And these peoples planted the obelisk into the earth and watched it rise towards the heavens. And they understood it not as a structure or just a monument, but as an actual ray of the sun itself made solid, a beam of light standing erect. And at the very top, they set a small capstone, a point, and they sheathed it in gold. So at the height of the day, the apex caught fire with sunlight. That very first to catch the dawn and the last to surrender it to the dusk. And they had a name for that golden point. That point was a benben. Benben, a word that simply meant to shine, to radiate.

And these peoples told a story to their children about how this was the shape of the first land ever to rise out of the dark waters at the beginning of the world. The one ground that the first light touched and never left. And for a brief, radiant age, these same people drew the sun as no one had before. They drew it as a disc of light overhead, and from it, long rays reaching down, each ray ending in a small open hand. Light that reaches. Light with palms coming down to face and cup the faces of the living.

I love that story. And it didn't end at the Nile shores. Almost every people who ever loved the light gave it a face and a name that they could call to. You've probably heard: a child of the sun, light of the world, a bright one walking among us. Different tongues, different faces, and underneath it all the same quiet certainty that the light is not only overhead. It is so much more.

And the wise ones who turned the search inward found that very sun, that same light, waiting there inside. So in sacred spaces across centuries, they passed the same idea along: that behind the sun in the sky burns an inner sun, and a spark of it sits deep within the human heart. The sun in your heart, in yours, in mine.

That the whole of the life, our entire spiritual journey, comes down to one idea, one opportunity, one task: to lift away whatever has settled over that inner spark, layer by layer, until we shine clearly and radiantly again. Our map to inner awakening names this journey in three words.

We start at obscurity: the light still burning, only veiled, dimmed, hard to see, under a bushel. Then it turns into idealism. Obscurity shifts into idealism, and that is when that moment of the inner eye opens and you catch sight of the radiant being that you have been all along. Wow. The ideal version of me. And at the far shore, just opposite of that, this beautiful gift that blossoms, we would simply call it light. Not the light the eyes can catch, but the light that you are once nothing is left to cover it. Obscurity leads to idealism leads to light. And that's our journey today in those three steps.