Somehow I had never heard until this week that St Symeon (the New Theologian) actually had seen the Light on a more or less regular basis. The Light, of course, being Jesus Christ or God in general. There is evidently a lot to this and it baffles me that this is not considered a big thing by at least the Christian world. While seeing the Light is not entirely unheard of, it seems to be rare indeed. I can't say I have seen it in any literal way. This is to be expected, given Jesus' words that the pure of heart shall see God.
(Purity of heart obviously - well obviously to some of us - is not really about virginity, least of all in any bodily sense. It is to become transparent, like fine glass, so that the mind does not stop or overly distort the image of what is on the other side. And who is capable of this?)
One would at first thought assume that someone who literally saw the Light was having a hallucination. And this is in some way true, I guess, since it probably is not photons striking the retina. Probably. But in a more straightforward definition of hallucination as seeing something that isn't there, it would be right to say that the rest of us are hallucinating. We are seeing a world without the manifest presence of the Light. Even though we know that this ain't so.
Ah, but as the saying goes: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is a freak.
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