or “thinking thought” (i.e.,
thought that thinks), which is confusing because it tends
to presuppose a subject other than thought itself. The
expression “activity of thinking,” on the other hand,
lacks specificity. Therefore, a few words of explanation
are offered here in an attempt to make it more intelligible for the reader.
As Scaligero intimates in Trattato del Pensiero Vivente
(p. 11), the pensiero pensante is not reflected thought but
thinking “riflettentesi,” that is, “in the act of reflecting
itself.” It is, in fact, what he refers to as the “dynamic
moment” of reflectivity (Trattato. . . , p. 13). This pensiero
pensante is continually at the point of leaving reflectivity,
but does not. Hence the light or “pure dynamis” of thinking goes unexperienced. “Gentile’s pensiero pensante,”
says Scaligero, “is not living thinking, but rather the
intuition of the dynamic moment of reflectivity; it is not
pure thinking, for it is thinking which is not conceived
outside its activity through an object. The path of thinking proposed by spiritual science conversely has as its
aim the experience of thinking in itself, insofar as it is
pure dynamis, that is, independent of the object.” (Dallo
Yoga ai Rosacroce, p. 125).
Scaligero refers to living thinking as “the substance
of pure ideas, to whose light the human being unknowingly tends with thinking and existing, for it is in itself
the dynamis of thinking and existing, life. . . ” (Trattato, p.
7
8
The Light
16-17). Whereas the pensiero pensante which can “resurrect reflected thought from abstraction, by reactivating
the dynamic moment of reflectivity, is still not. . . the
inner life. . . . ” “This life is indeed present in the pensiero
pensante, but it continually disappears” (Trattato. . . ,
p. 19). Only “if it realizes the continuity of its independence from a theme” can the pensiero pensante become
living. (Trattato. . . , p. 16). Says Scaligero, “there can rise,
as thought, the force which precedes its producing, i.e.,
the pensiero pensante but outside reflectivity. . . . ” Its
object becomes the process of reflecting itself, which
“therefore bears the life that previously annihilated itself
in the thinking act, and for which this act has never been
able to avoid being the fall of thinking into physicality,
i.e., into dialecticism and into rhetoric.” (Trattato. . . ,
p. 14). In order to cognize this pensiero pensante, we must
perceive its life. (Trattato. . . , p. 14).
Connected to this is Scaligero’s use of the lone word
pensante, which can itself be translated in several ways,
one of which is the adjective “thinking,” as in “la
coscienza pensante” (the thinking consciousness). Other
ways are thinking “in the act” as in “in the act of reflecting itself,” or simply “that (which) thinks,” both of
which the reader, again, must continually remember are
in specific reference to that “dynamic moment” of reflectivity in which the light of thinking, in the act of reflecting itself by way of an object, flashes in its dying out as
dialectics.
I.
Darkness: The Leaven of Light
—1—
The light by which we see things is only a symbol.
At the point of seeing the light, we lose it. Our loss of
the light is what we see as light.
The light we think we see is the light that has annihilated itself so that we can see.
We are always at the point of seeing the light. Therefore we see things.
We are unable to see the light, because we look at
things through the dying of the light. We cannot perceive the light, because we think we are seeing things,
and we see only things because they are clothed in the
light that we do not see. We see forms and colors and
think that we are seeing things. But we see only the
appearances of things — by means of the light that annihilates itself in us.
Light is the secret being of things and entities. The
essential matter of things is light. But the essential matter, the spiritual matrix of all that appears, is not the matter that appears to us.
The matter that appears to us is fallen light: the
corpse of the light. It is the stratification of fallen light.
Therefore, matter is darkness, the darkness dominated everywhere — except in the human soul — by the
light.
In matter, light encounters the levels of its fall. At
each point, it gives itself up and extinguishes itself — in
order to resurrect what fell.
9
10
The Light
Things illumined by the light of the sun are things at
the point of lighting up again by means of the original
light.
But the light reflected by the world is born as light so
that the human eye can see. It is born in order to die out.
It continually dies out. Yet it is reborn each time.
We must orient ourselves toward this birth, because
it occurs in the center of our soul — in essential thinking,
in non-dialectical thought, in pure perceiving.
—2—
When we are looking at things such as minerals,
plants, and living beings, we are always looking at the
light; but we do not see the light. Rather, we see the
darkness into which the light disappears.
The darkness that absorbs the light, the darkness into
which the light disappears, is no longer darkness. It is
the play of light within the soul, which, in the eye,
grasps the colors and forms of the world, the structure of
being.
Not only colors, but also the world’s forms are the
play of light in darkness.
Any form of thing or being is matter that tends to rise
again as light. It offers itself as an idea that is beyond our
ability to grasp as such, for any idea we have is only an
abstraction. We do not know how to grasp it as it arises
— alive.
Things, the world, and entities appear because they
clothe themselves in light. But this clothing is the
encounter of soul-light with the light of matter by means
of the eye. It is the reconstitution of the original light, as
an act of consciousness. And yet we are unaware of the
presence of the principle of light.
Because we do not live in the I, but in the soul, we
11
continually appeal to the I without being it. We have its
light, but only as reflected light. We ourselves are the
very source of the light; in reflection, we lose its life.
—3—
Our seeing is always a seeing of the light.
All of the world’s being that reaches us through our
eyes is a resurrection of the light. It is a continuing
moment of the light’s resurrection — by which we see
forms and colors. But not the light.
We do not meet this resurrection directly with the
light of our willing but, rather, through the mediation of
the senses, in which the light of willing is inverted. We
meet it with the movement of nature, through which this
resurrection takes the forms of sensation, of representation. This is always the dying out of the light.
Each time the light is at the point of resurrecting, it
dies out. It dies out as the light of the world.
The I should be so awake as an individual I, that it no
longer needs such a death to exist. It should perceive
death, so as to intuit the life which it loses.
Everything that dies has the force of dying: dying is
not the annihilation of that force. Dying can only occur
as a consequence of the differentiated expression of the
force — for the subject that experiences it.
Annihilation is not a dying, but only a transition of
that which, in a particularized state, cannot fully manifest itself. Thus, its being is actualized by its movement
away from that condition, by freeing itself from that particularized state. But only a subject, an I, can complete
this work. Annihilation apart from such a subject is
meaningless.
It is the path to “emptiness” and to silence: to the
nullification of all that impedes the light’s movement.
12
The Light
Thus, dying is always a hidden flow of life. Forgetting that it bears the principle of life within itself, the I
blindly fears death. To cognize itself — to cognize that
which does not die as something real — the I must cognize the death of the “unreal,” to which it has bound
itself in the soul.
—4—
Only what does not die can oppose death.
Death gives life its meaning. It can be cognized only
by what has a conscious life. The principle of life can
experience itself only through death, insofar as it perceives itself on this side of what dies and, therefore, cognizes death without dying.
On Earth, only the human I can experience death.
We must experience death in order to experience the
forces of life, in order to discover the life which we do
not perceive during our existence, but which we know
only by its earthly effects. We must experience death in
order to understand that what dies is not us but, rather,
the bearer of our undying being.
We must pass through the darkness, carrying ourselves beyond the whole of darkness, in order to cognize
the light. During life, our only experience of that light is
what is reflected to us by darkness.
Initiation proceeds through a series of death
moments, beyond which the initiate rises again. Life
processes cease to serve as supports to consciousness
and this, in turn, resists the tendency to precipitate into
nothingness by drawing forces of life from the incorporeal — from the I, which it is every day and without
which it would not be.
13
—5—
All of our suffering is just this: our failure to see the
light, though we know that the light illumines the
world.
It is the unseen light. We do not see the light, but we
know that it illumines the world, or else we would not
see the things, forms, and colors of the earth.
We think that we see the light. We are unaware that
we do not see it. We do not know that our suffering is
precisely our failure to see the light while believing that,
when we look at the world, we do see it. In reality, we
imagine it. We think it. We suppose it.
We see the sun’s light only in its guise of brightness
and heat. We do not truly see it as light.
In truth, light is idea: pure image. It is the image of an
essence which surfaces in the soul each time our gaze
perceives illuminated things.
To the degree that our senses gather the dying out of
the light, there arises in the soul the image of the light,
which is the light at the very point of giving itself up. We
do not live the life of the soul, but only participate in the
sensation and dialectical consciousness of such a life. We
do not notice the lighting up of the light in our souls. We
stop at the reflection, at the moment of the world’s
appearing, and we imbue this reflection with the power
of reality.
In translating the light’s reflection in the world into
something of real value, in converting the sensory reflection of the light into thought, we oppose the life of the
light. We operate according to darkness.
We only experience light by opposing darkness to it.
The opposition of darkness to light is the sense world
— which we take to be real.
14
The Light
—6—
Without the opposition of darkness, the light could
not give rise to colors. Colors are born for the human
being whose essence is the unseen light, because
human consciousness has darkness as its bearer.
Colors are not variations or aspects or fractions of the
light. They arise from the light’s encounter with darkness, and from our presence at this encounter.
The relationship between light and darkness takes
place in the human soul.
Without the support of darkness, we would have neither the light of day, nor anything illumined by the sun’s
glow. Light, penetrating into earthly darkness, and into
the sensory sphere, renders day visible to our eyes. We
do not know how to gather the invisible force of light. If
we did, we would perceive in ourselves the wisdom
from which light emanates. We have yet to form, within
ourselves, the organ of perception for light.
The light we think we see is only the symbol of the
living light. It is in fact the light that dies out.
This is the light that dies out into darkness, because it
can reach us only in the sphere of darkness.
We must perceive the light’s sensory manifestations,
in which the light extinguishes itself, in order to reascend to the light’s image — the living image that is the
fabric of light.
In reality, we do not perceive light, but only darkness, or the darkness that absorbs the light.
We see darkness in various forms thanks to the
light’s forces, but we do not cognize these forces. We do
not see the light. If we did see it, we would be able to
penetrate the darkness. For there is no darkness standing in opposition to the light apart from the way we happen to perceive and represent it.
15
What impresses itself on our souls as sensation is
only the form of the world’s dark element. To be known,
it demands that we bind and extinguish the light to various degrees.
The initial cognition that occurs, as a consequence of
the extinguishing of the light, is not light, but only its
image or reflection: dialectics. Such a dialectical process
has the virtue of passively shaping itself according to the
play of darkness — but it cannot penetrate the darkness.
Reflection belongs to the force field of darkness — as an
imitation of the light, operating in the world by the
light’s own force of necessity.
The shining of the light, as it becomes life, means that
the soul’s ordinary movement, or reflected knowledge,
is reversed or overturned and that the reflection is reabsorbed. For the reflection is always darkness clutching at the light: dialectical movement.
It is only in the human soul that this movement
clutches at the light, through the soul’s echo of ordinary
sense experience. Outside the human being, light pursues and dominates darkness.
We must open up to this movement. Our opening up
is already the light’s own movement. It is the intuitive
movement of thinking — prior to words — in which the
principle of the light operates.
This is the I which we are — without being aware of
who we are.
—7—
Darkness is not the same as nothingness; it is neither the void nor the absence of light. Rather, it is the
force opposed to the light.
Matter, deprived of the sun’s light, emanates an
16
The Light
inverse light, which is black light — an invisible darkness that is present even during the day.
If darkness were nothingness, we would not see it;
we would not perceive its obscurity. Darkness would be
invisible to us.
Instead, we see this obscurity, which is the obscurity
of our own souls, projected onto the world.
The darkness of the soul is the soul’s dependence on
the body, a dependence that enables it to arise as earthly
consciousness.
The physical carrier imprints itself on the soul. The
soul becomes deprived of the light, and so it lives by
means of sensory life, in which it has access only to the
extinguishing of the light.
The soul is immersed in darkness. It has only the
light’s image — the reflection, which lacks the power to
defeat darkness.
Therefore, when it lacks the light of day, the soul sees
only darkness — a darkness that emanates from the
powers of the earth.
But it is because it contains the light that the soul sees
darkness as well. We could behold the light at night. For
in the very absence of the physical sun and its visible
rays, it is possible to experience the presence of the spiritual sun in us.
The function of darkness is to stop the visible light —
which is not the light, but only its reflection. This means
opening the threshold to the true light, which is the
secret of matter.
Nevertheless, what the darkness holds back lets the
true light pass through. For we are to become conscious
of the light and experience, within ourselves, the light’s
movement.
17
—8—
Obscurity seen is already darkness illumined. For
our experience of seeing is a movement of the light from
the depths of the soul.
Such light continuously extinguishes itself. But it
could not extinguish itself if it were not there, or if it did
not flow continuously.
For now, the radiation of the light into us is possible
only as a dying of the light. It dies out in order to clothe
the darkness.
This happens only for the human being.
Outside the human being, light dominates the darkness and darkness is defeated. The Logos has placed
limits on the darkness.
In the human soul, the darkness absorbs the light. It
makes the play of the light its own. It clothes itself in
light.
It is only for human beings that light can die into
darkness.
We who see darkness behold it by means of the
forces of light. But we cannot penetrate darkness,
because we do not truly possess the light with which we
see.
We look at the darkness and see it. We do not know
why we see it as darkness.
The darkness we see before us is a symbol of the
darkness of the soul. Nevertheless, the light with which
we can behold the darkness rises to us from the soul’s
depths.
Therefore, by showing the soul’s condition more truly than the light of day, the darkness can sometimes be
the object of contemplation and of silence.
Contemplation must always proceed through
darkness.
18
The Light
—9—
Light continually lights up anew. Only in this way
can the darkness be seen. We are unaware of this. Our
seeing is always the movement of the light, but of the
light that lights up where it can only die out.
It lives in the same moment that it dies out. It could
not live otherwise. It would not give itself to us, if it did
not light up in order to extinguish itself.
Its flashing forth, in order to die out, is the endless
search for the true secret of things, which we pursue
through sensations and thought, through enjoyment and
suffering: uninterruptedly evoking life, seeking life, and
losing it. For every movement is longing — the play of
darkness by means of the light.
The true secret of things can only be reached by the
person who can inwardly enkindle the light that shines
without need of reflection. For light’s reflection comes
about through darkness, through the corporeal carrier. It
loses its warmth. It lacks the power of life.
Darkness is not merely the obscurity of night from
which we draw our image of darkness — so that we call
what contradicts the light, “darkness.”
Rather, by drawing its image from the night’s obscurity, the darkness that we imagine is condensed and
solidified in the material substance of things — in the
matter from which the earth is structured.
Matter is fallen light — light arrested during its fall
from the creative forces of light.
When matter is perceived, the light of thought
encounters the fallen light. It meets this light because for
it, the fallen light, illuminated by the sun, has become
visible.

The Light - Steiner Books

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