The power of radiance

We humans have brought ourselves to a fascinating and challenging point. By our numbers and our choices, particularly in the last 200 years, we’ve grown into an equivalent of the geological forces that have shaped our planet over its 4.5 billion year life. Our effect on the thin layer of atmosphere blanketing the earth means that we are potentially altering the ability of every living thing to prosper, or even exist. Our use of resources — forests, water, air, minerals, soil — is far outstripping the earth’s ability to replenish them. Millions of people worldwide are grappling with these challenges, which represent not just things to do but require new ways to think.

Now that we have become this force, where do we look for inspiration on how to act in our new role? To the universe itself, suggests cosmologist Brian Swimme amplifying the thinking of Thomas Berry, with whom he collaborated for many years. In 2005 Brian recorded a series of talks on the powers of the universe, the modes the cosmos itself operates by. These are the processes that gave birth to everything, including us. He chose eleven of them: seamlessness, centration, allurement, emergence, homeostasis, cataclysm, synergy, transmutation, transformation, interrelatedness, and radiance. 

In 2007 I attended the earth literacy intensive at Genesis Farm, a Berry-inspired ecological and spiritual center. One of our projects was to choose a power and, after pondering it for a couple of weeks, create a presentation for our final evening together. I made a beeline for the CD that held the talk on radiance. 

Just before going to Genesis Farm, I had been at an art workshop where a fellow participant shared her mandala journal with us. So inspired by this magical way of responding to our world, I sat down to do my first mandala as soon as she closed her book. I brought this happy zeal with me to Genesis Farm and combined listening to Brian talk about radiance with this new way of meditating. From a butterfly to the stars, all was held in its shimmering essence. So, even though radiance is the tenth listed power, I’m going with the time-honored and delicious principle of eating dessert first.

Radiance may be the sweetest of the powers, but that doesn’t lessen its immense importance and complexity. We wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for the most radiant of all local beings: the sun. She, blazing wildly from the depths of her fiery furnace, sets our standard. She also has a lot of company. Since the primeval flaring forth, everything in the universe has been giving off light, in the visible spectrum and out, in the form of electromagnetic and quantum energy. ‘Radiance is the primary language of the universe, the way the universe communicates with itself.’ The way that it speaks to us. The sun and the earth, with all its emerging forms and beings, are part of the cosmos’s ongoing conversation. 

Our task, Brian says, ‘is to become the human form of radiance.’ We didn’t evolve to become consumers, or cogs in an industrial machine, or to allow the sublime beauty of this world to be destroyed for trinkets. We evolved to manifest 14 billion years of radiance. 

For this, we can turn first to our most luminous organ: our heart. Our most crucial organ, nourishing every single cell, every moment of our lives. But it’s not only an exquisitely designed pump. It receives, and radiates. Look at a mother watching her baby, he suggests. ‘You don’t need to talk her into the idea that she’s holding a magnificent beauty.’ And we, looking on, recognize the glowing love flowing from her, and our heart opens in turn. ‘What comes forth, what reverberates out, feels like it’s completing the beauty that’s there.’

Our heart’s radiance is both effects and science, body and spirit. It’s a sublime biological system and an electromagnetic field 100 times stronger than the brain’s. Its rhythms convey information to all systems, functioning as the information hub of the body. It synchronizes the brain, giving us deeper access to our frontal lobes, helping us process the world and make sense of our emotional experiences.

The heart’s effects — warmth, aliveness, love, compassion, joy, forgiveness — both reach into and receive the world. These capacities are the essential qualities of all spiritual traditions, which recognize them as the way into our kinship with all other beings. They are the traits that have always made life worth living, and are why turning to our hearts now is crucial to our complex path forward. 

I might also say turning on our hearts. Since everything is connected, it makes perfect sense that our heart’s energy field would interact with the universe’s many interwoven fields. For the past ten years the Global Coherence Institute, part of the Institute for Heart Math, has been studying just this. A recent study “showed that human heart rhythms of participants synchronized with other participants, even in some cases…hundreds of miles apart. This indicated that the participants were all synchronized to an external signal in Earth’s magnetic field environment.”   

This is utterly fascinating, and Heart Math’s research, devoted to the science behind our most radiant organ, is full of such gems. But we don’t need studies to know we are in the presence of a big heart, or a tender heart, or a joyful spirit. Or that the heart leaps with joy at the sight a velvety sky full of stars, or a loved one’s face. Brian calls radiance a mode of perception as well as a power. The heart gifts us with the intuition to read other hearts, to read the earth itself. Our response is a reciprocation. When we see with compassion, or hope, or joy, when we recognize and react to beauty, we don’t spend those capacities, we enlarge them. 

We’ve been operating under distorted perceptions — that the earth is merely a resource, that some humans are less worthy than others, that economics is more important than love. All of these come from the basic distortion that everything is separate. When we allow the radiance of the universe to speak through our hearts, we can both perceive and radiate our deep interconnection with every manifestation of the unfolding cosmos.

Of the heart’s qualities, scriptures the world over tell us, the greatest is love. We have thousands upon thousands of poems, songs, paintings, stories of love. I think most of us would say it is the most important element in our own lives. We are passionate about, even obsessed with love. And yet the culture we have created devalues it, just as it is capable of trashing so many other manifestations of radiance. 

The recent outpouring of love-fueled outrage in response to the border crisis reassures us that love is powerful. But the decades of policy leading to this crisis in all the countries involved were, and continue to be, fueled by greed and domination. The disconnect between the depth of feeling in our hearts and the crushing power of corporations and governments makes love seem like a weak force. 

And yet we feel — in our hearts — that it’s not. It’s there that we know, as Brian says, ‘that something glorious is streaming into us.’ Knowing that the radiance of the universe is beating through our hearts can give us the strength to move through the frantic constructs of our time toward the vivid future we yearn for. This is not a ‘love, sweet love’ invocation; it’s not limited to that dimension. The sun doesn’t set us an example of placid radiance. Hers is wildly fierce, life-giving, life-altering. It makes everything possible.

But the universe also tells us that sweet radiance is powerful. Plants turn the sun’s ferocious energy into sugars, nourishment to feed themselves and to sustain the millions of years of evolution that radiated out after the appearance of photosynthesis. Out of this sweetness, plants create luminous petals, delicious fruits, aromatic essences to nurture other beings, including us, whose brains and senses have slowly evolved to hold consciousness of the beauty of life, and lives. 

Loving this incandescent bounty anchors us to the earth we rose from. We seek to create it, live it, share it, save it. We derive courage, strength, dedication. We respond with loving radiance. We are emboldened to take action. ‘We discover who we are in the midst of the deep voices of the universe.’

I’d love to have you on the journey! If you add your email address, I’ll send you notices of new adventures.

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