“Go to the light,” you may have heard said to people on the threshold of death and the afterlife. “Light-hearted” people are a joy to be around. Mystics seek “enlightenment” through isolation, fasting, and meditation or prayer.
Most ancient civilizations on Earth linked light from the sun, moon, and stars to human events, characteristics, and consciousness. The origin of everything, according to many texts, is One Light, the source of all life.
Western cultures have been slower to appreciate the metaphysical teachings of ancient peoples who came before us. Now, subjective experience is not enough to persuade empirical scientists that something is true.
But the West is catching up with ancient knowledge of knowing. Years of research trying to prove that chemicals in the brain create consciousness are being abandoned as our understanding of our inner nature grows.
Recent research is suggesting that our brains are hard-wired with a consciousness connection that, until now, has been little understood in the West, although it was identified more than 100 years ago in the scientific community: light particles – photons.
Cellular specialists over the past hundred years have shown that cells and now whole animals may communicate with each other by electromagnetic waves called biophotons.
Neurons emit and even conduct photons. Many cells, it turns out, perhaps even the majority, emit light as they function and it looks as if many cells use light to communicate.
Generating light particles is one thing but what about transmitting photons from cell to cell? The affirmative answer came earlier this year after a research team demonstrated that spinal neurons in rats are capable of conducting light.
Studies have found that neurons in mammalian brains are capable of producing photons of light or biophotons. The photons appear within the visible spectrum, ranging from near-infrared through violet, between 200 and 1,300 nanometers.
Neurons contain many molecules that are sensitive to light, including porphyrin rings, flavinic, pyridinic rings, lipid chromophores, and aromatic amino acids. Mitochondria (the mechanisms within cells which produce energy) contain several prominent chromophores, chemical groups that absorb light at a specific frequency and so impart color to a molecule.
Researchers are testing to see if the neurons in human brains could communicate through light. They suspect that our brain might have optic communication network but they have no idea what could be communicated.
Even more interesting, these researchers claim that if there is an optical communication happening, the biophotons our brains produce might be affected by quantum entanglement, which Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”
Quantum entanglement says that “two entangled particles affect each other irrespective of distance and time. Meaning, that if there’s a change in my light frequency, it can affect another with whom I’m entangled even from the past or future, and even at a far corner of the universe. Could part of our purpose here be to evolve from unconscious distance communication to conscious mastery?”
Could this strong link between cellular biophotons and our consciousness be what many cultures and religions refer to as spirit?
In a couple of experiments, scientists discovered that rat brains can pass just one biophoton per neuron a minute but human brains could convey more than a billion biophotons per neuron in a second. This raises the question, “Could it be possible that the more light one can produce and communicate between neurons, the more conscious they are?”
If there is any correlation between biophotons, life, and consciousness, it can have strong implications that there is more to light than we are aware of.
Roger Penrose is a mathematical physicist who saw a connection between quantum physics and consciousness. In 1996, the advanced thinker proposed that consciousness involves noncomputable components. He “suggested that consciousness is essentially a phenomenon of quantum mechanics and that microtubules were the medium in which quantum mechanics takes place.”
Penrose wrote that “we shall need to find some noncomputational physical process if we’re ever to explain the effects of consciousness. But I don’t see it in any existing theory.”
The prospect that present-day scientists could solve the riddle of biophotons and consciousness is very exciting since it validates empirically what mystics and spiritual seekers over the millennia have been saying is true: we are beings of light.