added PS 8/14/04
updated 11/18/04
updated 3/17/06
updated 3/4/07
Intimate
Conversation 2
"Light - A 'Definitely So' Story"
by Ramon 'Ray' Sender
original draft Summer, 1976
My
understanding of reality came to me over the years in a series of what I can
only refer to as mystical insights. After experiencing some aspects of the
current world religions, I focused upon the obvious source of all of mankind's
life, light and consciousness, the sun. I recognize the sun as our solar
system's god, my own center, Ray Sender, the only knowable -- visible --
creator within our normal material frame of reference. What lies beyond in space,
in the center of the galaxy, or before time within that primal moment when the
universe exploded into being, I can only conjure up in my imaginings. But my
senses, my daily experience, tell me that the light-bringer from which mankind
abstracts their multitude of notions of the deity is visible in the sky above,
perceivable to all living things every day of their lives and, according to my
observations, acknowledged as such by all creatures -- except we humans.
The above insights burst upon me in February, 1966, when I traveled to the
Mojave Desert for some time alone. There I took up the long-delayed quest that I had
begun ten years earlier (1957) on Mount Tamalpais where, as a
twenty-two-year-old, I had spent two weeks alone on a watershed belonging to
Pacific Gas and Electric. My predominant religious interest then had been Zen
Buddhism, fanned to a flame by the poetry of Gary Snyder, Ginsburg and Rexroth.
What few Zen books were available at that time (Alan Watts, R. H. Blythe's
haiku) I lugged up the trail in my backpack. I set up camp on the ridge next to
a spring under some welcoming redwoods. There I tried to meditate and to ponder
the true meaning of existence.
One evening, after a week alone in nature, the sunset burst through a
Baroque altarpiece of fog, beams of light diffracting through the misty curls.
It communicated to me such a beatific vision that I knew then and there that I
would have to restructure my life. I decided that this oceanic experience must
have been 'satori,' the Zen enlightenment that I had been seeking (although later I would reclassify this as a 'nature epiphany'. But at that
moment I embraced all and everything, my life's failures and its few successes, in
one harmonious totality that seemed one note in the universal chorus. I
said 'Yes' with all my heart to that glorious message, and decided that I had
to retire to a simple cabin somewhere in the California countryside. I would
turn away from society's meaningless power games, from the ruined marriage that
had brought me out west for that summer, and merge myself with nature -- my
nature.
I returned to New York City, and it took me two years to return to the West Coast after
living with -- and almost joining -- an Anabaptist Christian intentional
community where I hoped my marriage could be salvaged and our two-year-old daughter find a safe haven. The group's preparation
for baptism into full membership afforded me yet another spiritual experience,
but along a different route from nature or the Zen masters, this time the path of
ego-death and self-denial. I had to burn my old identity in the flames of their view of God's
wrathful judgment, emptying myself of everything to which I had once
clung. After an annihilating confessional encounter with the Elder, there came
a moment when, seated alone in my room, and having just had the last of my
ego's underpinnings pulled away, I heard a voice say, with infinite gentleness,
'I love you, Ramon.' And I knew with absolute certainty that this was God's
voice, and these four words melted the few remaining shreds of the 'separate me' completely away.
Yet this experience, from their Elder's point of view, was 'too
over-emotional,' and somehow the realization of God's love for me despite my innate sinfulness was 'not enough'
to be baptized into their congregation. After all, only the Elder was supposed to have direct
contact with God and then bring the fruits of his meditation to the
church.
A year later, during a second baptism intensive, I realized that I did not
know what my undergoing yet another ego-death would accomplish. I had 'no one inside' except the imprinted Elder's ego. What could I confess? Also I saw that my wife's focus was not on me but -- on the Elder! I realized that she
and I were never going to get back together. In deep despair, I escaped again to
California, at first feeling as if I had been cast into Inferno. I knew that the community's severe interpretation of Jesus' message as 'The love that cuts like a knife' would sever me forever from my daughter, and over time this proved to be the case, despite all my efforts to the contrary.
In San Francisco, I immersed myself in the writings of the Russian Christian Nicolai
Berdyaev, an existentialist philosopher who celebrated the connection to the
Divine through creative expression. He believed we were on the edge of a new
golden age of divine and human creativity, and hailed the artist as the one who
could break through the objectification that clouded men's perceptions.
At the time I welcomed Berdyaev's theories because they helped me feel that I
had not been thrown to the wolves. I devoted myself to composing music within
the congenial Bay Area artistic community. I also began to read the collected works of Carl
Jung, which helped me arrive at a deeper understanding of the individuation
process. I graduated from the Conservatory of Music, co-founded an electronic
music center with other composer friends, and devoted the next four years to
giving concerts while earning an M.A. in musical composition.
The psychedelic awakening of the early 'sixties re-energized my spiritual
search, starting with a night in early 1963 when a composer friend arrived at my house with a bagful of dried peyote buttons. After a few hours he went home and I lay down to find myself living my life backwards in a Jungian hero's journey to what seemed the instant of conceptions when I flashed into existence. Up until then I had never experimented with any mind-altering substances other than alcohol, so the doors of perception yawned very wide for me. A few more peyote sessions followed with friends until I realized that these new energies required more than just casual use. I decided to take up marijuana as a way to acclimatize myself more gradually. And when LSD became readily available for me that autumn, I was ready to venture deeper, focused at first on Tibetan Buddhism.
Meanwhile the 'concert series' theme of my musical career came to a
splendiferous climax with my co-producing "The Trips Festival," a
now-historic event that launched the hippie era. After an amazing weekend of 'people
energies,' I retreated to a small cave in the desert south of Needles. There I
recapitulated my earlier Christian experience back through various layers of
self-negation (The "Neti, Neti" path in Hinduism) to that same terrifying
moment of ego-annihilation I had experienced in the Anabaptist community. And once more I heard God's voice
repeat those same words, "I love you, Ramon" -- actually "You're a fool but I
love you, Ramon." And this time I was able to trace the voice to its source.
The voice had come -- from the sun! A sunbeam had at that very moment touched
the space where I sat, my head bowed to the ground.
What an incredible discovery! The sun was my higher self - was God! The
answer had been literally staring me in the face all my life! What a fool, what
a happy zany fool I was! Thinking back to that first time at the Christian
community, I now remembered how the sun had been pouring through the window at
the moment I heard those same loving words. The sun had been there all along,
always next to me every day, only disappearing to shine with equal love on the
other side of the planet. I felt as if I had reached back beyond the tainted
patriarchal religions to man's earliest awareness, to the source of life
itself. Now that I had 'awakened,' the obvious clues were everywhere -- in
nature, in the animal world, even in those religious paintings that showed a
ray of light descending from on high. Only man's vanity had insisted that God
was invisible and out of reach in some sort of non-material, ethereal
dimension.
I realized that our dualistic view of the universe was a misconception.
Matter, mind and spirit were just different vibrations -- different notes on
the same scale. And if the sun was a conscious being, then everything else must
be conscious as well! I had read similar truths in the writings of the mystics,
but it was totally different to experience this reality -- to talk with the
trees and flowers, even the stars who were only our same Divine Essence
manifesting elsewhere as Creator Beings of other solar systems. All was one,
and that unity did not mean that only our material plane existed. Spirit and
matter intermingled in ascending and descending cosmic melodies.
When I returned to the Bay Area, I was unable to live indoors, away from
the true source and fountainhead of my joy. I needed to be in nature as much as
possible to continue my yoga of adoration and my acclimatization to the solar
presence. So almost nine years later than my original decision to live out in the redwoods, I moved to a vacant ranch in Sonoma County that belonged to a friend.
My dog Katy moved with me and, later that summer, my partner Joan and some
friends and fellow travelers joined us. All that year I was caught up in a love
affair with the divine father and mother, the former manifesting in the
multi-colored rose windows the sun made in the redwood treetops, and the Holy
Mother speaking to me through dancing nature in the meadows and orchards.
Others experienced her nearness, and a few even saw her standing under a tree one
day. Some years later we learned, to our great amazement, that even before my
friend had bought the ranch, it had been dedicated to the Virgin Mary by the
Lay Order of St. Dominic.
I began to read through all the world's religions and spiritual masters, looking for where humans
had lost their basic understanding, and for references to the divinity of the sun, for
places where my new reality resonated with what others had experienced. I found
a few hints in books where the sun was used as a
metaphor for the Divine. Also it seemed that the further back I went, the stronger the hints became, such as the ecstatic hymns to the sun god in the Bronze Age Rig Veda. However I had to turn to the Native Americans to find contemporary fellow-believers.
I found some parallels in the writings of the Hindu philosopher-yogi
Sri Aurobindo Ghose. He shared with Berdyaev a vision of a spiritual evolution
that was leading man to a divinized light body that ultimately would replace
our corruptible ones. The 'forerunners of this divine multitude,' as he named
them in his epic poem 'Savitri,' were the rishis and holy beings who lived
thousand-year-long lives in the Himalayas within bodies that no longer needed
food, air or water. According to Aurobindo, through the meeting of eastern
spiritual traditions and western technical discoveries, a synthesis of yoga and
science would make the experience of this Himalayan advance guard available to
everyone.
At the ranch, I lay in the semi-shade of my favorite redwood grove for
long hours, staring up into the golden beams, entering various states of
altered consciousness, searching for a method to 'disappear' myself, to get out
of the way so that the solar light of Consciousness-Light-Love could merge with
the inner 'mother' light that also fueled me, the life force. Once that merger
occurred, I would no longer be flesh but instead would become the light-filled
energies that bound my atoms together.
I discovered that I had an innate talent for stillness and meditation. Later I
expanded my schedule to include daily Hatha Yoga and pranayama, yogic breathing
that kept me from getting chilled during my long hours in the grove.
It would be tedious for the reader for me to describe all the various
experiences, but I know with certainty that I tasted for a few brief instants the
nectar of immortality. Upon one or two occasions I came back to my body to find
it suspended between breaths, yet totally comfortable. I interpreted this as a
positive sign that I was approaching my goal, that I was within reach of the
'switch' that one day would click on and merge the inner and outer lights. From
there I would be able to unite with solar consciousness, one of whose
side-effects might even be a lifetime as long as the sun's.
However distractions kept occurring. It was difficult for our ranch
to remain merely a center for spiritual research, and for us not to welcome others
who came looking for answers of their own. At least we could share with
whomever was in need of a home the mother spirit that hovered over us. My
friends agreed and a trickle of young people began to arrive by January, 1967.
After a first visit from the Sheriff's department in March, I left the ranch. The anonymity that I felt necessary for my launches into the cosmos had been shattered. But when I came back to visit, the energies seemed so high, the Digger newcomers so
sincere, that finally I moved back. That May I built a sleeping platform on the dawn
side of the property where I could watch the morning star rise over Sonoma
Mountain, and thence began a tribal decade in my life for which I will be
forever grateful. I learned many wonderful things about living with other
seekers, but also I found myself in a double-bind because -- I was not ready to
share my deepest insights!
I knew that I was only a beginner, feeling my way step-by-step into the
unknown. I could take responsibility for my own eyesight during extended
periods of sun-gazing, but I could not be responsible for others' retinas. What
if the rumor got around that I was burning out the eyes of the younger
generation? We would be closed down in minutes! About this same time, an urban
myth circulated about a group of college students that had burned their retinas
staring at the sun on LSD. This did not help matters, especially because I must
acknowledge the invaluable role that LSD as well as plant teachers such as peyote have
played in my spiritual awakening.
Even if our cultural taboo against gazing at the sun turned out to be an old wives' tale that evolved along with the concept of an invisible god, I could not take any chances. We were still in the Kali Yuga, that most
materialistic of the Hindu cycle of ages. Somewhere I had read a description of
the Kali Yuga as the age when mankind's spirit had become so dense, so imbedded
in matter, that men could not gaze at the sun any more. And yet the Plains
Indians danced all day with their gaze fixed on the sun in that most sacred of
all rituals, the Sun Dance. What was their secret?
I treasured any reference I could find to ancient sun practices or current lore. I read that Romans took an oath on the sun by looking at it and saying, 'May Apollo strike me blind if I lie!' Coincidentally, a little child once had told me that the sun would not blind you if you hadn't told a lie. Elsewhere I ran across an item that nuns in Europe used to punish children for lying by making them stare at the sun! What a strange perversion, to make a punishment
out of recharging one's solar battery! What was the lying business, and how had
it started? And why would nature evolve an organ of sight incapable of looking
at the most important thing in the sky? Somehow it seemed implausible.
I felt like the man in Plato's story who left the cave of shadows and saw
reality but could not convince his fellow cave dwellers to venture forth.
However in my case, my fellow cavemen were all too eager to experiment, so I
only shared my insights with close friends. I also warned them to pay attention
to their pain threshold as a built-in fail-safe device.
One thing was certain: the quickest way for me to achieve a state of
no-thought was to fix my gaze on the filtered light of our parent star.
Immediately I would feel my heartbeat quicken and a warming sensation spread
from my solar(!) plexus throughout my body. However I lacked a method for
stabilizing a given amount of sunlight in one place for a long period of time.
After ten or so minutes of lying prone in the grove, I would find myself either
in too much shade or in blinding full sun. I would have to come "all the
way down" to my body in order to shift positions and then start over.
Perhaps I should summer at the North Pole? I dreamed of designing a sunlight
attenuator, something that would allow me to select the ideal amount for
extended gazing. I tried placing my hands in different positions or 'mudras'
over my eyes. Not satisfactory.
I devised a pair of pinhole glasses, but it was difficult to decide where
to allow the light to enter. On the blind spot, where the optic nerve entered
the retina? Filters were out, because I was not sure which were the beneficial
rays. The blue to violet seemed the most important, but the ultraviolet along
with the infrared at sunset seemed the most damaging, from reports I had read.
I did encounter a bluish Plexiglas skylight one ecstatic day in the Santa Cruz
mountains that was just terrific. How about those mirror balls they placed in
the center of gardens? The answer must be simple, I told myself, right in front
of me. It must be built into the human body, one way or another.
Another time I attained a remarkably blissful state in the city staring
at a tensor lamp. Don't laugh. The meditation was shared by a number of new
friends who, upon the strength of that experience, immediately moved to the
ranch. But ultimately, nothing was as satisfactory as the redwood groves and
they remained my sanctuaries.
Life at the ranch continued full of distractions, such as raids by
sheriff's deputies and fly-overs by building inspectors. When a local judge
placed an injunction on the property forbidding anyone except the owner to live
there, those of us who stayed faced the prospect of arrest daily. Gradually we
all moved to another ranch that had opened in a less accessible area, and there
I continued for another few years. Finally, in 1970, I left the now-beleaguered
second ranch and spent some time indoors in Santa Cruz writing a history of the
Open Land Movement, the name we had given our philosophy of living together
without choosing our neighbors.
While there, I visited the University of California Santa Cruz and wired
myself to their eight-channel EEG-EKG-heartbeat recorder. I sat outside in the
sun, the wires from my head leading through an open window to the equipment.
The tests were administered by a graduate student. By the time I received the
results, I was in South America on the track of ancient solar cultures. The
scrap of squiggles he mailed me and his brief analysis were enough to convince
me that my body underwent measurable changes during sun-gazing sessions. My
heartbeat increased radically whenever I looked at the sun, and my alpha rhythms
were as strong as some they had recorded with Zen meditators. I fully understood that gazing at the sun stopped my thought process, or at least made entry into a mindless state very easy.
In South America I wrote Being Of The Sun with Alicia Bay Laurel, who lovingly designed and drew each page. In it we attempted to put in the simplest language something of the religious experiences that I -- and it
seemed by then many others -- were experiencing. By the time it was published,
the hard-edged 1970s were in full swing. The gentle people had retreated to
quiet eddies in rural backwaters to raise their children and gardens. The ones
who needed the book's message were no longer interested, while the ones who
were living the reality it described did not need to be told the obvious.
I wrote an article celebrating the full-spectrum light experimenter John Ott, and various other essays and novels, some published, some not. In 1980, I moved back to San Francisco, where I met and married my wonderful life-partner Judy. With her help and a NEA Creative Writing grant, I recovered my birth mother's life story and the
reasons for her assassination during the Spanish Civil War. The University of New Mexico Press published it under the title
A Death In Zamora (1989).
During the 1990s, I found it
exhilarating to live in a high-stress urban environment with only the sun to steer
by. Every morning I chanted the Gayatri mantram to the rising sun, and kept a
close I-Thou devotional relationship thriving -- perhaps I should describe it as
my ongoing ’romance,’ because I remained truly in love. And truly in love also with my wife Judy who continued her devoted teaching career in the public high schools until her retirement at the end of the decade, and helped my three sons mature via various growing pains into young adulthood. At this time I founded a recovery group for a large number of
ex-members of the Anabaptist high-demand religious community where my daughter had grown up, married and
started a family. She had died very suddenly of melanoma in 1989, a week after
her diagnosis, and a few months after my mother’s story was published (she
never saw a copy, but knew of it). In the more recent paperback edition, I
added a final note that described their similar characters and how the many
strange parallels in their lives (both died at the same age, leaving two small
children) convinced me that they were the same soul. The recovery group had grown
out of my determination to interview people who had known my daughter and write
her biography, and my phone calls triggered a monthly newsletter, annual
gatherings and four books in a series titled "Women from Utopia" that I designed and published. Before I was forced to move on via three lawsuits and the threat of losing our liability insurance, the foundation and publishing company had more than four million words in print.
In 1999, I settled into a full-time job administering the Noe
Valley Ministry and community center across the street from our home. The work
combined my interests in community, publishing, spirituality, children
and music. I estimated that roughly 700 people walked into the building every
week and my busy days were rewarding and enjoyable.
Sometimes, however, I wondered if I was spiritually
starving myself just for the indescribable pleasure of some future reunion. ’Dry’
periods occur on the spiritual path for every seeker, I told myself. But I
continued to experience spirit and matter as one infinite continuum, and one
day a chance smile out the office window led me to discover that a smile, with a
glance of this type, triggered a burst of energy in my solar plexus that surged
through my body and out my fingertips. A search for the phrase 'smile
meditation' on the Internet led me to a Taoist 'Inner Smile' exercise that I began
to use. This in turn led me to Taoist yoga and some other teachers mentioned here on my website. I then discovered the writings of Master Omraam Mikhael Aihanhov.
Various of his pages on Sun Yoga I could have written myself! How sorry I was
not to have met him in person before he left his body in 1986.
In August, 2004, a few months
before my 70th birthday and determined to 'sunbathe’ at least every
sunny afternoon, I retired to devote myself with reawakened enthusiasm to my solar studies and meditations. Beyond the exercises I’ve developed for increasing eudemony
(please see the postings under OBEATA on the top menu here) and a pre-sleep
meditation based on the ’wet' Vipassana Buddhist breath-awareness method, I do
not practice any other yogas except for the continuing awareness that I am in
The Presence every day, in varying degrees on the energy continuum (depending
on the weather). Of course all light is sunlight, so even on cloudy days I bask
in the light of the One in whom we "live and move and have our being."
By the time I celebrated my 70th birthday in 2004 I had discovered a series of exercises which, although not directly sun-centered, seemed to promise an entry through that final door into awakening, that stage of 'undistracted self-consciousness or true self-knowledge sometimes called the state of 'wakeful sleep,' as a follower of Sri Ramana Maharshi wrote me today.
Whatever else occurs, I know that one day I will launch myself
into the sky with whatever knowledge I have acquired and throw my soul as far
as possible towards my Golden Center. This time I hope it will hook onto not
just a sunbeam, but onto the Source of all our planetary existence. Whatever
else this process is, it must be a natural one, because I know this
phototropic, light-seeking urge lies coiled in the deepest recesses of every
living form. My essay
Why Nature Grew Humans ventures into this topic in greater
detail. Until such a time, I am more than content to lead an urban existence in
what I call "the left ventricle of San Francisco" while I accumulate more data
on the effects of light on living organisms, and absorb the wisdom and
realizations of great seekers.
Finally, if everything is conscious and the sun is our God node in our
solar system, then heaven also must exist in our material universe. In one of
the references to sun yoga -- Surya Yoga -- that I found in India, the sun is
referred to as the place where the rishis (spiritual teachers) and kings of
ancient times return after death. I agree. I think our heaven, paradise,
whence our earthly souls return, does indeed exist within the sun. But how
wonderful it would be if we could merge our consciousness with our higher
Souls-in-Sol while still experiencing our individual planetary
existences! This 'living merger' is the evolution of the physical form anticipated by many great teachers such as Sri Aurobindo and hinted at by almost every spiritual path, Tibetan, Hindu, Kabbalist or Sufi amongst others. May I live to see that day blossom for all life on the planet -- and for Gaia herself!
P.S. Since uploading a version of this essay in June, 2003, my prayer
voiced in the final sentence above has been more than answered, because a
whole community of sungazers has blossomed on the Internet. Please read the
following links:
An excellent historical background site authored by Petre Liviu Misicu:
http://www.sunlight.as.ro/
Petre's very informative list for sungazers
(Teacher Hira Manek's site, with instructions on HRM Method)
(Mason Dwinell's site, very similar to HRM Method)
http://www.rawpaleodiet.org/sungazing/
(Vinny's site, overview of many different
systems/methods, also offers basic safety info)
http://www.anandaproject.org/sunyoga/photos.html
Umasankar
http://www.newtreatments.org/fromweb/manekji.html
http://www.jsocf.org/sshrm.htm
http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/11377_yoga.html
http://indiamonitor.com/news/readCatFullNews.jsp?ni=3257&ct=Indian%20Achievements
http://www.lifemysteries.com/sungazing.html
Also please check the folder Sun Letters under the Solar Legation menu
