Perhaps you are a teacher of the value, the beauty, the truth of what is outwardly fire, inwardly light. You quote: "And when the sun rises up, then the earth, made by Ahura, becomes clean..." I have often thought how nothing on earth has existence except that it comes from the fire of the sun(s)--the water, the soil, the wind, the life--it's all from sun. Later in the same passage, I note this expression of the sacredness of all things: "all the holy creatures, the creatures of the Good Spirit, become clean." Goodness equals beauty. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Perhaps this does not mean just that different people see things differently, but also that the cleansed eye--cleansed as by the fire and light of the sun--beautifies all within its sight.
Well put! ... though the word "teacher" is a bit much to swallow. It may be that mystical knowledge is the experience of beauty, which is in a sense universal but also something that one's eye must be trained to. Perhaps one of the mechanisms for such training is the process of annihilating self, not as some kind of personal advancement, but a process that purges and mitigates the prejudices that blind us to otherwise unappreciated beauties, giving us a broader appreciation for what is good or of value in the world.
... As for the relationship of light and fire, we generally know light as radiation emitted from some phenomenon akin to fire. It seems that the ancient Iranians saw the sun as a fire. They knew it to be hot and that it could burn skin. On the other hand, many ancients knew that sunlight could start a fire, introducing the idea that fire could be born of light. Then there is the equivalence of combustion and respiration, implying that life is a fire (that even breathes), which I imagine the ancient Iranians could only guess at. Heraclitus, a resident of the Persian Empire, saw fire as the best metaphor for the world, perhaps because it represents a dynamic process that simultaneously creates and destroys in a kind of harmonious war-dance. Then there's special relativity which established that the speed of light is tied to an "equivalence" of substance and change (matter and energy) which is pretty fundamental. But all this is physical, mathematical, and coldly objective. None of it can be used to establish the existence of goodness or beauty. Light and beauty are both fundamental so maybe there is a deep equivalence, but phenomenologically, existentially, beauty has to come first. Without beauty, light is just stuff that gives beauty form.
Perhaps you are a teacher of the value, the beauty, the truth of what is outwardly fire, inwardly light. You quote: "And when the sun rises up, then the earth, made by Ahura, becomes clean..." I have often thought how nothing on earth has existence except that it comes from the fire of the sun(s)--the water, the soil, the wind, the life--it's all from sun. Later in the same passage, I note this expression of the sacredness of all things: "all the holy creatures, the creatures of the Good Spirit, become clean." Goodness equals beauty. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Perhaps this does not mean just that different people see things differently, but also that the cleansed eye--cleansed as by the fire and light of the sun--beautifies all within its sight.
Well put! ... though the word "teacher" is a bit much to swallow. It may be that mystical knowledge is the experience of beauty, which is in a sense universal but also something that one's eye must be trained to. Perhaps one of the mechanisms for such training is the process of annihilating self, not as some kind of personal advancement, but a process that purges and mitigates the prejudices that blind us to otherwise unappreciated beauties, giving us a broader appreciation for what is good or of value in the world.
... As for the relationship of light and fire, we generally know light as radiation emitted from some phenomenon akin to fire. It seems that the ancient Iranians saw the sun as a fire. They knew it to be hot and that it could burn skin. On the other hand, many ancients knew that sunlight could start a fire, introducing the idea that fire could be born of light. Then there is the equivalence of combustion and respiration, implying that life is a fire (that even breathes), which I imagine the ancient Iranians could only guess at. Heraclitus, a resident of the Persian Empire, saw fire as the best metaphor for the world, perhaps because it represents a dynamic process that simultaneously creates and destroys in a kind of harmonious war-dance. Then there's special relativity which established that the speed of light is tied to an "equivalence" of substance and change (matter and energy) which is pretty fundamental. But all this is physical, mathematical, and coldly objective. None of it can be used to establish the existence of goodness or beauty. Light and beauty are both fundamental so maybe there is a deep equivalence, but phenomenologically, existentially, beauty has to come first. Without beauty, light is just stuff that gives beauty form.