Binary Star pt. 2

Illusion of the Two Suns

I had a little trawl through the internet hoping to solve the riddle of an optical illusion that might make people believe they have literally seen two or three suns in the sky, as reported by William Lilly and referenced in The Secret Teachings of All Ages, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover a very satisfying explanation: not only that but I have seen the illusion in question with my own eyes, once or perhaps twice, but must have filed it away under "anomalous weather conditions" in my mind so that it didn't even feature anywhere in my consciousness when I came to write a blog about a twin sunset.

http://www.greatdreams.com/twosuns.htm

Very near the top of the page, the second photograph down that says "photo with permission of Daniel" you will see the two suns yourself. Looks like a photoshop special, but it isn't. It is an optical illusion that can only work when the sun is at a certain height in the sky, when there is a certain type of cloud cover in the sky, like the one in the photograph, and when the sun is partially hidden behind those clouds, and with a generous halo that cannot be visually determined from the sun itself. The second sun appears partially hidden behind the same clouds, a good distance across the sky from the real sun, and appears as the same large bright halo with an indeterminable centre. It is incredibly bright, so much so that the first time I saw this phenomenon I couldn't believe my eyes, it really did look like a second sun to the degree that I could not distinguish which sun was real and which was the mirage. Truly breathtaking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage_of_astronomical_objects

This is the nearest thing I could find in what little time I had to dig on the subject of a mirage creating the illusion of a binary sunset, although I found the whole article slightly ambiguous and I'm not sure if it presents a direct adressing of the specific phenomenon I am writing about, although no doubt it falls somewhere into the broader category.

Food for thought: Has a mirage ever been produced of a second burning sun, high in the crystal clear blue sky, in the plain light of day?


Edit to add:

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Found it! It's called a Parhelion, Sun Dog or Mock Sun... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_dog

Surely the phenomenon William Lilly was writing about?

Ghost Dog

It is a good viewpoint to view the world as a dream. When you have something like a nightmare, you will wake up and tell yourself that it was only a dream. It is said that the world we live in is not a bit different from this

~ Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

The Cosmic Mirror

One night while laying in bed, in my relaxed state I had found myself focusing on a shaving mirror I used to keep on my desk. Being as I was on the brink of sleep, and in an almost meditative state dwelling on the face of my mirror, my mind started to form an analogy: the waking reality is to the dream reality as the material world is to its reflection in the face of a mirror (or possibly vice versa). Not something I consciously "believed" at the time, and certainly not a thought that had ever really crossed my mind before, in fact not a concept I could even fully explain or rationalise today, but something I felt was punching above its weight and had more to it than met the eye.

I carried on swimming through my thoughts in my relaxed state and drifted off into sleep.

That night I had a dream that featured "The Voice". "The Voice" is a very rare visitor to the shores of my dreamlife, and has on one occasion invaded my waking life too. Now when I say rare, I mean it has only ever showed up a handful of times in my entire life. The Voice is a deep, authoritative, clear, loud and noble sounding male voice that tends to offer statements that come from outside my current consciousness: that is to say it offers perspectives that are alien to the things I believe, think, am aware of or concern myself with at the time of hearing it.

The dream was a bit of a muddle, especially now as I try to recall it, but I remember a swirling mass of dust or something of a cosmic nature, and the dream visuals eventually settling on the image of a pig. As I looked at the pig, which was an image being presented to me as opposed to the illusion of a real pig, I hear The Voice stating in its signature tone: The magical and mysterious substance of which dreams and time are composed.

What to make of that? "Dreams" and "time" are both composed of the same "magical and mysterious substance"? What substance would that be? And, well, what?

The dream itself wasn't much I will admit, but that The Voice put in an appearance and that the dream should occur on the same night I was dwelling on the analogy of the mirror makes it one of my most memorable and I believe most important.

What was the voice saying? The voice was telling me that in my relaxed free-thinking state just before falling into a blissful sleep, I had stumbled upon a deep truth relating to the nature of reality: that our dreams are made of the same substance that our material reality is: that the apparently objective and hard reality we call life/the world/the universe is not a solid material substance at all but a pliable, fluid consciousness that flows from a sentient centre and creates the perfect illusion of a solid material substance: just like a dream.

Just as when fully immersed in a dream all the furniture, foliage, people and places are completely real to us, and it is only upon waking that we can look back and realise we were dreaming: so it is with our waking lives, but to a more complex and consistent extent: only while we are here locked in our bodies does the illusion of reality remain intact, upon being liberated by spiritual enlightenment or physical death we will instantly see it for the dreamlike illusion it really is.

The idea is certainly not original to me, although at the time it was not a concept I was familiar with. I believe a truth was revealed to me that night, a truth that I have subsequently absorbed into my belief system; that reality is a dream emanating from God, and that material solidity is an illusion.

Row row row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream

Date experienced: Approx. Spring 2007

Binary Star

Allow me to recount a true story. Call it coincidence, synchronicity, or what you will, but it happened, and it illustrates very well a concept that I would say tallies most closely with jung's idea of synchronicity. It touches on the importance of deep symbols and the role they play in mysticism, and the way the universe plays with them.

One evening while staying at my mother's house I was reading from Manly P Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages, and came across the passage on p142 presenting the esoteric idea of a second sun, conjuring up instantly one of the most memorable vistas in film history, for me, of the binary sunset on Tatooine in the first Star Wars movie (larger picture here) and remembering how even as a young child watching the movie for the first time the image of a binary sunset was so powerful and profound I found myself all those years later lost in a sea of amazement and almost in a state of meditation at the mental image conjured up as a result of reading about such a concept.

P Hall writes, ..."In the fifty first year after Christ three suns were seen at once in the sky and also in the sixty-sixth year. In the sixty-ninth year, two suns were seen together. According to William Lilly, between the years 1156 and 1648 twenty similar occurences were recorded."

Regardless of the historical accuracy of such recordings, the deep symbolism of the second sun relates to the concept of a spiritual sun that rises to take its place in the sky with its material counterpart once the spiritual essence of a man is sufficiently awakened. The concept and its associated imagery is one that has always had a profound affect on me, and even now when I watch Episode IV: A New Hope I find myself in a state of deep mystery and awe at the scene with the two setting suns.

"!!! Come and look at this!!!", I was interrupted from my deep reflective state by my mother who was in the kitchen preparing a salad, and by the sound of it in a state of shocked exclamation. She had cooked us a hard-boiled egg each, and just as she was cutting mine in half she noticed something that in all our combined years on earth neither of us could recall ever seeing before...

Date experienced: Approx. September 2007