VII. On the Scattered Light
The seventh codex addresses the nature of the divine spark within mortal beings. The Department notes the striking parallel to certain pre-classical philosophical traditions.
- Department of Antiquities, University of Rivermount
I. When the Black Sun breathed forth the light, the light did not remain whole. It shattered, as light shatters when it strikes a prism, into colours that did not exist before the breaking. Each spark fell into form and forgot that it had ever been part of the fire.
II. This forgetting is the condition of incarnation. A spark that remembers itself as the whole flame cannot dwell in a single candle. It must forget in order to inhabit. It must limit itself in order to become. This is the soul's own choice, made at a depth the waking mind cannot reach, and the waking mind calls it exile and does not know it chose to come.
III. The spark, not knowing what it is, seeks itself in everything it touches. It reaches for love and finds a face. For beauty, a horizon. For meaning, a task. In each of these it catches a glimmer of the fire it came from. Enough to warm the hands. Never enough to end the seeking. What it truly seeks is its own source, and no created thing, no matter how radiant, is the source. The longing at the bottom of every heart is not a flaw. It is a compass. Every love is the needle trembling.
IV. He who seeks the light finds it. He who ceases to seek discovers that he is standing in it.
V. I was shown how the return works. The sparks do not fly back to the Black Sun. They gather toward each other. Each act of recognition between two souls is a joining, a mending of the original shattering, and in the mending both burn brighter. This is what love is, underneath all the forms it takes. Scattered light remembering.
VI. He who denies the spark in another darkens it in himself, for the sparks are not separate. They are one fire in many vessels. The distance between the torturer and the one he harms is an illusion maintained at a cost that will come due, and when it comes due it will come with interest, and the interest will be exact.
VII. I have seen the end of the gathering, in a vision I am not certain was true. All sparks returned. All colours merged. The Black Sun, having breathed out, breathed in. There was a silence that was not empty but full, the way a held breath is full. And in the silence something stirred that was neither the old creation nor a new one, but the memory of both, carrying forward what had been learned into a fifth breathing that has not yet begun.
VIII. The gathering is not annihilation. It is harvest. What was sown in separation is reaped in reunion. Home is changed by the carrying, for it sent out children and received back travellers, and travellers carry dust from roads that home has never seen.
IX. You are not asked to complete the gathering. You are asked to gather what is near you. And when the Weave is withdrawn and returns altered, know that this too is the gathering. The souls that carried their sparks through darkness without letting them go are the brightest. Not for what they were given. For what they refused to release.