LIGHTNING

At first, the principle seems simple enough: When clouds get all stirred up, the negative charges inside of them tend to sink to the bottom. And since opposites attract, those negative charges are eventually pulled toward the positive charges on the ground. The result is what we call lightning.

But there’s more to the story than that.  As Distinguished Professor Martin Uman of the University of Florida writes, “The usual lightning flash between cloud and ground . . . begins with a visually undetected downward-moving traveling spark called the stepped leader.” 

Once this leader reaches the ground—or is intercepted by positive charges moving upward—it reverses direction, growing brighter the farther it climbs. “It is the return stroke that produces the bright channel of high temperature,” explains Uman, one of the world’s leading authorities on lightning. “The eye is not fast enough to resolve the propagation of the return stroke and it seems as if all points on the channel become bright simultaneously.”

Because it travels at roughly 93,000 miles per second, this energy—which is more than 10 times hotter than the sun—appears as a single flash. Neither the human eye, nor the human mind, can contain it.

How much more powerful is the touch of the Divine One, emanating from a source unseen, moving by means incomprehensible, searing the heart with its heat.