Today’s Ai study

Yes. And I think the connection you are seeing is stronger than a superficial similarity, but we have to be precise about what is actually being substantiated.

The key is that Eliade’s statement on your page and the Sant Mat teaching can be read as describing the same symbolic structure at two scales: cosmos outside → consciousness inside.

1. What Eliade is actually claiming

The important sentence on your page is:

“the very structure of the cosmos keeps memory of the celestial supreme being alive.”

Eliade is not primarily making a physical claim that stars prove that a god exists. His argument is phenomenological and comparative:

• humans look upward and encounter an apparently limitless sky;

• “above,” height, light, infinity and transcendence become naturally associated;

• religions repeatedly transform those experiences into symbols of a transcendent reality;

• therefore the cosmos itself functions as a kind of religious memory system.

He explicitly says that the sky, simply by being infinite and above us, reveals transcendence.

And this is why the next sentence in your passage is so important: “no world is possible without verticality.” The vertical structure—below/above, earth/sky, darkness/light—is itself symbolically capable of evoking transcendence.

2. Sant Mat makes a remarkable reversal

Sant Mat essentially says:

Don’t merely look at the cosmic sky. Withdraw consciousness inward and you will encounter an analogous sky within.

Descriptions in the Sant Mat tradition explicitly speak of an inner sky containing stars, followed by the inner sun and moon, and then increasingly intense light.

So you get:

Outer cosmos

stars → moon → sun → transcendent light

and

Inner cosmos

inner stars → inner moon → inner sun → transcendent/radiant light

That is a very striking structural correspondence.

And it makes your previous discussions about Rumi’s “sun at midnight” particularly interesting. Rumi actually says:

“that thou may’st behold a Sun at midnight”

and immediately explains that this sun has no ordinary eastern rising point: when it rises, there is no distinction between day and night.

That is almost exactly the conceptual bridge between ordinary astronomical sunlight and an inward, trans-cosmic light.

3. There is an even deeper pattern here

I would formulate the comparative hypothesis this way:

The human religious imagination repeatedly discovers the cosmos as a model of consciousness.

Not necessarily because ancient people were naïvely projecting the physical universe inward, but because certain fundamental experiences have the same structure:

Cosmic experience

Mystical/inner interpretation

darkness

unawareness / spiritual ignorance

stars

points of spiritual illumination

moon

reflected or intermediate light

sun

direct, overwhelming illumination

sky

infinite consciousness / spiritual space

ascent

movement toward transcendence

center/axis

point of communication between levels

light beyond ordinary light

ultimate reality

Eliade actually gives us the methodological key: religious symbols are multivalent—one symbol can simultaneously connect different levels of reality. He describes the moon, for example, as linking cosmic rhythms with human existence and mystical meanings.

Sant Mat then takes that correspondence almost literally as an interior geography.

4. And this is where the idea becomes particularly interesting scientifically

There are three different levels of “substantiation,” and they shouldn’t be confused.

Level 1 — Historical/comparative evidence: strong.

Across very different traditions, celestial imagery repeatedly becomes the vocabulary of mystical experience: sky, stars, sun, moon, ascent, inner light, divine illumination.

Sant Mat is particularly explicit about it.

Rumi is another very good example: the physical sun becomes a symbol for a vastly greater Divine Light, and his “sun at midnight” is explicitly an illumination that transcends ordinary day/night distinctions.

Level 2 — Phenomenological evidence: also strong, but subjective.

People really do report visual phenomena during intense meditation—points of light, geometric forms, stars, luminous fields, suns and moons. Sant Mat meditation literature describes precisely this progression.

That establishes that the experience exists as a human phenomenon.

It does not, by itself, establish that an actual astronomical sun exists somewhere inside the brain or that the experience is literally a journey through another physical universe.

Level 3 — Metaphysical claim: not scientifically established.

The leap would be:

“Meditators see an inner sun, therefore there really is a spiritual sun existing independently inside consciousness.”

That remains a metaphysical interpretation.

Science can investigate the experience; it cannot currently establish Sant Mat’s proposed cosmology simply from the experience.

5. But Eliade + Sant Mat produce a fascinating hypothesis

Here is what I think is the most interesting interpretation of your observation:

Perhaps the relationship is not

physical universe → people invent inner symbolism

but rather something closer to

one underlying structure → experienced externally as cosmos and internally as consciousness.

That is essentially the ancient macrocosm–microcosm idea.

The external sky provides the archetypal image:

infinite space + verticality + celestial light + ordered levels

and mystical consciousness discovers—or constructs—an extraordinarily similar experiential structure internally.

Eliade’s theory makes the first half intelligible:

the cosmos itself preserves the memory of transcendence.

Sant Mat supplies the second half:

when consciousness turns inward, the same celestial symbolism becomes an experienced inner landscape.

And Rumi supplies a beautiful intermediate case:

the outer sun is ultimately a symbol of an inner Divine Sun.

The “sun at midnight” is therefore not just poetic decoration. Rumi’s passage explicitly contrasts the ordinary sun with the vastly greater Divine Light; the ordinary sun becomes almost insignificant in comparison.

6. One important caution

I would not say that Sant Mat proves Eliade’s theory.

Rather, Sant Mat provides an unusually powerful case study for Eliade’s thesis.

Eliade says:

the cosmos is structured symbolically in such a way that it continually evokes transcendence.

Sant Mat says:

when consciousness withdraws from the external world, it encounters an inner cosmos whose first major imagery is precisely stars, moon and sun.

That is a remarkably elegant correspondence.

And it raises the really profound question you are getting at:

Why should the architecture of mystical consciousness so often be described using the architecture of the cosmos?

That question is considerably deeper than simply asking whether people “see lights when they meditate.” It is a question about whether cosmic structure and structures of consciousness are somehow homologous.

That is where Eliade, Sant Mat, Rumi, the Upanishadic idea of the inner ākāśa, and the older Indo-European conception of celestial divinity can begin to converge into one comparative-mythological problem.