Psalms 36:9 Meaning For with You Is the Spring

Within you is the source of all life. Not the life of the body alone, which comes and goes, but the deep aliveness of Being you feel when the mind grows quiet and you sense the presence that you are. This is the fountain, and it never runs dry, for it is what you essentially are.

This source is also how you come to know it. In its light you see light: the awareness that is your true nature reveals itself to you. When the mind falls still and you become present, you no longer merely think about being alive; you feel yourself as the living presence that was the source all along.

The source is inward. The fountain of life is the river inside the head, the cerebrospinal fluid rising through the still chambers of the brain in meditation, the true spring a person drinks from when the outer world goes quiet. And the light that lets one see light is not the sun outside but the illumination of the pineal, the melatonin the little gland pours out when the single eye is opened, so that the seeing itself becomes the thing seen. One does not find this glow by staring outward; it is found by turning in until the inner light switches on and reveals its own source.

So light is known only by light already lit within, awareness recognizing the deeper awareness it came from.

Fountain of life: the inner spring, the cerebrospinal river rising through the brain in meditation Light: the pineal illumination, the melatonin poured out when the single eye opens

Al-Ḥayy: The Living One of the names of God, the Living. Most people treat being alive as something they produce and keep going on their own, until strength runs out. After that, a person sees that the aliveness had been arriving from somewhere else all along, without any effort of theirs.

Khalq jadīd: Creation made new at every moment Ibn Arabi taught that God makes the world new in every instant. A person who thinks of life as one gift handed over long ago will keep looking backward for proof of it. Someone who sees it as arriving continuously finds the evidence in the next breath, which nobody arranged for themselves.

Faqr: Poverty before God The Quran tells people plainly that they are the needy ones and God is the one who needs nothing. Owning nothing of your own sounds like bad news, until you have tried to be your own source and failed. Then it lands as relief, because the supply never depended on how much you had stored up.

Nūr: Light Al-Ghazali held that only one light exists, and everything else called light is borrowed from it. Seeing feels like our own doing, since the eye is ours and the looking is ours, but an eye adds nothing in a dark room. Understanding works the same way, and a person can feel the moment when something they stared at for weeks suddenly comes clear.

Rayn: Rust on the heart The Quran describes a film that settles on the heart from what a person keeps doing, the way rust builds on metal. Light keeps shining the whole time, and the change is in the surface that would have caught it. Someone in that state does not feel blind, only that nothing is there to see, so they assume the fault is in the world.

I become the sight with which he sees: closeness supplies the seeing itself A saying of the Prophet, reporting God's words about someone he has drawn near. Straining to perceive God wears a person out, because they are working with equipment they think belongs to them alone. In the closeness described here the straining stops, since the seeing comes from the same source as the thing being seen.