You Literally Sparkle

Scientific Understanding of Vision

Our understanding of vision took a long time to develop. Many obstacles had to be overcome: fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of light (physics), prohibitions against dissecting human bodies (anatomy), erroneous preconceptions about the eye’s function (physiology) and errors in understanding perceptual, or interpretive, aspects of vision (psychology). To appreciate the struggle to achieve even our current, imperfect level of understanding, consider a few of the main historical landmarks.

Light is made up of wavelengths of light, and each wavelength is a particular colour. The colour we see is a result of which wavelengths are reflected back to our eyes. Visible light is the small part within the electromagnetic spectrum that human eyes are sensitive to and can detect. Visible light waves consist of different wavelengths. The colour of visible light depends on its wavelength. These wavelengths range from 700 nm at the red end of the spectrum to 400 nm at the violet end. White light is actually made of all of the colours of the rainbow because it contains all wavelengths. Light from a torch or the Sun is a good example of this.

Ancient Greeks held that the eye sends out rays to objects and that these rays give the viewer information about color and shape. A second opinion held that sight depended upon an interaction between images that were ejected from the eye and the perceiver’s own soul. Plato was among the best known of this theory’s supporters. Finally, another opinion held that when people see, they actually make contact with the objects they see, or with replicas of those objects.

Though little known today in the West, one of the greatest scientists of medieval time was Abu Ali Mohammed Ibn Al Hasn Ibn Al Haytham, whom we know today as Alhazen. During the waning years of the tenth century and the first years of the eleventh century, Alhazen worked out most major details of our contemporary theories of light and vision. He made significant contributions to the principles of optics and visual perception. He was the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and gave a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He contradicted ancient Greek’s theories. According to him the rays originate in the object of vision and not in the eye. Alhazen made a thorough examination of the passage of light through various media and discovered the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into its constituent colours. Among other topics, he studied afterimages that resulted from looking at bright objects. He also demonstrated that objects that are visible under some lighting conditions can become invisible under others.

Sunlight and other white lights are actually made of many different frequencies. The sun emits infrared and ultraviolet waves in addition to the full spectrum of visible light. We don’t see the infrared and UV waves. But we do see the full range of visible color, all bundled together in the form of white light. White light is the combination of many different frequencies of visible light from all parts of the visible spectrum. The only way we can see these frequencies as separate colors is to separate them into a rainbow. Using a prism, we can break sunlight into a rainbow, and with a second prism to cohere the colors back into white light. When visible light of many frequencies is incident towards the surface of objects, objects have a tendency to selectively absorb, reflect or transmit certain frequencies of light.

What makes a plant green? All of the colors in the visible light spectrum are characterized by different frequencies. Green-colored light lives between 540 and 610 Terahertz. For red, the frequencies are a bit lower. For violet, they are higher. But what determines the color of an object? How do the frequencies get divided out between red, green, and violet objects? To answer these questions, we first need to look into the mysteries of white light.

Selective absorption describes the tendency of an object to absorb some frequencies of light more than others. An object that appears a certain color reflects the light frequency that corresponds to that color, and it absorbs all the other frequencies in the visible light spectrum. Absorption of a light wave occurs through resonance. When the frequency of a light wave matches the resonant frequency of an object, then the object vibrates at that frequency. The energy of the light wave stays in that object as thermal or vibrational energy. In other words, you never see that light wave again! In summary, when light reaches an object, different things can happen: Light can be absorbed, reflected or transmitted through the object. Generally, a combination of these takes place.

When visible light strikes an object and a specific frequency becomes absorbed, that frequency of light will never make it to our eyes. When we say an object is a certain colour, it is because it’s reflecting more of a certain wavelength. We see only reflected color, and not the absorbed one. When white light shines on a red apple, the apple skin absorbs all of the colours in white light except red. The red light is reflected into our eyes and we see the apple as red. In summary, the colour of the object is not contained within the object. The colour is the result of the light, which strikes the object and is reflected by it. A white object reflects the light in all the directions, independently of the original direction. It is called a diffuse reflection. If you shine a beam of light onto a white surface, it is scattered in all the directions. On the other hand, a mirror reflects the light symmetrically to the input direction, with no scattering.

Dual Nature of Light

The sources of light are Sun, stars, fire, candle, light bulb, and flashlight. Light is light—pure, but not simple. No one is exactly sure how to describe it. A wave? A particle? Yes, the scientists say. Both.

Known for his Law of Universal Gravitation, English physicist Sir Isaac Newton (1643 to 1727) realized that light had frequency-like properties when he used a prism to split sunlight into its component colors. Nevertheless, he thought that light was a particle because the periphery of the shadows it created was extremely sharp and clear.

The wave theory, which maintains that light is a wave, was proposed around the same time.In 1665, Italian physicist Francesco Maria Grimaldi (1618 to 1663) discovered the phenomenon of light diffraction and pointed out that it resembles the behavior of waves. Then, in 1678, Dutch physicist Christian Huygens (1629 to 1695) established the wave theory of light and announced the Huygens’ principle. Some 100 years after the time of Newton, French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788 to 1827) asserted that light waves have an extremely short wavelength and mathematically proved light interference. In 1817, English physicist Thomas Young (1773 to 1829) calculated light’s wavelength from an interference pattern. The next theory was provided by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831 to 1879). In 1864, he predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves, the existence of which had not been confirmed before that time, and out of his prediction came the concept of light being a wave, or more specifically, a type of electromagnetic wave.

The German physicist Albert Einstein (1879 to 1955), famous for his theories of relativity, conducted research on the photoelectric effect, in which electrons fly out of a metal surface exposed to light. Einstein explained the photoelectric effect by saying that “light itself is a particle,” and for this he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. Einstein believed light is a particle (photon) and the flow of photons is a wave. Einstein proved his theory by proving that the Planck’s constant he derived based on his experiments on the photoelectric effect exactly matched the Planck’s constant that German physicist Max Planck (1858 to 1947) obtained in 1900 through his research on electromagnetic waves.

French theoretical physicist Louis de Broglie (1892 to 1987) furthered such research on the wave nature of particles by proving that there are particles (electrons, protons and neutrons) besides photons that have the properties of a wave. According to de Broglie, all particles traveling at speeds near that of light adopt the properties and wavelength of a wave in addition to the properties and momentum of a particle. From another perspective, one could say that the essence of the dual nature of light as both a particle and a wave could already be found in Planck’s constant.

Light is almost like air. It’s a given. A human would no more linger over the concept of light than a fish would ponder the notion of water. A photon is what you call light when it’s behaving like a subatomic particle. Here we come to one facet of the miracle of light. It has no volume, and photons are traditionally said to be massless, and have no electric charge. Sound is a good example of a wave that propagates, or travels, much like ripples in a pond do. When waves come into contact with one another, they exhibit interference: waves that are all in phase add together to become stronger, and waves that are out of phase with one another cancel out.

Can Our Body Emit Light?

The answer is yes. The eye itself is continually exposed to ambient powerful photons that pass through various ocular tissues. Biologists have long been familiar with a visible luminescence in organisms, but more intriguing perhaps is the newer field of study centered around biophotons, whereby cells in organisms produce photons, but the intensity of the light emitted by the body is 1000 times lower than the sensitivity of our naked eyes. The human body literally glimmers. Virtually all-living organisms emit extremely weak light, spontaneously without external photo excitation. This biophoton emission is categorized in different phenomena of light emission from bioluminescence. By using a sensitive charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera with the ability to detect light at the level of a single photon, we succeeded in imaging the spontaneous photon emission from human bodies.

A biophoton (from the Greek βίος meaning “life” and φῶς meaning “light”) is a photon of non-thermal origin in the visible and unltraviolet spectrum emitted from a biological system. The term biophoton used in this narrow sense should not be confused with the broader field of biophotonics, which studies the general interaction of light with biological systems. While detection of biophotons has been reported by several groups, hypotheses that such biophotons indicate the state of biological tissues and facilitate a form of cellular communication are controversial. The theoretical approach requires holistic models of living systems, rather than local analytical models. Consequently, these new insights into living matter create a new basis of “integrative biophysics” that is concerned with the questions of regulation, communication and organization of biological systems.

If you examine a neuron, you will see that there are many hollow tubes surrounding the axon. These microtubules have been thought of as a kind of scaffold to support the nerve fiber. The particular characteristics of microtubules that make them suitable for quantum effects include their crystal-like lattice structure, hollow inner core, organization of cell function and capacity for information processing. According to the researchers, their size appears perfectly designed to transmit biophotons.

In the photograph above (after a Reiki seminar), white light is visible, and it’s also present above a human body. It looks concentrated around and above a human head, and dispersed in the surrounding area. It’s shape appears to be made of various triangles and vortexes. It does not have an exclusively spherical character.

Questions
Is white light produced in this photo some kind of a camera glitch?
If this is not a glitch, did a human body produce or reflect white light?
Are we capable of increasing the capacity of light emissions within our body and radiating light around us?
Are we capable of making un-manifested energy into manifested, possibly by using the chakras?
Are we capable of channeling what the spiritual world calls the light of God and make it visible in the physical plane? How?

I’m at best disinterested in the answer, and the only purpose of this article is to make the reader think. Science or ancient scriptures can give us some direction, but not the answers. How did we find out that the world wasn’t flat before it was proven? It might have been calculated but it couldn’t be proven until someone had the courage and the capability to prove it. Higgs Boson discovery in 2012 is associated with a field, called the Higgs field, theorized to pervade the universe. Higgs field exists everywhere and it interacts with matter to give mass. Spiritual teachers transmitted all-pervading energy field information to their students about 5000 years ago. As a symbol in spirituality, white is the opposite of black, and often represents light in contrast with darkness.

Quotes on Light

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” – Plato

“If there be light, then there is darkness; if cold, heat; if height, depth; if solid, fluid; if hard, soft; if rough, smooth; if calm, tempest; if prosperity, adversity; if life, death.” – Pythagoras

“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.” – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people’s eyes, to reveal the marvels around.” – Paulo Coelho

“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” -Desmond Tutu

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” – Rumi

“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.” – Rumi

“Although you appear in earthly form, Your essence is pure Consciousness. You are the fearless guardian of Divine Light. So come, return to the root of the root of your own soul.” – Rumi

“If Light Is In Your Heart You Will Find Your Way Home.” – Rumi

“The universe and the light of the stars come through me.” – Rumi

“Some nights stay up till dawn, as the moon sometimes does for the sun. Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way of a well, then lifted out into light.” – Rumi

“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.”- St. Francis of Assisi

“To love beauty is to see light.”- Victor Hugo

“A sensible man will remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways – by a change from light to darkness or from darkness to light; and he will recognize that the same thing happens to the soul.” – Plato

“One man may read the Bhagavata by the light of a lamp, and another may commit a forgery by that very light; but the lamp is unaffected. The sun sheds its light on the wicked as well as on the virtuous.” – Ramakrishna

“Use the Light that dwells within you to regain your natural clarity of sight.” – Lao Tzu

“It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.” – Confucius

“The human body is the temple of God. One who kindles the light of awareness within gets true light. The sacred flame of your inner shrine is constantly bright. The experience of unity is the fulfillment of human endeavors. The mysteries of life are revealed.” -Rig Veda

“O Brahma, lead us from the unreal to the real. O Brahma, lead us from darkness to light. O Brahma, lead us from death to immortality. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti, Om.” – Brhadaranyaka Upanishad

“Doubt everything. Find your own light.” – Gautama Buddha

“If you light a lamp for someone else, it will also brighten your path.” – Gautama Buddha

“There isn’t enough darkness in all the world to snuff out the light of one little candle.” – Gautama Buddha

“Following the Noble Path is like entering a dark room with a light in the hand; the darkness will all be cleared away, and the room will be filled with light.” – Gautama Buddha

“There are stars who’s light only reaches the earth long after they have fallen apart. There are people who’s remembrance gives light in this world, long after they have passed away. This light shines in our darkest nights on the road we must follow.” – Talmud

John 1:5- “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Matthew 5:14- “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”

Isaiah 42:16- “And I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them into light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do, and I do not forsake them.”

Genesis 1:3-5- “And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

Ayat an-Nur Light Verse- “Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth. His light, in terms of a similitude, is like a niche in which there is a lamp–the lamp is in a glass, the glass as if it were a brilliant star–that is being kindled by the oil of a blessed olive tree that is neither of the eastern nor of the western side: its oil would all but light up, even though no fire touched it. Light upon light. Allah guides to His light whomever He wishes. And Allah strikes similitudes for people. And Allah has knowledge of everything.”

“The eye which turns from a white object in the light of the sun and goes into a less fully lighted place will see everything as dark.” -Leonardo Da Vinci

“I am part of a light, and it is the music. The Light fills my six senses: I see it, hear, feel, smell, touch and think. Thinking of it means my sixth sense. Particles of Light are written note. O bolt of lightning can be an entire sonata. A thousand balls of lightening is a concert. For this concert I have created a Ball Lightning, which can be heard on the icy peaks of the Himalayas.” – Nikola Tesla

“Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light.” -Bruce Lee

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky.
When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.
Then the traveller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so.
In the dark blue sky you keep, And often through my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, ‘Till the sun is in the sky.
As your bright and tiny spark, Lights the traveller in the dark. Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.” – Jane Taylor