Yoga (communion with God) ~ ananda(bliss) ~
Parmahansa Yogananda taught, that the entire Universe is God's cosmic motion picture, and that individuals are merely actors in the divine play, who change roles through incarnations. He taught that mankind's deep suffering is rooted in identifying too closely with one's current role, rather than with the movie's director, or God........
The life like images of the motion picture illustrate many truths, concerning creation .. The Cosmic Director has written His own plays, and assembled the tremendous cast 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.........
Yogananda asked God, why there must be suffering in the world, and the answer he got........
"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 care 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 and daughters are the children of Light .. They will not sleep forever in delusion"
"What has life and death got 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!"
Yoganada says, "You are walking on the earth as in a dream within a dream .. You must realize, that to find God, is the only goal, the only purpose, for which you are here .. For Him alone, you exist .. Him you must find".
PARMAHANSA YOGANANDA - (January 5 1893-7 March 1952. )
