Yogananda, Paramahansa, 1893-1952; Yogis -- India -- Biography
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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