Are we the bulb or are we the light?

Sensing the thin veneer of the false self.

Photo by David W. Levin using black & white film, 2025

Asked by a friend considering mindfulness practices to describe some of my meditation experiences, I recalled a phrase I haven’t used in quite a long time. “Sometimes,” I said, “when my breath settles and things feel calm, it’s like my body is falling asleep around me.” That description remains accurate: my mind is alert and awake, aware of what’s going on inside and around me, but my body itself feels like it’s in low power mode, draped over my skeleton, experiencing deep rest. My body feels separate from me.

Sharing this perspective seems to have re-animated the actual experience within my own meditations. There’s something about those words — my body falling asleep around me — that brings me back to beginner’s mind and allows me to feel those pleasant sensations with renewed clarity/attention. That sensation brings with it a palpable, tangible sense of separation between mind and body, consciousness and matter. During the most pleasant experiences — ie, those generating a wealth of peaceful, calming, freedom-via-lack-of-fear feelings — I feel highly present with my mind and imbued with a degree of unearthly confidence and calm. Re-reading those words makes them seem silly, but if there’s any truth to which I hold most dear, it’s how truly transcendent experiences seem to defy explanation.

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I was up around 3am again last night. Highly familiar/repetitive vexations swirling in my head. I decided to sit up for a bit in the quiet, dark room next to the bedroom, avoiding the desire to meditate in a formal way so as to not risk boosting my awakeness, choosing instead just to sit and breathe “unprogrammed” for a while. After several minutes, surprisingly, I began to experience that body-falling-asleep-around-me feeling. It was highly pleasant and calming. It felt notable as well, given that I was having this sensation without the trappings and build-up of “meditating.” In those precious seconds when the pleasant feeling was strongest, a quote from Joseph Campbell came to mind, something he said in dialogue with journalist Bill Moyers, captured on page 88 of their book, The Power of Myth:

“What am I?

Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?”

Most often, thoughts occurring in meditation are worth discarding immediately as mind non-sequiturs, but sometimes they’re worth paying attention to. There was something about this quote, especially the image I conjured of the highly delicate, thin outer glass shell of a bulb, that felt worth my attention. And since I wasn’t technically meditating, but rather just resting and feeling at peace, I indulged my thinking mind.

The image and associated feelings of this quote seemed to sync with thoughts I’ve had about how our “false self” may be some kind of hyper-thin veneer surrounding our “true self,” using terms popularized by Richard Rohr, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, and others. The false self is who we think we are: our body/personality/opinions/preferences, our ego or conditioned mind, the self with a small “s,” the person caught up in the delusions or maya of the world. The true self is who we really are: the being who is never born and never dies, who is one with all things, the Self with a big “S,” the person who lives eternally in true reality of which our small “self” cannot conceive. (Side note: exploring the differences between the true and false self and how those metaphors can be useful have been invaluable teachings for me. Rohr’s books Falling Upward and Immortal Diamond, along with James Finley’s “Merton’s Palace of Nowhere” are books I highly recommend, and will likely be future candidates for my Phenomenal Books Revisited section.)

In the middle of the night, breathing calmly in the dark, I believe Campbell’s lightbulb metaphor came to me as commentary on what I was experiencing inside and between my mind and body in that moment. An inner source of peace and calm filled me up, pushing to my farthest perimeter what I imagined to be this ultra-thin veneer that was the part of me feeling injured, threatened, angry, fragile. Perhaps it’s not my body that’s falling asleep around me, but rather my false self in its miniscule entirety. Quieting down, resting, being silent for a bit.

Last night, within those sensations, feeling alert and aware, the subject matter that only moments ago had me feeling tight, angry, and on edge was still present. It had not vanished. It’s just that there was just no juice behind it, no emotional heft. The thoughts weren’t triggering. They just existed. They existed with the same indifference as the sensation of the couch’s fabric on my skin, the temperature of the air, the ambient sounds of my house during the night. The part of me that gets riled up, that reacts, that gets offended…that was the part that felt like it was asleep on my outer-most edges.

It was so, so, so pleasant. And is seemingly the way with all pleasant experiences in the spiritual game, it lasted only a handful of minutes. But as seasoned practitioners know, it’s those brief nuggets of nirvana (said loosely) that keep us going.

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I think what has me thinking, writing, and feeling inspired with this particular experience is the number of parallels that seem to be intersecting here, if you’ll enjoy the imagery and kindly ignore the mathematical impossibility of what I just wrote. Some themes pointing in a particular direction. Experiences in meditation: parts of me moving outward, thinning, falling asleep and displaced by other parts of me which feel larger and filled with equanimity and ease. Campbell’s lightbulb metaphor: the degree to which the glass surround of a lightbulb is so thin, so fragile and sensitive, yet plays a vital role for the inner light to be expressed. And last but not least, what we’ve come to understand about the nature of matter in our observable universe: how atoms are essentially 99.999999999% “empty” space. So if atoms are filled with such emptiness, and atoms are the sole building blocks/material of everything we know, including our own bodies, then what we see, touch, taste, and experience in total must be 99.999999999% “empty” as well.

Kinda seems like a pretty thin veneer, doesn’t it?
More to ponder….