Clear Light

it will cause the naked consciousness to be recognized as the Clear Light; and, thirdly, recognizing one’s own self [thus], one becometh permanently united with the Dharma-Kāya and Liberation will be certain.

This passage states the soteriological function of the Clear Light: recognition of naked consciousness as Clear Light is identical with union with the Dharmakāya and guarantees Liberation, distinguishing further between Primary and Secondary Clear Light stages.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the Dharma-Kāya unobscured; and, if unable to hold fast to that experience, next experiences the secondary Clear Light, having fallen to a lower state of the Bardo, wherein the Dharma-Kāya is dimmed by karmic obscurations.

Through an extended analogy of a bouncing ball, this passage establishes the hierarchical structure of Clear Light experience at death, with the Primary Clear Light as the highest spiritual bound and the Secondary as a diminished recurrence when karmic obscurations intervene.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Thy guru hath set thee face to face before with the Clear Light; and now thou art about to experience it in its Reality in the Bardo state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like unto a transparent vacuum without circumference or centre.

The liturgical address to the dying person frames the Clear Light as the imminent direct experience of reality — a void-like, unbounded luminosity equated with the naked intellect — accessible because prior guru instruction has prepared recognition.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz Edition), 1927thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This yoga also concerns the foundation of the immutable Great Light. The teaching of this changeless Great Light is of the unique Clear Wisdom here set forth, which, illuminating the Three Times, is called ‘The Light’.

In the Great Liberation text, Clear Wisdom and the immutable Great Light are presented as synonymous, constituting the foundation of the highest yoga and illuminating past, present, and future simultaneously.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Man at his birth is ‘endowed with the perfect light of nature.’ Paracelsus calls it ‘primum ac optimum thesaurum, quem naturae Monarchia in se claudit’ — the first and best treasure which the monarchy of nature hides within itself.

Jung’s citation of Paracelsus’s lumen naturae as the perfect light given to the inner body at birth provides a Western alchemical parallel to the Tibetan Clear Light, situating luminous primordial consciousness within the depth-psychological tradition of the Self.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

When one seeks one’s mind in its true state, it is found to be quite intelligible, although invisible. In its true state, mind is naked, immacu-

The description of mind in its true state as naked and immaculate parallels the Clear Light phenomenology, grounding the luminosity of awareness in the self-knowing quality of mind rather than in any external or constructed experience.

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 1954supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

a ‘chromatic harmony’ is established between the esoteric and the exoteric, the hidden and the apparent. Thus in the first stages, blue (kabud) clothing w-

Corbin’s account of Sufi chromatic mysticism, where clothing colour corresponds to the light contemplated at each mystic station, provides a comparative framework for understanding how luminous states — including the Clear Light — are mapped onto stages of spiritual realisation across traditions.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

at the bottom of the well of depression is the inner light that empowers one to reenter life… We each have our natural light, an image of what our soul intends for us.

Hollis employs the metaphor of an inner natural light at the nadir of depression as a Jungian analogue to the luminous ground of being, loosely parallel to the Clear Light as the self-revealing intelligence encountered when ordinary constructs are stripped away.

Hollis, James, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →