Daily Meditation: Monday, January 6, 2003

Human beings eat, drink, and breathe, and in doing so they …

01/06/2003

Human beings eat, drink, and breathe, and in doing so they are in contact with the elements of earth, water, and air and are nourished by them. But what do they do with the fourth element, the igneous element which we know as fire, as light? Nothing much. They do not know how to nourish themselves with light, and yet it is even more vital to them than air. Man must absorb light in order to nourish his brain. Yes, the brain too wants to eat, and light is its food. It is that which awakens certain faculties and enables us to penetrate the divine world. You will say that by eating, drinking, and breathing we nourish our whole body, including the brain. Yes, but so long as we are satisfied to nourish our brain only with solid, liquid, and gaseous particles, which are not the elements it most needs, we will remain very limited in our understanding. Tradition has it that one day Zarathustra asked the God Ahura Mazda how first man nourished himself, and Ahura Mazda replied: 'He ate fire and drank light.'