Episode 10: Lower Lights Sangha
One Heart One Mind
Thomas McConkie
5.0 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2017
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mariners throughout history have used the "upper lights"–stars, moon and sun–to guide them across the open oceans. But it is the final stretch of the journey into harbor that is often the most perilous. Thomas shares in this episode the meaning of "lower lights", how we can be lights to one another on the path, as well as the crucial role of sangha in mindfulness practice.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Mindfulness Plus. I'm your host, Thomas Mconki. Thanks so much for listening today. |
| 0:13.2 | To get started, I want to talk about the name of our new mindfulness community in Salt Lake City. |
| 0:20.2 | We are Lower Lights Sanga. So what does |
| 0:24.9 | lower light saga mean? Well, Lower Lights is a beautiful metaphor that has inspired me over the |
| 0:33.1 | years. It is originally a nautical metaphor. In pre-modern times, mariners would navigate the open seas |
| 0:42.9 | by way of the upper lights, they called them. This was the sun, the moon, the stars. They could get a long |
| 0:53.1 | distance, just by the upper lights alone. |
| 0:57.5 | But by the time they got to shore, there were a lot of dangers involved, |
| 1:03.1 | particularly if it was stormy, if it was dark outside. |
| 1:06.6 | They didn't know the terrain they were sailing into. |
| 1:09.8 | They were in danger of being dashed on the rocks. |
| 1:13.2 | Their ships crushed sinking to a watery grave. So it became very important to learn how to orient |
| 1:21.3 | those last few steps of the journey, so to speak. they needed light to guide them into safe harbor. |
| 1:29.7 | And the starlight, the moonlight, the sunlight even, wasn't enough oftentimes given the conditions. |
| 1:38.1 | So they came to call the lights of the town along the shore, and particularly the light houses giving off light, |
| 1:47.4 | the lower lights. And it was the lower lights particularly that were so critical, especially in |
| 1:55.7 | challenging times, right? If it was sunny out and bright and you're sailing into harbor, you could get by. |
| 2:03.3 | But when it was stormy out and visibility was limited and so forth, they really needed these |
| 2:09.8 | lower lights to guide them for those, you know, last few hundred meters coming into shore. |
| 2:21.5 | What this says to me is that as we're practicing mindfulness, as we're practicing as human beings and looking to wake up |
| 2:28.5 | and to love more deeply and to serve more fully, we absolutely can't do that without one another. We can get very far with the upper lights. And by way of analogy, we can get really far in our own life just by meditating, just by practicing on our own and receiving the light about us. But if we want to go those last few |
| 2:55.5 | critical steps in the journey, we really need one another. And that makes us all the lower lights. |
... |
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