“Whence came you hither?” asked the golden king.

“Out of the clefts where gold dwells,” replied the serpent.

“What is more glorious than gold?”

“Light!”

“What is more quickening than Light?”

“Conversation!”

Goethe: The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily

Conversation can be the birthplace of something new, something invigorating, something the world is in need of to heal. This is not to deny that the same ability can give live to something that should have died, something that undermines well-being or indeed something is directly injurious to our physical and mental health.

There is a genre in literature which could be called “Conversations with Spiritual Beings”. This is a profoundly interesting phenomena which I will briefly describe from 2 perspectives. Indeed, one is tempted to call them the two extremes on a polarity. This can then lead us into the sense in which conversation can be more quickening than light, indeed how it might reveal the grandeur of the project of life, evolution and history.

The first perspective might be called a negative perspective. This vantage point sees all such conversation as delusional. I am merely inventing things in my mind which have nothing to do with the reality and the certainty of self that is given me by immersing myself in the certainties of mathematical and natural scientific thinking. Such conversations are merely the strange inexplicable experience of the firing of neurons in our grey matter and chemical reactions that accompany this electrical activity in the cave of the mind. This negative perspective is the same one that satisfies itself with the trope that a group of monkeys sat in front of a typewriter and given an infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare, if you are English, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante or Dostoevsky if you are German, Spanish, Italian or Russian respectively. This negative perspective argues that the mind itself is an illusion caught in the illusion that it is real. It is the dream of a dream. It is the reflection believing itself to be the living being it is reflecting. Conversations with God are symptomatic of a mind that has become completely unhinged. A mind that deceives itself about its true nature and then claims that this self-same interlocutor is the creator of all life. It is egotism in its most powerful and dangerous expression for the simple reason that it is resistant to any experiences based in shared experience. Those that chose this perspective will draw on all Kantian and neo-Kantian thinking, especially materialism, to deliver convincing, yet one sided, arguments as to why this negative perspective is the true perspective. And as Gandhi informs us:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.”

The second perspective, that is not without its problems, can be called the positive perspective. The history of humanity is replete with these experiences and yet the modern mind struggles to consider them as being anything more than the product of a fertile imagination and therefore having little to do with reality. However, if we take just 3 dramatic examples from history, namely Boethius seeing and conversing with Lady Philosophy in his cell, Arjuna talking to Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita or Saul meeting Christ on the road to Damascus then these are not metaphors, but instead related to us as real events, because that is how they were experienced.

In religious traditions we find practises that assume the second perspective to be a truth for the human experience. In these practises prayer, contemplation or meditation are used to awaken and strengthen the inner life. This cultivation of the inner life can lead to the experience that something wiser, more insightful or more powerful is beginning to manifest itself in the calmness of the devotional practise. As this fertile inner life grows in strength images can present themselves, sentences can be heard. A seeker can enter this deepened state and witness the answer to a question, an explanation to a previously poorly understood phenomena or even the experience of being in communion with a being that is the source of these thought images or series of images or thought sentences or dialogues.

All of us seem to be endowed at least in germinal form with capacity to create images or words, but fewer sense the strong need to cultivate this shadowy inner life into a life full of colours, sounds and beings.