THE LAW OF MIRACLES
The great novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote a delightful story, THE THREE
HERMITS. His friend Nicholas Roerich {FN30-1} 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 Three-have
mercy on us!’ Great miracles were manifested during this naive
prayer.
“The local bishop {FN30-2} 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.
[Illustration: A GURU AND DISCIPLE, Forest hermitages were
the ancient seats of learning, secular and divine, for the youth
of India. Here a venerable guru, leaning on a wooden meditation
elbow-prop, is initiating his disciple into the august mysteries
of Spirit.—see guru.jpg]
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. {FN30-3}
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 light-186,000
miles per second-dominates 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 nature-a 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, Einstein {FN30-4} reaches across the ages to the
rishis who proclaimed a sole texture of creation-that 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.” {FN30-5}
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 projection-whether it be a tree, a medicine, a human body-is
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.” {FN30-6}
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 possession-a 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 power-light, guided by divine intelligence. The
wonders of the motion picture, of radio, of television, of radar,
of the photo-electric cell-the 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 seen-a
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!”
{FN30-1} 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.”
{FN30-2} 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.
{FN30-3} 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.”
{FN30-4} 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.
{FN30-5} I TIMOTHY 6:15-16.
{FN30-6} GENESIS 1:26.