The goal of the spiritual art of alchemy is to unite the opposites — to integrate the conscious and the unconscious, to unlock the light encoded and imprisoned within the darkness. The light within the darkness itself is known as the lumen naturae, the inner living light of primordial, ever-present, non-dual awareness itself, which is the light of nature that literally lights-up the whole of creation in this and every moment. To see the light that is hidden in the darkness is to become conscious, which, alchemically speaking, frees the spirit that is hidden and trapped inside the materialized world. The art of alchemy itself is an expression that hidden in the darkness is light. The alchemists, Jung says, “discover that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness…the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends” In contrast to a light that, as the Bible says, “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not,” the lumen naturae, the light of lights, is a light that the darkness intimately recognizes as its own nature. The lumen naturae is the luminosity within the darkness recognizing itself as it illumines its own darkness. This archetypal experience of the luminescence of the divine being found in the translucent darkness is referred to in various mystical traditions by names such as the luminous darkness and the black sun.
A light that doesn’t go out, the lumen naturae pervades, infuses and animates the physical world. Everything that arises in the materialized world is inseparable from and a modification of the lumen naturae. At the same time, being the light of non-dual awareness prior to consciousness, the lumen naturae inspires, e-lucid-ates, il-lumin-ates, and en-light-ens consciousness itself. Being non-dual, the lumen naturae non-locally and synchronistically con-figures co-arising events, both in the physical world and reciprocally within the landscape of our minds, as a way of revealing itself.
– Paul Levi, awakeinthedream.com
Art – Laurie Lipton, 1989, Splendor Solis: The Black Sun
Cosmic Flotsam 