Experiment with Light

The Experiment with Light is a grassroots movement loosely based on a meditation practice described by the British Friend Rex Ambler, which is in turn based on his interpretation of early Quaker spiritual practice. The movement began in the late 1990s^[1], and has been spread both through retreats/workshops and through his booklet Light to Live By (and to a lesser extent its companion book, his George Fox anthology Truth of the Heart).

Light to Live By

In 2001, Rex gave the Cary Lecture to Friends in Germany, which was then published that year by German Yearly Meeting as Licht, darin zu Leben, and the next year by Quaker Books (UK) as Light to Live By.

In the first section of the book (called "Searching"), Rex describes his desires to understand the powerful spirituality of early Friends, and for his practice of Quakerism to be more able to guide him through particular concerns in his life. After being intrigued by the descriptions of early Quaker spirituality made by Hugh Barbour and Arthur Roberts, Rex eventually decided to read more early Quaker texts for himself, at one point spending two years reading the complete works of George Fox, focusing especially on the earlier writings before persecution and intra-Quaker controversies "made him wary and cautious."^[2]

Upon doing so, he was struck by the way Fox described "the light" as something which "discovers" or shows to whoever is attentive to it, one's true condition, especially one's wrongdoings, and urged their hearers to undertake a specific meditative process aimed at perceiving this. Rex summarizes Fox's early message as follows:

give up your dependence on doctrines, rituals, preachers and everything else that is external to you, and find the light within you because that will teach you all you need to know. And you already know what the light is, because it's that that makes you uncomfortable about the things you do wrong. So take note of those uncomfortable feelings, and let 'the light in your conscience' show you what they're about. If you allow it to, the light will show you the whole truth of your life, and if you then accept that truth, it will set you free – free from guilt and shame, but also free from the powerful desires that made you act wrongly in the first place.^[3]

He later describes the practice urged by this message as consisting of four steps: learning to recognize the light, opening your heart to the truth it presents to you, continuing to wait in the light, and ultimately submitting to it. ^[4]

After beginning a 30-minute daily meditation practice based on the above, and though it gaining clarity about several concrete difficulties in his life, he describes the practice to a friend of his who is also a psychotherapist. The friend tells him it sounds similar to a technique called "focusing" developed by the American psychologist and philosopher Eugene Gendlin.

Rex then discusses the steps of Gendlin's focusing technique and compares it to the kind of early Quaker meditation he discussed earlier, saying that "the newly discovered skill of focusing can be put to spiritual use," and can be seen as "partly a rediscovery of what at least the early Quakers had already found."^[5] However, he argues that some things emphasised by focusing, but not by early Friends, are helpful. At the end of the book Rex combines focusing techniques and his interpretation of early Quaker meditation to produce five six-step guided meditations for use either alone or in groups – one that focuses on the individual, one on "other people," one on "the meeting," one generically on "the group," and one on "the world."

Since then

Groups

In the years since Rex began writing and speaking about this, about 100 "light groups," mostly in the UK, have sprung up to regularly practice this general kind of meditation, some using the specific guided meditation texts by Rex at the end of Light to Live By, and others devising their own. The main Experiment with Light website contains two of Rex's from Light to Live By (which use modern language), and two assembled from Fox quotations (one by Rex in 1997, and one by Klaus Huber).^[6] There are also other meditations on the Experiment with Light CDs.

Retreats

There are regular workshops introducing Friends to the practice both at the cradle of Quakerism, Swarthmoor Hall ^[7] and at Charney Manor ^[8] A major retreat was held at Glenthorne, Grasmere (UK) in November of 2004, which produced an epistle that was widely distributed in the UK, and is available on the main Experiment with Light website ^[9]