Erin, Rick , Glenn
couldn't help but put in my pennies worth, so here goes...
I was certain it was Pirsig who refutes the existence of the so called
Dharmakaya light, but maybe not, anyway, I think this has a wholly
biological explanation, as I understood it, people see this light at times
of great emotional upheaval, at a a point in their lives when a huge value
change occurs such as a death in the family. At this time, whenever this
occurs, the pupils dilate massively, allowing more light into the eye, and
as most people who are dying tend to be kept in darkened rooms (not dark,
but not in trhe sun!!!), this gives the impression of a "ring of light" or
flash of light around the dying, this has also been attributable to people
who claim they see the soul leaving the body.
This has very close parallels with near death experience, the tunnel of
light effect as the optic nerve begins to stop sending signals to the brain,
again a ring of bright white light is all that is seen.
Rod
on 2/27/02 5:29 AM, Glenn Bradford at gmbbradford@netscape.net wrote:
> Erin, Rick,
>
> ERIN asked:
> Do you remember where you read this?
>
>> Also, support for this interpretation comes from his
>> experience with the karmakaya (sp?) light. Until he was
>> told about it, which I guess is a kind of social initiation,
>> he hadn't seen it. Afterward, he started to.
>
> It's in Lila, for sure, but I was doing this from memory and I'm not even
> sure I'm remembering the right bit that I had in mind. I remember it ends
> a chapter with "Tiger, tiger, burning bright"...Found it. Near the end of
> chapter 26, p.387. It's Dharmakaya light, sorry. He even says, with a
> bullseye: "The Dharmakaya light. That was a huge area of human experience
> cut off by cultural filtering." This *really* bolsters the interpretation
> that "observes", in the other quote, should be taken literally! Further
> down he says that he thinks this light is a phenomena of nature (like the
> light from the sun is) and not a subjective quality: "In fact he was sure
> it was grounded in physical reality." Then he says:
>
> PIRSIG:
> But nobody sees it because the cultural definition of what is real and
> what is unreal filters out the Dharmakaya light from 20th century
> American "reality" just as sure as time is filtered out of Hopi reality,
> and green-yellow differences mean nothing to the Natchez.
>
> I'm convinced. Of course, the other things he mentions about the Hopi and
> the Natchez - the Sapir-Whorf research - has been discredited, and the
> Dharmakaya light, despite what he thinks, is most likely a subjective
> feature of the brain, related to his mental illness.
>
> The Cleveland Harbour story precedes the Dharmakaya stuff.
> On page 385 he talks about the "green flash" of the sun found in yachting
> literature. This was the bit I intended to talk about in my last post and
> proceeded to mix up with the part about the Dharmakaya light. But it's all
> relevant and it's even all in the same chapter, which I also didn't
> remember. Concerning the "green flash", he says:
>
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