The “light” isn’t god, but it’s very real

And there's a simple explanation for it

1/ Crazy stuff you see on meditation retreats

I’ve had a few mystical experiences in my life. These weren’t all drug-induced hallucinations. Many of them have come totally sober, during deeper meditation. Like witnessing my body completely dissolve, observing elaborate three-dimensional visuals, and experiencing absolute stillness with almost no perception of my senses. 

A by-product of deep concentration states is seeing a bright, white light. This can be a glowing, spacious light with different colors, or it can be a very clearly defined orb or ball that appears to be floating in space. I’ve experienced this several times on meditation retreats. I’m not making this shit up. The light is usually accompanied by a very pleasant feeling, lots of joy, and a sense of total peace. 

There’s obviously no picture of it, because it’s in your head. But it can sort of looks like this:

Or this: 

Or even this: 

2/ What happens when you focus on the light? 

If you focus on the light, it’ll disappear. Sorry. It’s elusive like that. Any excitement about the light is likely to scare it off. It’s like when I tried to catch a pigeon that one time. Pretty damn near impossible. You just have to let it be, and it will come to you (‘what you seek is seeking you’, and all that jazz). When you let it do its thing without adding anything extra, you can sustain deeper and deeper states of concentration. Typically they start out as a more diffused light and then become more centered and defined with more concentration.

This is spoken about a lot in Buddhist texts and is a fairly common experience. It’s called a “Nimitta.” The word nimitta literally just means “sign.” In the Visuddhimagga, they talk about the different ones you can see: 

“It appears to some like a star or a cluster of gems or a cluster of pearls, to others with a rough touch like that of silk-cotton seeds or a peg made of heartwood, to others like a long braid string or a wreath of flowers or a puff of smoke, to others like a stretched-out cobweb or a film of cloud or a lotus flower or a chariot wheel or the moon's disk or the sun's disk.”

There are so many types! You never know which one you’ll get. They just appear. Actually, to be totally fair, there are practices where your concentration becomes stronger and you can focus on the light which can take you into deeper absorption states.

But the nimitta isn’t the “point” or the “goal” of meditation, and you don’t actually ever need to see one in order to reach the upper echelons of meditation or to reach nirvana. But it’s certainly pleasant to experience. 

In other words, according to Buddhism, anybody can experience this bright light and you shouldn’t feel too special. But if you’ve seen it, it probably means you’re an advanced meditator or you had a momentary experience where your mind and body were particularly open and relaxed. Congratulations! 

Of course, when you see something you can’t explain, there’s lots of room for interpretation.

3/ Is it Jesus, Allah, or your Third Eye?

Big, bright, white light. Huh. Sounds pretty familiar. It got me thinking. Don’t many religions, belief systems and mystical accounts talk about “seeing a bright, white light?” Buddhism is obviously one, but it’s common in many other places. 

If I was alive a couple hundred years ago and saw a big light, I’d probably be pretty jazzed. I might conclude it was a vision from the lord almighty and go tell everyone in my neighborhood. Thanks to the tendency for these states to increase creativity and imagination (I have outlined entire books in my head on meditation retreats), I might even make up an elaborate story about how I received a ‘special transmission’ from god. Ever hear of Mormonism? Here’s Joseph Smith, recounting the day he received the message: 

“Smith said he saw a pillar of light brighter than the noonday sun that slowly descended on him, growing in brightness as it descended and lighting the entire area for some distance. As the light reached the tree tops, Smith feared the trees might catch fire. But when it reached the ground and enveloped him, it produced a "peculiar sensation." [H]is mind was caught away from the natural objects with which he was surrounded; and he was enwrapped in a heavenly vision."

It sounds like Smith had a mystical/meditative experience and interpreted it as something way bigger than it really was. I don’t blame him, and it’s not a bad business idea for the 1800s.

The power of suggestion is strong, by the way. During my own meditation experiences, I can “direct” my mind towards an idea or image, and get VERY clear and realistic images of that thing. Like an oreo. Or a centaur. But you don’t see me starting the Church of Centaurs. Maybe I should.

Anyways, this mention of bright lights occurs a LOT.

For example, the Gnostic Gospels, secret texts written 2,000 years ago but not included in the official Bible, the light was totally a thing that happened. Jesus talks a lot about being the light. 

“...if one is whole, one will be filled with Light, but if one is divided, one will be filled with darkness. If your eye becomes single, your whole body shall be full of Light.

And more references from Christianity. 

“If they say to you, 'Where have you come from?' say to them, 'We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.”

In Islam, Allah is frequently referred to as “the light” and seeing a light is a sign of god. 

"The light which shines in the eye

is really the light of the heart.

The light which fills the heart

is the light of God*, which is pure

and separate from the light of intellect and sense."

In Taoism:

"The light is neither inside nor outside the self. Mountains, rivers, sun, moon, and the whole earth are this light, so it is not only in the self. All the operations of intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom are also this light, so it is not outside the self. The light of heaven and earth fills the universe; the light of one individual also naturally extends through the heavens and covers the earth. Therefore, once you turn the light around, everything in the world is turned around."

In the Upanishads, the oldest Hindu texts, seeing the light is about merging with specific gods. 

"There was this light that became brighter and

brighter and brighter, the light of a thousand suns...

This brilliant light, of which I was the center and

also the circumference, expanded through the

universe, and... this light shone so bright, yet it was

beautiful, it was bliss, it was ineffable, indescribable."

And in Shintoism

“A mirror has a clean light that reflects everything as it is. It symbolizes the stainless mind of the kami, and at the same time is regarded as a sacred symbolic embodiment of the fidelity of the worshiper towards the kami.”

As I started to look up other religions and mystical accounts, I found something similar. Either frequent references to the light, or outright instructions to develop this light.

Now, it’s possible the light could be a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment. But at least based on my meditation experience, and that of many others, combined with the frequent mention of Light when someone has a spiritual experience – all leads me to believe they’re probably all hinting at seeing an actual light in the mind’s eye. 

Knowing what we know now, there might be a simple explanation for this. 

4/ Sensory deprivation and your visual cortex

When someone is on their deathbed (or had a near death experience and came back), don’t they often talk about seeing a big, bright light or a tunnel with a light at the end of it? According to research at the University of Bristol, it’s not surprising you could experience these visuals nearer death:

“Brain activity is normally kept stable by some cells inhibiting others. Disinhibition (the reduction of this inhibitory activity) produces too much activity in the brain. This can occur near death (because of lack of oxygen) or with drugs like LSD, which interfere with inhibition.”

So, since it’s all subjective and hard to actually see what people are seeing, they came up with a clever way to test it. They used a computer to simulate what would happen when you have gradually increasing electrical noise in the visual cortex.

“The computer program starts with thinly spread dots of light, mapped in the same way as the cortex, with more toward the middle and very few at the edges. Gradually the number of dots increases, mimicking the increasing noise. Now the center begins to look like a white blob and the outer edges gradually get more and more dots. And so it expands until eventually the whole screen is filled with light. The appearance is just like a dark speckly tunnel with a white light at the end, and the light grows bigger and bigger (or nearer and nearer) until it fills the whole screen.” 

This sounds very much like the nimitta experience as written about for millenia. The expanding and contracting of light is also in line with my own experience and how these lights appear.

The near-death experience itself sounds like a stage of advanced meditation. An article in Scientific American describes one person’s account:

“—tunnel vision and bright lights; a feeling of awakening from sleep, including partial or complete paralysis; a sense of peaceful floating; out-of-body experiences; sensations of pleasure and even euphoria; and short but intense dreams, often involving conversations with family members, that remain vivid to them many years afterward.”

But even when you’re not on the brink of death, there seems to be a very logical explanation: meditation (or meditation-like experiences) can be like sensory deprivation, and that causes hallucinations. 

“​​Attenuation of sensory input reliably leads to hallucinations, even after a short time. Decreased sensory input leads to spontaneous firing and hallucinations through homeostatic plasticity – a set of feedback mechanisms that neuronal circuits use to maintain stable activity and firing rates close to a set point.”

In fact, you can have a very meditative or spiritual experience (with or without the bright lights) when you’re in a sensory deprivation tank aka a “float tank.”

You can even get this feeling in a place that simulates a “perceptual isolation environment” (a float tank, meditating for 20 hours etc), by looking at an expansive space like a big blue sky. No wonder laying in the park and just gazing at the sky feels so good – you're basically meditating. (here’s a sky gazing meditation I found).

5/ That light is probably not god

Regardless of the belief system, these are all human experiences. It seems pretty likely that we are experiencing the same thing, or at least something similar. Depending on your beliefs or when you were born in history, you could interpret the light as a sign from Jesus, Allah, Mother Teresa, the Hindu God of the Sun, the Buddhist nimitta, the third eye chakra, or a trick of your visual cortex. In other words, these are human concepts we’ve developed to explain an experience we all are capable of having.

It’s not to say that looking at the sky, going in a float tank, meditating for 100 hours on a retreat, and have a near-death experience are the same. They’re not, and they will probably produce differing experiences that are open to different interpretations. This also isn’t to discount the deep, transformative nature of mystical experience and what can rise when you’re in a place where you’re relaxed/focused enough to see the light.

In fact, if more people saw the light, it would probably mean they were more in touch with their inner selves, and would be less likely to go out and do stupid things. The world would probably be a better place. So yes, I totally encourage everyone to meditate and go towards the light. (And join my meditation group in Tokyo if you’re in Japan, or stay tuned for online meditations which I plan to host).

It’s helpful to know that seeing a light of some sort could be something that just happens. Good news is that it doesn’t mean you’re totally crazy when it happens. Because it does happen, and it’s pretty common. Whenever I experience a nimitta, I think it can be cool, but I don’t get caught up in it. And I like to remind myself that it’s probably best to not start a new religion. We’ve got more than enough of those already. 

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