Jacques Lusseyran ~ A Stream of Light

3.473 - 22.193 Samaneri Jayasara

There are two truths. The first of these is that joy does not come from outside. For whatever happens to us, it is within.

22.253 - 33.244 Jacques Lusseyran

The second truth is that light does not come to us from without.

35.975 - 64.345 Samaneri Jayasara

Light is in us, even if we have no eyes. Without my eyes, light was much more stable than it had been with them. As I remember it,

94.7 - 135.178 Jacques Lusseyran

Every sound, every scent and every shape was forever changing into light. And light itself changing into colour to make a kaleidoscope of my blindness. A light so continuous and so intense was so far beyond my comprehension that sometimes I doubted it.

141.746 - 147.994 Samaneri Jayasara

Still, there was light, and light cast a spell over me.

157.34 - 183.651 Jacques Lusseyran

Colours, all the colours of the rainbow, also survived. For me, the child who loved to draw and paint, colours made a celebration so unexpected that I spent hours playing with them. And all the more easily, now they were more docile than they used to be.

235.428 - 291.646 Jacques Lusseyran

Still the colours were only a game, while light was my whole reason for living. I let it rise in me like water in a well and I rejoiced. I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly because as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes. and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside it.

299.617 - 335.374 Jacques Lusseyran

But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. Before I was ten years old, I knew with absolute certainty that everything in the world was a sign of something else, ready to take its place if it should fall by the way.

340.535 - 350.105 Jacques Lusseyran

And this continuing miracle of healing, I heard expressed in the Lord's Prayer, I repeated at night before going to sleep.

362.479 - 364.281 Samaneri Jayasara

Some people would say I had faith.

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and how should I not have it in the presence of the marvel which kept renewing itself? I felt sure that nothing was unfriendly, that the branches I used to swing on would hold firm, and that the paths, no matter how winding, would take me to a place where I would not be afraid. that all paths eventually would lead me back to my family.

405.163 - 464.292 Jacques Lusseyran

You might say that I had no story, except the most important of all, the story of life. I began to look more closely, Not at things, but at a world closer to myself. Looking from an inner place to one further within. Instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside. Immediately the substance of the universe drew together, redefined and peopled itself anew.

464.312 - 492.786 Jacques Lusseyran

I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might have well been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or to put it more precisely, light.

497.552 - 501.116 Samaneri Jayasara

It was a fact, for light was there.

508.164 - 547.071 Jacques Lusseyran

I felt indescribable relief, and happiness so great it almost made me laugh. Confidence and gratitude came as if a prayer had been answered. I found light and joy at the same moment. And I can say without hesitation that from that time on, light and joy have never been separated in my experience.

581.341 - 607.922 Jacques Lusseyran

I was not light myself, I knew that, but I bathed in it as an element which blindness had suddenly brought much closer. I could feel light rising, spreading, resting on objects, giving them form.

610.433 - 611.274 Samaneri Jayasara

then leaving them.

616.419 - 665.803 Jacques Lusseyran

Withdrawing or diminishing is what I mean, for the opposite of light was never present. Sighted people always talk about the night of blindness, and that seems to them quite natural. But there is no such night. For at every waking hour, and even in my dreams, I lived in a stream of light. Inside me, there was everything I had believed was outside. There was, in particular,

673.341 - 719.01 Jacques Lusseyran

There were even the shapes of objects and the distance between objects. Everything was there and movement as well. Light is an element that we carry inside us. and which can grow there with as much abundance, variety, and intensity as it can outside of us. I could light myself. That is, I could create a light inside of me so alive, so large,

720.796 - 749.706 Jacques Lusseyran

and so near that my eyes, my physical eyes, or what remained of them, vibrated almost to the point of hurting. God is there under a form that has the good luck to be neither religious, nor intellectual, nor sentimental, but quite simply,

750.226 - 804.06 Jacques Lusseyran

I am certain that children always know this more than they are able to tell and that makes the big difference between them and adults who at best know only a fraction of what they say The reason is simply that children know everything with their whole being, while we know it only with our heads. Unhappiness comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the centre of the world.