There is no more intimate and detailed account of the experience and workings of the inner light than the one given by Jacques Lusseyran in his book “And There Was Light”.
Jacques Lusseyran, born in Paris in 1924, was a professor of French literature, first in France and later in the United States.
When he was eight years old he lost in an accident both his eyes.
Soon after the accident, the lack of any external visual stimuli conferred him access to a light within.
It seemed that he had other, internal eyes, with which he perceived a stream of light in many hues and colours. This inner light was not only colours in different grades of luminosity, no, it carried the most precise and correct information he needed at any given moment – it was a light full of knowledge, meanings, messages.
The light within revealed to him that objects are not inert, that they emanate light, through which they communicate their presence and their state – he did not need to bump into anything, he could recognise the contours of any landscape.
He could find his way in the house, the city, the fields and mountains.
He also knew instantly the nature of the people he met and their true intentions.
He perceived the cruelty behind a soft voice, the unbridled ambition behind a polite talk, the truthfulness of a person in spite of her rough speech, the love behind an ordinary conversation.
He could assess correctly complex social and political situations.
While listening as a ten year old boy to the radio, he heard for the first time, in 1934, representatives of the German Nationalist Socialist Party speak. He knew on the spot that Germans had chosen murderers as leaders. He decided to learn German in order to listen to German radio broadcasts. He was fourteen years old by the time Germany had annexed Austria. He had mastered German language and knew already that a war was coming, and that it will be his war as well.
Last but not least: he could absorb and memorise in short time an immense quantity of data he needed for his studies at school, at the Ecole Normale Superieur and at Sorbonne, and later for his activities as the leader of a Parisian resistance group he had formed during the Nazi occupation.
As the leader of the Maquis group, his power of discrimination and his capacity to organise were legendary.
Once, when talking to a candidate eager to join his resistance group, his inner sight presented him with a balk across the screen of his internal visual field. The image intrigued him, so he went rationally through all the details of the application. He could not find any flaw and accepted the man. It turned out that the candidate was a traitor who denounced him and all his friends to the Gestapo.
This was the only time when his understanding, his power of discrimination failed him.
Only two members of the resistance group, one of them Jacques Lusseyan, survived the torture, the journey to Buchenwald and the camp.
When in Buchenwald, lying to die of a host of illnesses of which even one would have been sufficient to kill him, Jacques Lusseyran saw the inner light restoring him back to life and health.
At the same time, Lusseyran reports that when he was scared, doubtful, insecure, jealous, his inner sight faded – he became truly blind.
The inner light never failed him, he failed only once to understand its message.
What is this Inner Light?
Western psychology does not have a concept for it, does not even know about it.
Vedic psychology calls the inner light: Chetana. As it also has a separate concept for the power of discrimination: Viveka.
Chetana: individual consciousness in which the cosmic consciousness is mirrored.
Its seat in the human body-mind-spiritual system is in the heart.
To have access to the knowledge beyond time and space, to the strength and the ubiquity of cosmic consciousness means that the heart is open.
