Do you have the light of the sun within?

Today is May 25 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you work on developing the light of the sun within yourself?

French novelist, historian and mystic Romain Rolland wrote “If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself.” Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915 "as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings.”

His first book was published in 1902, when he was 36 years old. Through his advocacy for a 'people's theatre', he made a significant contribution towards the democratization of the theatre. As a humanist, he embraced the work of the philosophers of India ("Conversations with Rabindranath Tagore" and Mohandas Gandhi).

Rolland was strongly influenced by the Vedanta philosophy of India, primarily through the works of Swami Vivekananda. Rolland became professor of art history at the École Normale in Paris. In 1904 he continued his academic career as a professor of the history of music at the Sorbonne. While still a teacher, Rolland's first literary vocation was the theatre. In his mid-30s he wrote successful dramas about the French Revolution.

After his best-known work, Jean-Christophe (1904-12), was finished, Rolland devoted himself entirely to writing. The ten-volume novel, dedicated to "the free souls of all nations who suffer, struggle, but shall vanquish", was an epic story of a German musical genius. Rolland portrayed his protagonist as a heroic figure, a fighter for social justice with a courageous, uncompromising soul.

In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, Romain Rolland coined the phrase "oceanic feeling" to refer to the sensation of being one with the universe. According to Rolland, this feeling is the source of all the religious energy that permeates in various religious systems, and one may justifiably call oneself religious on the basis of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one renounces every belief and every illusion. Being one with the universe involved having the light of the sun within.

How often do you work on developing the light of the sun within yourself?

#RomainRolland #author #light #sun