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Preface 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40: 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 |
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda
Chapter 30: The Law of MiraclesThe great novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a delightful story, The Three Hermits. His friend Nicholas Roerich1 has summarized the tale, as follows:
"On an island there lived three old hermits. They were so simple that the only prayer they used was: 'We are three; Thou art Threehave mercy on us!' Great miracles were manifested during this naive prayer.
"The
local bishop2
came to hear about the three hermits and their inadmissible prayer,
and decided to visit them in order to teach them the canonical invocations.
He arrived on the island, told the hermits that their heavenly petition
was undignified, and taught them many of the customary prayers.
The bishop then left on a boat. He saw, following the ship, a radiant
light. As it approached, he discerned the three hermits, who were
holding hands and running upon the waves in an effort to overtake
the vessel.
"'We have
forgotten the prayers you taught us,' they cried as they reached
the bishop, 'and have hastened to ask you to repeat them.' The awed
bishop shook his head.
"'Dear
ones,' he replied humbly, 'continue to live with your old prayer!'"
How did the
three saints walk on the water?
How did Christ
resurrect his crucified body?
How did Lahiri
Mahasaya and Sri Yukteswar perform their miracles?
Modern science
has, as yet, no answer; though with the advent of the atomic bomb
and the wonders of radar, the scope of the world-mind has been abruptly
enlarged. The word "impossible" is becoming less prominent
in the scientific vocabulary.
The ancient Vedic scriptures declare that the physical world operates under one fundamental law of maya, the principle of relativity and duality. God, the Sole Life, is an Absolute Unity; He cannot appear as the separate and diverse manifestations of a creation except under a false or unreal veil. That cosmic illusion is maya. Every great scientific discovery of modern times has served as a confirmation of this simple pronouncement of the rishis.
Newton's
Law of Motion is a law of maya: "To every action there
is always an equal and contrary reaction; the mutual actions of
any two bodies are always equal and oppositely directed." Action
and reaction are thus exactly equal. "To have a single force
is impossible. There must be, and always is, a pair of forces equal
and opposite."
Fundamental
natural activities all betray their mayic origin. Electricity, for
example, is a phenomenon of repulsion and attraction; its electrons
and protons are electrical opposites. Another example: the atom
or final particle of matter is, like the earth itself, a magnet
with positive and negative poles. The entire phenomenal world is
under the inexorable sway of polarity; no law of physics, chemistry,
or any other science is ever found free from inherent opposite or
contrasted principles.
Physical science, then, cannot formulate laws outside of maya, the very texture and structure of creation. Nature herself is maya; natural science must perforce deal with her ineluctable quiddity. In her own domain, she is eternal and inexhaustible; future scientists can do no more than probe one aspect after another of her varied infinitude. Science thus remains in a perpetual flux, unable to reach finality; fit indeed to formulate the laws of an already existing and functioning cosmos, but powerless to detect the Law Framer and Sole Operator. The majestic manifestations of gravitation and electricity have become known, but what gravitation and electricity are, no mortal knoweth. 3
To surmount maya was the task assigned to the human race by the millennial prophets. To rise above the duality of creation and perceive the unity of the Creator was conceived of as man's highest goal. Those who cling to the cosmic illusion must accept its essential law of polarity: flow and ebb, rise and fall, day and night, pleasure and pain, good and evil, birth and death. This cyclic pattern assumes a certain anguishing monotony, after man has gone through a few thousand human births; he begins to cast a hopeful eye beyond the compulsions of maya.
To tear the veil of maya is to pierce the secret of creation. The yogi who thus denudes the universe is the only true monotheist. All others are worshiping heathen images. So long as man remains subject to the dualistic delusions of nature, the Janus-faced Maya is his goddess; he cannot know the one true God.
The
world illusion, maya, is individually called avidya,
literally, "not-knowledge," ignorance, delusion. Maya
or avidya can never be destroyed through intellectual conviction
or analysis, but solely through attaining the interior state of
nirbikalpa samadhi. The Old Testament prophets, and seers of
all lands and ages, spoke from that state of consciousness. Ezekiel
says (43:1-2): "Afterwards he brought me to the gate, even
the gate that looketh toward the east: and, behold, the glory of
the God of Israel came from the way of the east: and his voice was
like a noise of many waters: and the earth shined with his glory."
Through the divine eye in the forehead (east), the yogi sails his
consciousness into omnipresence, hearing the Word or Aum, divine
sound of many waters or vibrations which is the sole reality of
creation.
Among the trillion
mysteries of the cosmos, the most phenomenal is light. Unlike sound-waves,
whose transmission requires air or other material media, light-waves
pass freely through the vacuum of interstellar space. Even the hypothetical
ether, held as the interplanetary medium of light in the undulatory
theory, can be discarded on the Einsteinian grounds that the geometrical
properties of space render the theory of ether unnecessary. Under
either hypothesis, light remains the most subtle, the freest from
material dependence, of any natural manifestation.
In the gigantic conceptions of Einstein, the velocity of light186,000 miles per seconddominates the whole Theory of Relativity. He proves mathematically that the velocity of light is, so far as man's finite mind is concerned, the only constant in a universe of unstayable flux. On the sole absolute of light-velocity depend all human standards of time and space. Not abstractly eternal as hitherto considered, time and space are relative and finite factors, deriving their measurement validity only in reference to the yardstick of light-velocity. In joining space as a dimensional relativity, time has surrendered age-old claims to a changeless value. Time is now stripped to its rightful naturea simple essence of ambiguity! With a few equational strokes of his pen, Einstein has banished from the cosmos every fixed reality except that of light.
In a later development, his Unified Field Theory, the great physicist embodies in one mathematical formula the laws of gravitation and of electromagnetism. Reducing the cosmical structure to variations on a single law, Einstein4 reaches across the ages to the rishis who proclaimed a sole texture of creationthat of a protean maya.
On the epochal Theory of Relativity have arisen the mathematical possibilities of exploring the ultimate atom. Great scientists are now boldly asserting not only that the atom is energy rather than matter, but that atomic energy is essentially mind-stuff.
"The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant advances," Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington writes in The Nature of the Physical World. "In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. . . . To put the conclusion crudely, the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. . . . The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant except in so far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings. . . . The external world has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions."
With
the recent discovery of the electron microscope came definite proof
of the light-essence of atoms and of the inescapable duality of
nature. The New York Times gave the following report of a
1937 demonstration of the electron microscope before a meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
"The crystalline
structure of tungsten, hitherto known only indirectly by means of
X-rays, stood outlined boldly on a fluorescent screen, showing nine
atoms in their correct positions in the space lattice, a cube, with
one atom in each corner and one in the center. The atoms in the
crystal lattice of the tungsten appeared on the fluorescent screen
as points of light, arranged in geometric pattern. Against this
crystal cube of light the bombarding molecules of air could be observed
as dancing points of light, similar to points of sunlight shimmering
on moving waters. . . .
"The principle
of the electron microscope was first discovered in 1927 by Drs.
Clinton J. Davisson and Lester H. Germer of the Bell Telephone Laboratories,
New York City, who found that the electron had a dual personality
partaking of the characteristic of both a particle and a wave. The
wave quality gave the electron the characteristic of light, and
a search was begun to devise means for 'focusing' electrons in a
manner similar to the focusing of light by means of a lens.
"For his
discovery of the Jekyll-Hyde quality of the electron, which corroborated
the prediction made in 1924 by De Broglie, French Nobel Prize winning
physicist, and showed that the entire realm of physical nature had
a dual personality, Dr. Davisson also received the Nobel Prize in
physics."
"The stream of knowledge," Sir James Jeans writes in The Mysterious Universe, "is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine." Twentieth-century science is thus sounding like a page from the hoary Vedas.
From
science, then, if it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth
that there is no material universe; its warp and woof is maya,
illusion. Its mirages of reality all break down under analysis.
As one by one the reassuring props of a physical cosmos crash beneath
him, man dimly perceives his idolatrous reliance, his past transgression
of the divine command: "Thou shalt have no other gods before
Me."
In his famous
equation outlining the equivalence of mass and energy, Einstein
proved that the energy in any particle of matter is equal to its
mass or weight multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.
The release of the atomic energies is brought about through the
annihilation of the material particles. The "death" of
matter has been the "birth" of an Atomic Age.
Light-velocity
is a mathematical standard or constant not because there is an absolute
value in 186,000 miles a second, but because no material body, whose
mass increases with its velocity, can ever attain the velocity of
light. Stated another way: only a material body whose mass is infinite
could equal the velocity of light.
This conception brings us to the law of miracles.
The masters who are able to materialize and dematerialize their bodies or any other object, and to move with the velocity of light, and to utilize the creative light-rays in bringing into instant visibility any physical manifestation, have fulfilled the necessary Einsteinian condition: their mass is infinite.
The consciousness of a perfected yogi is effortlessly identified, not with a narrow body, but with the universal structure. Gravitation, whether the "force" of Newton or the Einsteinian "manifestation of inertia," is powerless to compel a master to exhibit the property of "weight" which is the distinguishing gravitational condition of all material objects. He who knows himself as the omnipresent Spirit is subject no longer to the rigidities of a body in time and space. Their imprisoning "rings-pass-not" have yielded to the solvent: "I am He."
"Fiat
lux! And there was light." God's first command to His ordered
creation (Genesis 1:3) brought into being the only atomic
reality: light. On the beams of this immaterial medium occur all
divine manifestations. Devotees of every age testify to the appearance
of God as flame and light. "The King of kings, and Lord of
lords; who only hath immortality, dwelling in the light which no
man can approach unto." 5
A yogi who through
perfect meditation has merged his consciousness with the Creator
perceives the cosmical essence as light; to him there is no difference
between the light rays composing water and the light rays composing
land. Free from matter-consciousness, free from the three dimensions
of space and the fourth dimension of time, a master transfers his
body of light with equal ease over the light rays of earth, water,
fire, or air. Long concentration on the liberating spiritual eye
has enabled the yogi to destroy all delusions concerning matter
and its gravitational weight; thenceforth he sees the universe as
an essentially undifferentiated mass of light.
"Optical
images," Dr. L. T. Troland of Harvard tells us, "are built
up on the same principle as the ordinary 'half-tone' engravings;
that is, they are made up of minute dottings or stripplings far
too small to be detected by the eye. . . . The sensitiveness of
the retina is so great that a visual sensation can be produced by
relatively few Quanta of the right kind of light." Through
a master's divine knowledge of light phenomena, he can instantly
project into perceptible manifestation the ubiquitous light atoms.
The actual form of the projectionwhether it be a tree, a medicine,
a human bodyis in conformance with a yogi's powers of will and
of visualization.
In man's dream-consciousness, where he has loosened in sleep his clutch on the egoistic limitations that daily hem him round, the omnipotence of his mind has a nightly demonstration. Lo! there in the dream stand the long-dead friends, the remotest continents, the resurrected scenes of his childhood. With that free and unconditioned consciousness, known to all men in the phenomena of dreams, the God-tuned master has forged a never-severed link. Innocent of all personal motives, and employing the creative will bestowed on him by the Creator, a yogi rearranges the light atoms of the universe to satisfy any sincere prayer of a devotee. For this purpose were man and creation made: that he should rise up as master of maya, knowing his dominion over the cosmos.
"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."6
In
1915, shortly after I had entered the Swami Order, I witnessed a
vision of violent contrasts. In it the relativity of human consciousness
was vividly established; I clearly perceived the unity of the Eternal
Light behind the painful dualities of maya. The vision descended
on me as I sat one morning in my little attic room in Father's Gurpar
Road home. For months World War I had been raging in Europe; I reflected
sadly on the vast toll of death.
As I closed
my eyes in meditation, my consciousness was suddenly transferred
to the body of a captain in command of a battleship. The thunder
of guns split the air as shots were exchanged between shore batteries
and the ship's cannons. A huge shell hit the powder magazine and
tore my ship asunder. I jumped into the water, together with the
few sailors who had survived the explosion.
Heart pounding,
I reached the shore safely. But alas! a stray bullet ended its furious
flight in my chest. I fell groaning to the ground. My whole body
was paralyzed, yet I was aware of possessing it as one is conscious
of a leg gone to sleep.
"At last
the mysterious footstep of Death has caught up with me," I
thought. With a final sigh, I was about to sink into unconsciousness
when lo! I found myself seated in the lotus posture in my Gurpar
Road room.
Hysterical tears
poured forth as I joyfully stroked and pinched my regained possessiona
body free from any bullet hole in the breast. I rocked to and fro,
inhaling and exhaling to assure myself that I was alive. Amidst
these self-congratulations, again I found my consciousness transferred
to the captain's dead body by the gory shore. Utter confusion of
mind came upon me.
"Lord,"
I prayed, "am I dead or alive?"
A dazzling play
of light filled the whole horizon. A soft rumbling vibration formed
itself into words:
"What has
life or death to do with Light? In the image of My Light I have
made you. The relativities of life and death belong to the cosmic
dream. Behold your dreamless being! Awake, my child, awake!"
As steps in
man's awakening, the Lord inspires scientists to discover, at the
right time and place, the secrets of His creation. Many modern discoveries
help men to apprehend the cosmos as a varied expression of one powerlight,
guided by divine intelligence. The wonders of the motion picture,
of radio, of television, of radar, of the photo-electric cellthe
all-seeing "electric eye," of atomic energies, are all
based on the electromagnetic phenomenon of light.
The motion picture
art can portray any miracle. From the impressive visual standpoint,
no marvel is barred to trick photography. A man's transparent astral
body can be seen rising from his gross physical form, he can walk
on the water, resurrect the dead, reverse the natural sequence of
developments, and play havoc with time and space. Assembling the
light images as he pleases, the photographer achieves optical wonders
which a true master produces with actual light rays.
The lifelike
images of the motion picture illustrate many truths concerning creation.
The Cosmic Director has written His own plays, and assembled the
tremendous casts for the pageant of the centuries. From the dark
booth of eternity, He pours His creative beam through the films
of successive ages, and the pictures are thrown on the screen of
space. Just as the motion-picture images appear to be real, but
are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety
a delusive seeming. The planetary spheres, with their countless
forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture,
temporarily true to five sense perceptions as the scenes are cast
on the screen of man's consciousness by the infinite creative beam.
A cinema audience
can look up and see that all screen images are appearing through
the instrumentality of one imageless beam of light. The colorful
universal drama is similarly issuing from the single white light
of a Cosmic Source. With inconceivable ingenuity God is staging
an entertainment for His human children, making them actors as well
as audience in His planetary theater.
One day I entered
a motion picture house to view a newsreel of the European battlefields.
World War I was still being waged in the West; the newsreel recorded
the carnage with such realism that I left the theater with a troubled
heart.
"Lord,"
I prayed, "why dost Thou permit such suffering?"
To my intense
surprise, an instant answer came in the form of a vision of the
actual European battlefields. The horror of the struggle, filled
with the dead and dying, far surpassed in ferocity any representation
of the newsreel.
"Look intently!"
A gentle voice spoke to my inner consciousness. "You will see
that these scenes now being enacted in France are nothing but a
play of chiaroscuro. They are the cosmic motion picture, as real
and as unreal as the theater newsreel you have just seena play
within a play."
My heart was still not comforted. The divine voice went on: "Creation is light and shadow both, else no picture is possible. The good and evil of maya must ever alternate in supremacy. If joy were ceaseless here in this world, would man ever seek another? Without suffering he scarcely cares to recall that he has forsaken his eternal home. Pain is a prod to remembrance. The way of escape is through wisdom! The tragedy of death is unreal; those who shudder at it are like an ignorant actor who dies of fright on the stage when nothing more is fired at him than a blank cartridge. My sons are the children of light; they will not sleep forever in delusion."
Although
I had read scriptural accounts of maya, they had not given
me the deep insight that came with the personal visions and their
accompanying words of consolation. One's values are profoundly changed
when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion
picture, and that not in it, but beyond it, lies his own reality.
As I finished
writing this chapter, I sat on my bed in the lotus posture. My room
was dimly lit by two shaded lamps. Lifting my gaze, I noticed that
the ceiling was dotted with small mustard-colored lights, scintillating
and quivering with a radiumlike luster. Myriads of pencilled rays,
like sheets of rain, gathered into a transparent shaft and poured
silently upon me.
At once my physical
body lost its grossness and became metamorphosed into astral texture.
I felt a floating sensation as, barely touching the bed, the weightless
body shifted slightly and alternately to left and right. I looked
around the room; the furniture and walls were as usual, but the
little mass of light had so multiplied that the ceiling was invisible.
I was wonder-struck.
"This is
the cosmic motion picture mechanism." A voice spoke as though
from within the light. "Shedding its beam on the white screen
of your bed sheets, it is producing the picture of your body. Behold,
your form is nothing but light!"
I gazed at my
arms and moved them back and forth, yet could not feel their weight.
An ecstatic joy overwhelmed me. This cosmic stem of light, blossoming
as my body, seemed a divine replica of the light beams streaming
out of the projection booth in a cinema house and manifesting as
pictures on the screen.
For a long time
I experienced this motion picture of my body in the dimly lighted
theater of my own bedroom. Despite the many visions I have had,
none was ever more singular. As my illusion of a solid body was
completely dissipated, and my realization deepened that the essence
of all objects is light, I looked up to the throbbing stream of
lifetrons and spoke entreatingly.
"Divine
Light, please withdraw this, my humble bodily picture, into Thyself,
even as Elijah was drawn up to heaven by a flame."
This prayer
was evidently startling; the beam disappeared. My body resumed its
normal weight and sank on the bed; the swarm of dazzling ceiling
lights flickered and vanished. My time to leave this earth had apparently
not arrived.
"Besides,"
I thought philosophically, "the prophet Elijah might well be
displeased at my presumption!"
1
This famous Russian artist and philosopher has been living for many
years in India near the Himalayas. "From the peaks comes revelation,"
he has written. "In caves and upon the summits lived the rishis.
Over the snowy peaks of the Himalayas burns a bright glow, brighter
than stars and the fantastic flashes of lightning."
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2
The story may have a historical basis; an editorial note informs
us that the bishop met the three monks while he was sailing from
Archangel to the Slovetsky Monastery, at the mouth of the Dvina
River.
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3
Marconi, the great inventor, made the following admission of scientific
inadequacy before the finalities: "The inability of science
to solve life is absolute. This fact would be truly frightening
were it not for faith. The mystery of life is certainly the most
persistent problem ever placed before the thought of man."
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4
A clue to the direction taken by Einstein's genius is given by the
fact that he is a lifelong disciple of the great philosopher Spinoza,
whose best-known work is Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order.
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5
I Timothy 6:15-16.
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6
Genesis 1:26.
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