Thinking Light

Consciousness and being are not there different from each other. All being is consciousness and all consciousness being. Thought and reality coalesce and a creative merging of subject and object results. Life grows conscious of its incredidible depths. In this fulness of felt life and freedom, the distinction of the knower and the known disappears. The privacy of the individual self is broken into and invaded by a universal self which the individual feels as his own.
     The experience itself is felt to be sufficient and complete. It does not come in a fragmentary or truncated form demanding completion by something else. It does not look beyond itself for meaning or validity. It does not appeal to external standards of logic or metaphysics. It is its own credentials. It is self-established (svatahsiddha), self-evidencing (svasamvedya), self-luminescent (svayaamprakasa). It does not argue or explain but knows and is. It is beyond the bounds of proof and so touches completeness. It comes with a constraint that brooks no denial. It is pure comprehension, entire significance, complete validity. Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutra, tells us that the insight is truth-filled, or truth-bearing.
     The tension of normal life disappears, giving rise to inward peace, power, and joy. The Greeks called it ataraxy, but the word sounds more negative than the Hindu trem "santi" or peace, which is a positive feeling of calm and confidence, joy and strength in the midst of outward pain and defeat, loss and frustration. The experience is felt as profoundly satisfying, where darkness is turned into light, sadness into joy, despair into assurance. The continuance of such an experience constitutes dwelling in heaven which is not a place where God lives, but a mode of being which is fully and completely real.
— S. Radhakrishnan, "Character of Religious Experience," from Chapter III of An Idealist's View of Life, in A Sourcebook of Indian Philosophy, pp. 617-618.

Reflecting minds make little use of this expression; the happy and the unhappy. In this world, the vestibule of another evidently, there is none happy.
     The true division of humanity is this: the luminous and the dark.
     To diminish the number of the dark, to increase the number of the luminous, behold the aim. This is why we cry: education, knowledge! to learn to read is to kindle a fire; every syllable spelled sparkles.
     But he who says light does not necessarily say joy. There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius.
     When you know and when you love you shall suffer still. The day dawns in tears. The luminous weep, were it only over the dark.
— Victor-Marie Hugo, Les Miserables, Vol. 2, Part IV, Book VII, p. 209.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.
— Thomas Caryle, The French Revolution, Vol. X, p. 7.

[After speaking about Caballah and the Zohar:]
Every question a man can find to utter is answered even in the moment of its asking when dealt with in the way of the spirit....
     The whole of life is nothing more than questions that have taken unto themselves shape, and bear within themselves the sum of their own answer: and answers that are pregnant with questions. Only fools see it otherwise.
— Gustave Meyrink, The Golem, p. 26.

The strength of the intellectual chain is no greater than that of the staple from which it hangs — and that is human feeling. The strength of Euclid is no greater than the axioms — and they are feelings; they are unreasoning statements of which all that we can say is, "I feel like that."
— Edward Carpenter, Civilization: Its Causes and Cure (1889), p. 83.