1. The Return of Light

Modern science, in its long and luminous arc of discovery, is turning back toward truths that ancient sages once realized through silence. The idea of a light body(once confined to mystical vocabulary)now finds resonance in physics and biology.

What the mystics called light was never mere luminosity. It was the living radiance of awareness itself: truth, love, and intelligence as the very fabric of existence. Science, purified of ideology, becomes a discipline of wonder. It studies the object; Dharma studies the observer. Both are ways of knowing, yet Dharma directs the practitioner beyond knowledge  and description – into direct realization.

The Heart Sutra calls this as  “transcendence of knowledge” ( ‘gone completely beyond’): a none categorical knowing so complete that knower and known dissolve into singleness. Thus, science and Dharma are not opposites, but two gestures of the same cosmic intelligence: one reaching outward through hypothesis, the other inward through meditation.

2. Psychology and the Skandhas

The history of psychology mirrors this same inward curve. Freud mapped the shadows of the unconscious; Jung illuminated the archetypal ground beneath it – a shared psychic field shaping human imagination across cultures.

What the Buddha named Skandhas: form, feeling, perception, volition, and consciousness – are precisely such universal processes, not possessions of an isolated self. The ego, therefore, is not an entity but an event: a temporary coordination of conditions mistaken for permanence.

The ego itself is innocent. Its only tragedy is our identification with it. When we absolutize the ego as “I,” the vastness of awareness is veiled by the passing cloud of thought. To see the ego clearly, without condemnation, is already to be free of it. This is the living sense of form is emptiness, emptiness is form: every phenomenon is both existent and void, arising through causes and ceasing when they end.

Awareness, like space, needs no cause to be – it simply is.

3. The Joy of Understanding

Once this is glimpsed, analysis itself becomes an act of freedom. Thinking ceases to be a battlefield of opinions and becomes a discipline in right view( or true seeing). To think without bias is to participate in the clarity of mind itself. Concepts and categories are not traps when they are known and used as tools.

From such understanding, joy naturally arises. The Buddha praised joy in the Dharma (the gladness that blooms when the heart delights in truth) as one of the great virtues. Joy ensures awakening because it dissolves the obsession with results. When one rejoices in each step of understanding, the path itself becomes the fruit.

Even ignorance, when illuminated, becomes teacher rather than obstacle. Each wave of anger, anxiety, or attachment exposes the dynamic logic of dependent origination. In tracing it back, we verify again and again the Four Noble Truths: there is suffering, its cause, its cessation, and a way beyond it.

4. The Path of Direct Observation

The Way begins not elsewhere but here, in the immediacy of our own existence. Mindfulness is both its threshold and its fulfilment. By attending to the arising and passing of experience, we confirm impermanence, conditionality, and the absence of a separate self.

This is Right View: the quiet revolution of perceiving that no phenomenon stands alone. Meditation ripens this from concept to vision. In walking, sitting, speaking, and listening, we embody the truth we Understand.

Every situation becomes the Buddha’s workshop. The flux of life – its losses and renewals – is the laboratory of awakening. Ice melts into water, yet water remains water. In the same way, the unconditioned awareness at the heart of being abides unchanged through all transformations of form.

5. The Unfolding of Awakening

When mindfulness is grounded in wisdom, zeal arises. From zeal springs joy; from joy, serenity; from serenity, faith; and from faith, equanimity. These are not separate attainments but the natural unfolding of realization.

Joy is their current and their power: the living fuel of enlightenment. It is the laughter of emptiness within the play of forms, the recognition that every phenomenon, from galaxies to thoughts, is a ripple upon the same luminous sea.

To live by the Dharma is to rest in that sea: unmoved yet ever moving, empty yet overflowing. The world, seen rightly, is not an illusion to escape but an ineffable wonder, a ‘magic show’ .

Light does not compete with darkness; it simply shines.