The Place of Lamps

We leave the chamber of imagination and enter a place of lamps.

In the Holy Place of the biblical sanctuary, the lampstand gave light. The seven-branched lamp of the tabernacle gives our inward journey its image of a tended illumination. In our inward temple, its flame becomes an image of the knowing through which every chamber has been visible.

Memory was known. Imagination was known. Even confusion was known.

You begin to notice the light that accompanied the whole journey.

Beside the lampstand lies a small vessel of oil.

Anointing belongs to the language of consecration. The word chrism keeps sacred oil within this language of dedication. The Greek title Christos means “anointed”; it corresponds to the Hebrew language of messiah and anointing. It was a title within a Jewish world of kingship, expectation, and dedication.

In the inward temple, the oil asks what will be consecrated.

A thought can be given entirely to self-defense. A desire can become a campaign for possession. A sorrow can become an identity from which every future encounter is interpreted.

The same living intensity can be brought into dedication.

The lamp requires the material that life supplies. Joy is available. So are shame, disappointment, longing, and the difficult emotions we had hoped to remove before entering a sacred place.

The alchemical image begins here: the material we were tempted to reject becomes available for transformation through a changed direction.

The vessel remains beside the lamp. We will return to it when we reach the inner room.

The restored eye of Horus appears beside the lamps. In Egyptian tradition, the wedjat carried meanings of healing, protection, and renewed wholeness. In the myth associated with it, Horus’ eye is injured or taken by Seth and restored by Thoth. The image carries the recovery of a sight that had been wounded. Here it becomes a companion to the gathering of attention: a sight that has been scattered begins to recover its integrity.

You can see a movement without becoming wholly absorbed in it.

Matthew’s image of the eye as the lamp of the body finds a place here too. Jesus, speaking within his Jewish world, draws together the condition of sight and the illumination of a life. At this stage of our journey, the image asks us to attend to what governs our seeing.

What has held the lamp?

Fear can hold it over every possible danger. Desire can carry it from object to object. A grievance can keep it shining upon the same wound for years.

Now attention begins to be gathered into the one who knows these movements.

The power of gathered attention can be remarkable. Occult disciplines have explored its relationship with imagination, ritual, correspondence, and will. Crowley’s account of magick centers upon change in conformity with will; the Hermetic Emerald Tablet gives ascent and descent a place within transformation.

The question follows us into the temple: what will receive the strength we gather?

A wish for control can become intensely disciplined. Fear can wear the form of spiritual ambition. A person may seek inward power because dependence, uncertainty, and ordinary human vulnerability feel unbearable.

We have to be able to see this motive as clearly as we see the practice.

The gathering of attention prepares a capacity. Its allegiance gives that capacity a direction.

The lamp can be carried toward an object we want to possess, or toward the Source before whom even the wish to possess can be brought.

Al-Ghazali’s Niche of Lights deepens the chamber around us. His reading of the Qur’anic lamp, glass, niche, tree, and oil relates them to the faculties through which experience is known: sensation, imagination, intellect, reflection, and prophetic illumination.

Each light reveals a depth unavailable at the previous threshold.

A sensation is received. An image preserves it. Understanding discovers a relation. Reflection opens a significance. The inward landscape becomes luminous through different powers of knowing.

The lamps illuminate a stairway.

Beside it, a tree opens its branches through the temple. In Jewish mystical teaching, the sefirot can be related to powers of the soul. We encounter them here as living capacities: wisdom appearing in a sudden opening, understanding giving that opening form, love moving toward what it cherishes, restraint giving the movement a boundary.

The Tree of Life has become an interior landscape. As you pass beneath its branches, you recognize the powers through which your own life is being shaped.