I first encountered that visceral, present, divine nature of existence when I was 18. Home on Long Island for Thanksgiving break, it was cold, and snowing, if not very hard. I was walking by myself late at night, through the neighborhoods of my childhood and youth. A crystalline sheen on everything, and the streetlights made it all glow in the greenish blue of mercury vapor.

As I walked and contemplated the freshman science courses I was taking, I started to see everything in those scientific terms. The houses like great crystal structures grown out of the ground. I was like a huge molecule, changing abd recycling components with every move, every breath. And there was this dog, a small terrier that was barking at me, would not let me approach, running out of reach, but following me as I walked…almost like a moon around a planet. An electron around a proton. Thinking this, and continuing to marvel at the complexity and fluidity of the natural forms, and the beauty of the snow, adding the shimmer. Covering up, and amplifying the glow of the streetlights.

It was in a streetlight that I looked. It was in a streetlight that I saw what the light meant. It was in the light that I saw myself stretching to the other side of the universe. And I saw the other side of the universe touch my heart. I could see in the light the origin of any light is the destruction, the annihilation of a very tiny bit of matter, into that precise amount of energy, transported across a limitless chasm, into my eye, where I receive that tiny bit of energy, and see the light. And I saw that chasm wasn’t there, really.

I saw the play of opposites, staging a running battle down the armistice line which is Now. The Now of that moment looking into the heart of the street light.

I saw a lot of things that I had no words for. But it was more than the seeing. It was who the see’er was, Now.

That Now changed me. I felt my science had grown up. It had grown a spirit.

It would be over a year before I took a course in Buddhism, and realized what I had experienced can be explained and expanded on using Buddhist terms and sensibilities. I started working out equations, and started working out my “Theory of the Universe”. [It has grown into Heart Sutra Science]

Thinking back on it, it drives home that you don’t need anything special going on for the divine to strike. You can meditate on a candle if you have a candle. You can also meditate on the Streetlight. On the neon sign. On the sound of the subway. Meditate on water dripping from the ceiling.

Even man-made objects carry with them the essential characteristics of real existence. And the light, real or artificial, carries with it the essence of its creation, delivered in the destruction of the photon.

There is no independence in Streetlight Buddhism. Everything is in a rolling state of flux. Everything is transforming, energy moves in, transforms, and continues flowing out.

The streetlight as an object is a useful metaphor. It exists through the factories of our industrial age, practical on a wide scale only in the last few hundred years at best, and never before near the scale at which streetlights, roads, and all that come with it are being deployed across the earth today. But do we as people really understand fully even a single specific streetlight? I know there are equations that I can look up to predict the amount of light it will produce, the amount of waste heat perhaps, it will tell me how high a wind it can withstand. I can determine what the mean time between failures of the bulb.

Yet all of these things are not the streetlight. The streetlight is also the life of every person who has passed it, and seen it. They may have leaned against it, torn the phone number from a “room for rent” ad. The streetlight is a terminal for a flow of power that may start at turbines in a water fall, or it may start in the burning of coal, which means it starts when that coal was a tree in a forest, when dinosaurs were still the size of poodles.

Look closer. Look deeper. See in what way we are still just skimming the surface. Do things really look distinct? Where are they the same. Is everything looking too much the same? Where are the deeper distinctions.

This can seem all very abstract, which means it’s time to see what’s there. What is right around you, where you are, right now. That computer exists because it is the divine energy which makes matter cohesive. It is divine love that makes the earth possible. And when you see someone else, you are seeing not just a being like you, but it is you in there, somewhere. When you see another animal of any kind, you are seeing yourself in there, somewhere. And when you look up at the stars, and when you look up at the galaxies, even galaxies where the light has been traveling for billions of years to reach us…that other side of that photon, that little bit of energy that got used up to send the photon on its way? When it hits your eye, you still get it back, as if that chasm didn’t exist.

Streetlight Buddhism = StreetBuddhism