Self-sprung awareness is a state that Tibetan Buddhists use to describe an awareness of the eternal, of consciousness beyond words and time. It transcends systems of logic, spiritual practice and human reality. This state is also known as uncreated light which contrasts to the created light of spiritual paths and systems. These paths lead a seeker to a higher consciousness and truth that is permanent and objective and not just opinion.
Platonic Forms
Plato indicates a form or ideal that is a permanent reality beyond description and logic. He wrote that the good, the true, and the physical laws of geometry and nature exist eternally. They are the essence of meaning that predicate human knowledge and understanding. He acknowledges that words are barren of meaning without the illumination that accompanies contact with eternal consciousness.
In the later writings of Plato, particularly in the Seventh Letter, he acknowledges the limits of knowledge. He says that there is an experience that is beyond logic. It transcends being and non-being to a level that seems more of an emotional perception. “A fire is kindled in the soul, transmitted from one to the other.’’ This fire is a desire to follow “the affinity with justice and all the other noble ideals” that transcend the limits of language. “At last in a flash of understanding each blazes up, and the mind, as it exerts all its powers to the limit of human capacity, is flooded with light.”
Plato demonstrates in the Meno how Socrates can educate an untutored slave boy to understand the laws of geometry and how it applies to the form of a square through simple dialogue. Socrates says. “The truth about reality is always in our soul; the soul must be immortal… One must recollect.” There is an indissoluble link between the immortal soul and knowledge of Forms. It is an affinity in the soul that recognizes the permanent nature of the ideals such as the Good, and Truth. Plato later says that it is this affinity, this emotional desire to return to its spiritual home, the eternal source, that creates the movement toward something higher.
Looking Out from One’s Eyes
When we try to be present and remember ourselves by staying out of imagination we return to something more permanent within ourselves. The state of presence often creates the desire for more presence by putting aside imagination and coming back to the moment. If the process was one of continued self-recognition only, it would be a narrowing of experience and limiting, as words are. Being present–by conscious awareness that one is looking out of one’s eyes–brings an experience of our own soul.
You are what is looking.
According to Plato, the soul knows and recognizes eternal being. “Like can only be known by like.”
The Soul’s Recognition of Objective Forms
Definitions of human values such as the Good, justice and the laws of geometry are not arbitrary, according to Plato. The soul can remember these values in their eternal Form and tries to be in harmony with them. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates is the midwife to the soul. He tries to get to the essence or truth of these values and deliver them explicitly so that humans can understand them.
These Forms are the eternal structure of things. The soul can recognize the essence of justice, for example, by practicing justice, by a sifting process of logical dialogue, recognizing what is just. The just man acts on what he thinks is the highest form of justice. Then he brings it into being if his soul is active on remembering who it is.
Uncreated Light – the Source of our Being
Presence is the illumination of our soul’s efforts to re-member itself. It is the revelation of the divine nature of a human being. It can be the lighting up of an individual’s life with the eternal matrix of being from which the soul springs. This is the uncreated light from which it was born. When we penetrate the moment, the truth of being in a material world, a material body, connects to the eternal Present.
“Light, rare untellable Light, lighting the very light, beyond all descriptions, languages.” – Walt Whitman
Patricia Stahl is a licensed psychologist and has been a student of the Fourth Way for more than four decades. For another article on how the self learns to recognize itself, see: https://fourthwaytoday.org/sense-of-self/.