Today, I want to share with you the extraordinary experience of Master Yogananda and how he received insights into the nature of life, death, and illusion.
In 1915, I witnessed a strange vision that led me to understand the relativity of human consciousness and to clearly perceive the unity of Eternal Light behind the painful dualities of Maya.
The vision occurred while I was sitting in my small attic room at my father’s house. The First World War had been ravaging Europe for months, and I was sorrowfully reflecting on the vast harvest of deaths it was reaping.
As I closed my eyes in meditation, my consciousness was suddenly transferred into the body of a captain commanding a warship. The roar of artillery echoed through the air as coastal batteries and naval cannons exchanged fire. A heavy bomb struck the gunpowder magazine, violently shattering my ship. I threw myself into the water along with a few sailors who had survived the explosion.
With my heart pounding, I reached the shore safely. However, a stray bullet ended its swift flight in my chest. Groaning, I collapsed to the ground. My entire body became paralyzed, yet I was aware of possessing it.
“At last, the mysterious step of death has reached me,” I thought. Exhaling my last breath, I was about to plunge into unconsciousness when, to my surprise, I found myself alive, sitting in a lotus position in my room.
Hysterical tears welled in my eyes as I joyfully verified my regained possession—a body free of a bullet hole in the chest. I swayed from side to side, deliberately breathing to assure myself that I was alive.
In the midst of these self-congratulations, I again felt my consciousness transfer into the dead captain’s body, lying on the bloodstained shore.
An absolute mental confusion overtook me.
“Lord,” I prayed, “am I dead or alive?”
A dazzling play of light filled the entire horizon. A softly murmuring vibration modulated into words:
“What has life or death to do with light?
In My light, I have created you. The relativities of life and death belong to the cosmic dream.
Behold your being, beyond dreams! Awaken, My child, awaken!”
One day, I entered a cinema to watch a documentary on the European battlefields. The First World War was still raging in the West, and the newsreel presented the carnage with such realism that I left the theater with a heavy heart.
“Lord,” I prayed, “why do You allow such suffering?”
To my immense surprise, I received His instant response in the form of a vision of the real battlefields in Europe. The scenes, filled with the dead and the dying, surpassed in cruelty anything portrayed in the newsreel.
“Pay attention!”
A gentle voice addressed my inner consciousness.
“You will see that these scenes now occurring in France are nothing more than black-and-white frames. They constitute the cosmic film—just as real and unreal as the documentary you have just watched—a film within another film.”
My heart was still not consoled. The Divine Voice continued:
“Creation is both light and shadow; otherwise, no film would be possible.
Good and evil in Maya must always alternate.
If joy were uninterrupted in this world, would man ever long for another?
Without suffering, he would hardly remember that he abandoned his eternal home.
Pain is the goad of remembrance. The way of escape lies in wisdom.
The tragedy of death is unreal; those who tremble before it are like an ignorant actor who fears for his life when a blank cartridge is fired at him on stage.
My creatures are children of light; they will not sleep forever in illusion.”
When I finished writing this chapter, I sat in the lotus position on my bed. Two dim lights illuminated the room. Raising my gaze, I noticed that the ceiling was dotted with mustard-colored lights, twinkling and trembling like radioactive sparks. Myriad rays, like pencil strokes or raindrop streaks, converged into a transparent beam and silently poured over me.
Immediately, my physical body lost its density and metamorphosed into an astral texture. I had the sensation of floating, as my weightless body barely touched the bed, shifting slightly from side to side. I looked around the room; the furniture and walls remained the same, but the small mass of light had multiplied so much that the ceiling was invisible. I was in awe.
“This is the mechanism of the cosmic cinema,”
A Voice spoke as if coming from within the light.
“By projecting a beam of rays onto the white screen of your bed sheets, it is producing the film of your body.
Observe, that body is nothing but light!”
I looked at my arms, moved them back and forth, yet I could not feel their weight. An ecstatic joy flooded me. The cosmic stem of light, blossoming as my body, seemed like a divine reproduction of the luminous rays emanating from a movie projector’s boothYogananda Vision, and manifesting as images on the screen.
The illusion of the solidity of my body had completely dissolved, and my experience of the essence of all objects as LIGHT deepened.
