AND THERE WAS LIGHT
The Inner Light of Jacques Lusseyran, and the Traditions of the World

The Inner Light is real. All ancient traditions place it at the core of their teachings. Countless sages and saints have told about it, as also spiritual seekers from all corners of the world. From Isaiah, the Essenes, Joseph Gikatilla, Jeshua ben Joseph who entered history as Jesus Christ, John the Apostle, to Ananda Mayi Ma, Swami Vishuddananda, teacher of Surya-Vijnana, the solar science, to Lewis Thompson who wrote the remarkable essay “Mirror to the Light” – a lightship in his own right.
I did not read all these scriptures, but some I read, and I did not encounter a 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. The light was not only endowed with knowledge and discernment, it had also unlimited power.
At the same time, Lusseyran reports that when he was scared, doubtful, insecure, jealous, angry, his inner sight faded – he became truly blind.
The inner light never failed him, he failed only once to understand its message.
Behind everything that Lusseyran described there was a single law, and he learned it slowly, over the whole course of his life.
The light did not obey his will. It could not be seized, or summoned, or commanded.
It answered only to a certain inner posture – to attention, to trust, to a quiet and open heart.
The moment he reached for it greedily, the moment he tried to force it or to hold it fast, it withdrew from him.
This is why fear blinded him, and anger, and impatience, and jealousy. Not because these are sins, but because each of them is a kind of grasping, a clenching of the hand around what can only be received in an open palm.
The true blindness was never the loss of his eyes. The true blindness was fear, anger, jealousy.
A seeing man ruled by these emotions perceives nothing of what matters. A blind man at peace perceives everything.
Perhaps the light came to him because he was a child when he lost his eyes, and a child does not argue with what he is given. He did not spend his strength mourning what he had lost. He turned, instead, toward the light that appeared in its place, and by turning toward it he allowed it to grow.
Maybe this is why, in Buchenwald, the healing could come.
Lying among the dying, his body broken by fever and infection and the slow starvation of the camp, Lusseyran did not fight for his life with clenched fists.
He let go.
And precisely then, when the will to live loosened its grip, the light returned to him. It came, he said, from above, descending upon him as he lay on the boards, entering at the crown of his head.
The men around him were dying in their thousands, and he did not die.
Why the light should have come to him and passed the others by, he never claimed to know, and neither can we. He reported only what he had lived: that he stopped struggling, and that he was given back his life.
After the war Lusseyran left France for the United States, where he taught French literature for the rest of his life.
But the deepest circle of his life had been drawn long before, in childhood, and it was waiting quietly to close.
When he was a small boy, before the accident, he spent his summers at his grandmother’s house, in a village in the west of France, in a garden full of flowers.
In the summer of his eighth year he was there once more. At the end of the holidays, when the time came to leave for Paris, he looked at the garden one last time, and a strange certainty came over him: that he would never see it again.
Shortly afterwards he lost his eyes, and indeed he never saw the garden again.
The child’s premonition was true. But it was true in a way that he could not have understood at eight years old, and its full meaning remained hidden from him for the rest of his life.
In the summer of 1971, after the long American decades, Jacques Lusseyran returned to France, to the country of his childhood, to the region of that garden.
His wife was at the wheel, for he was blind, on a small road through that quiet countryside.
There, in the land where everything had begun, the two of them died together in an accident.
He had been sent out from the garden, and to the garden he was called back, to be gathered in.
The last look of the eight-year-old child reached, at last, all the way to its meaning. He never saw the garden again with his eyes. He returned to it in order to die.
There is a name we give to such things, when words fail us. We call it destiny.
What we mean is that a life can have a shape – that it can begin and end like a circle drawn from a single centre, and that the hand which draws it is not entirely our own.
Lusseyran spent his whole life learning one thing only: to open the hand, to cease grasping, to let the light come.
At the end he was brought back to the place where the learning had begun, and there he let go completely.
What is this light? Not the light of the sun, not the light of the moon, not the light of the eyes, yet real, and in a certain way, more than real?
It does not come from outside. It does not enter through any window of the body. It rises from within, and it has no source that can be pointed to, for it is its own source.
The eyes, while they functioned, had hidden it. They had filled him so completely with the outer world that he had never once noticed the inner one. The loss of his eyes did not create the light. The loss only drew back the curtain that the eyes themselves had been.
This is why the light was not a memory of seeing, and not a clever consolation built by a mind robbed of its images. It was not a copy of the visible world. It was more real than the visible world, not less – steadier, deeper, and truer.
It was a light that knew. A light that loved. A light that recognised cruelty and tenderness, danger and truth, long before reason could confirm them.
It was not, in the end, a kind of seeing at all. It was nearer to what sees. It was closer to the one who looks than to anything that is looked at.
And it was not his alone.
This is the quiet astonishment at the centre of his book: that the light he found behind his ruined eyes is not a privilege granted to the blind, but a light that lies within every human being, covered over, unnoticed.
In most of us it is hidden by the very abundance of the world – by the ceaseless traffic of the eyes, by fear, by wanting, by the noise of a mind that is rarely still.
In him the covering was torn away in a single afternoon, when he was eight years old, and for the rest of his life he was left face to face with this presence which had always been there.
The light is not something we see. It is something we are.
We call it, at times, by the name of the soul or the spirit. Lusseyran simply called it the light, and said that it had never left him – that even in the camp, even at the very threshold of death, it was there, and that nothing in this world had the power to put it out, except his own fear.
The seers of the Vedic tradition knew this light, and they gave it a name.
They called it jyotiḥ – light. And because it shines of itself, owing its radiance to nothing outside it, they called it svayaṃ-jyotiḥ, the self-luminous: the light that is its own source.
In the oldest of the Upaniṣads there is a conversation between the sage Yājñavalkya and King Janaka. By what light, the king asks, does a man live, and act, and find his way? By the light of the sun, the sage answers. And when the sun has set? By the moon. And when the moon too has set? By fire. And when the fire has gone out, and not a voice is left to guide him, and every outer light has been taken away – what light has a man then?
Then, Yājñavalkya says, the Self itself becomes his light. Ātmā jyotiḥ. The Self alone is the light of man.
This is precisely what befell the boy whose eyesight was taken from him. The outer light was removed, and the inner light – which had been there all along, hidden behind the other – was laid bare.
The Vedic tradition is, at its root, a science of this light. The ṛṣis were not inventors but seers; the verses of the Veda were not composed but seen, beheld by an inner vision before ever they were spoken. And among the six sciences that stand guard around the Vedas, Jyotiṣa – the science of the lights, of sun and moon and stars – is called their very eye. The outer eye that reads the heavens, and the inner eye by which the heavens are read, bear in Sanskrit one and the same name: jyotis.
The Upaniṣads give it one name more. Beyond the sun, beyond every flame, beyond all the lights by which we see, they set the single light by which even these are lit, and they call it jyotiṣāṃ jyotiḥ – the Light of lights.
It was this, and nothing less, that Jacques Lusseyran found behind his ruined eyes.
The Jewish tradition knew this light also, and from its very first page.
When the world is made, the first word that breaks the darkness is yehi or – “let there be light.” Yet the sun and the moon and the stars are not made until the fourth day. The sages asked the plain question: if the lights of heaven did not yet exist, what was this light that shone on the first day?
Their answer was that it was no light of any sun. It was a light by which, they said, a man could see from one end of the world to the other. And because the generations to come were not worthy of it, God hid it away. They called it or ha-ganuz, the hidden light, the treasured light, stored up within creation and kept for the pure of heart.
A light that is not the sun’s; a light by which one beholds the whole of things; a light hidden, and uncovered only by those made ready to receive it. It is the same light, told in another tongue.
The Hebrew Scriptures name it again and again. Ner Hashem nishmat adam – “the soul of man is the lamp of the Lord.” And in the Psalms: be-or’cha nir’eh or – “in Your light we see light,” the light by which every other light is seen.
And the mystics of Israel, the masters of Kabbalah, saw the whole of creation as light: a single infinite radiance that drew itself back to make room for the world, scattered itself into countless sparks, and hid those sparks inside all things, waiting to be gathered home. The portion of that radiance held secretly within the vessel they called or pnimi – the inner light.
And then there is the word of Jesus: “I am the light of the world.”
He spoke as a Jew, out of the heart of his own tradition. He spoke, the Gospel tells, at the season of the Feast of Tabernacles, when the great lamps blazed in the courts of the Temple and their light filled Jerusalem; and behind his words stood the old promise of a light to the nations, and the hidden light of the first day, and the radiance of the divine Presence that his people called the Shekhinah. He did not bring a foreign lamp. He named a light his people had carried from the beginning.
In his own day that light burned at the hidden heart of Judaism. By the shores of the Dead Sea, the community of Qumran – the Essenes, as many hold them to have been – called themselves the sons of light, and saw the age as a long war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. It is that very phrase which returns upon the lips of Jesus: believe in the light, he said, that you may become sons of light. Older still was the vision of the fiery chariot-throne of Ezekiel, the Merkavah, whose blazing the seers could scarcely put into words – the inward and guarded mysticism of Israel, which the sages would not expound in the open. This was the world in which Jesus stood. The light he proclaimed was no invention of his own; it was the secret that the seers and the ascetics of his people had kept for centuries.
And the light he named was not his alone. The Gospel of John calls it “the true light, which enlightens every man that comes into the world” – a light kindled in every human being, the very thing Lusseyran discovered was no private possession of his own but the common inheritance of all.
Jesus spoke, too, of an inner light and an inner eye. “The lamp of the body is the eye,” he said; “if your eye be single, your whole body shall be full of light.” And he gave the warning that is the exact law of Lusseyran’s life: “if the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness.”
The Christian contemplatives who came after pursued this light inward. The monks of the Christian East beheld in prayer an uncreated light, the same that had shone from the face of Christ upon the mountain. Augustine saw, with what he called the eye of the soul, a Light unchangeable above the mind. And there were those, in later centuries, who gave it the plainest name of all, and called it simply the Inner Light.
So the testimony of the blind man of Paris turns out to be very old.
What he found behind his ruined eyes, the ṛṣis of India called jyotiṣāṃ jyotiḥ, the Light of lights; the sages of Israel called or ha-ganuz, the hidden light, and ner Hashem, the lamp of the Lord; and the Christian Scriptures called the true light that enlightens every man.
It is one light. The traditions differ in their words for it, in the paths they lay toward it, in the names they give to the darkness that conceals it. But the light to which they point is the same, and it is not far from any one of us. It is the light we are.
Jacques Lusseyran lost his eyes, and the loss tore away the curtain. He spent the rest of his life gazing, without eyes, upon what the wise of every age have named the light – and he told us, plainly and from his own living, that it is real, that it is within us, and that nothing in this world can put it out, save only our own destructive emotions.
A Note on the Sources
Vedic and Sanskrit
Ātmā jyotiḥ, “the Self itself becomes his light,” and the withdrawal of sun, moon, fire, and speech: Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.3, the dialogue of Yājñavalkya and King Janaka. Svayaṃ-jyotiḥ, the self-luminous: Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.3.9. Jyotiṣāṃ jyotiḥ, the Light of lights: Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 2.2.9 and Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 4.4.16; compare Bhagavad Gītā 13.17. Jyotiṣa as the eye (cakṣus) of the Veda among the six Vedāṅgas: Pāṇinīya Śikṣā.
Jewish
Yehi or, “let there be light”: Genesis 1:3, with the luminaries of heaven created only on the fourth day, Genesis 1:14–19. Or ha-ganuz, the hidden light by which Adam saw from one end of the world to the other, stored away for the righteous: Talmud, Ḥagigah 12a; Bereshit (Genesis) Rabbah; Rashi on Genesis 1:4. Ner Hashem nishmat adam, “the soul of man is the lamp of the Lord”: Proverbs 20:27. Be-or’cha nir’eh or, “in Your light we see light”: Psalm 36:9 (36:10 in the Hebrew). The sons of light and the war of light against darkness: the Community Rule (1QS) and the War Scroll (1QM) among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Merkavah, the chariot-throne: Ezekiel 1, with the restriction on its public exposition at Mishnah Ḥagigah 2:1. Or pnimi, the inner light: a term of the later Kabbalah.
Christian
“I am the light of the world”: John 8:12, spoken during the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7–8). “The true light, which enlightens every man”: John 1:9; “the life was the light of men,” John 1:4. The eye as the lamp of the body, and the single eye that fills the body with light: Matthew 6:22–23; compare Luke 11:34–36. “That you may become sons of light”: John 12:36. A light to the nations: Isaiah 42:6 and 49:6. The light of the Transfiguration, the face shining as the sun: Matthew 17:2; the Uncreated Light of the hesychast fathers: Saint Gregory Palamas. The Light unchangeable, seen with the eye of the soul: Augustine, Confessions VII.10. The Inner Light: George Fox and the Religious Society of Friends.
Lewis Thompson: “Mirror to the Light”