Numinosity/Luminosity
“And as
little as aught can exist in man without the divine numen, so little can aught
exist in men without the natural lumen.
A man is made perfect by numen and lumen and these two alone.
Everything springs from these two, and these two are in man, but without them
man is nothing, though they can be without man.”
We might say, then, that the term "religion"
designates the attitude peculiar to a
consciousness which has been changed by
experience of the numinosum.
Of this natural light innate in man
Dorn says: "For the life, the light of men, shineth in us, albeit dimly,
and as though in
darkness. It is not to be extracted from us, yet is it in
us and not of us, but of Him to Whom it belongs, Who deigns to make us his
dwelling-place .... He has implanted that light in us that we may see in
its light the light of Him Who dwells in inaccessible light, and that we may
excel His other creatures; in this wise we are made like unto Him, that He has
given us a spark of His light. Thus the truth is to be sought not in
ourselves, but in the
image of
God which is within us."
Ye are lights of the world
Matthew 5:14
Numinous experience
elevates and humiliates
simultaneously.
Wherever the psyche is set violently oscillating by a numinous experience, there is a danger that the thread by which one hangs may be torn. Should that happen, one man tumbles into absolute affirmation, another into an equally absolute negation. Nirdvandva (freedom from opposites) is the Orient’s remedy for this. I have not forgotten that. The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. MDR 154
…The numinosum is dangerous because it lures
men to extremes, so that a modest truth is regarded as the truth and a
minor mistake is equated with fatal error. MDR 154