The Net of Light

In these days of world turmoil and uncertainty, Elyn and I are extending our usual daily spiritual practice by placing ourselves on the great “Net of Light” that we learned about at the “Grandmothers” website.

The process is quite simple, and I recommend it to you as an addition to your own practice—whatever it is. Each day when we complete our meditation, we find our place on the “Net of Light” and cast our own light out wherever it is needed. The Grandmothers tell us that there is a place reserved for each of us on the net and that, by taking our place, we make a contribution to holding the Earth and all its creatures together. You might think of it as the interconnected web of all existence.

The Net of Light can be visualized in many ways. It could resemble a spider web with dew drops:

It could resemble photos of the planet at night with lights showing up in populated areas:

It could be something like Indra’s Net:

The most compelling version I’ve seen is a computer simulation of the whole universe:

Although the concept of a “Net of Light” may seem unusual, it has an ancient history in the Mahayana school of Buddhism. Alan Watts described it this way: "Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so on ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.”

New experiments based on quantum physics have indeed demonstrated that everything is connected—even at the subatomic level.

However you visualize it, I encourage you to find your unique place on the Net and share your own light.