The World is Like a Movie, a Dream, a Video Game
The metaphor came to Yogananda through a rather disturbing and interesting vision. In 1915, shortly after being ordained ‘Swami Yogananda’ by his guru, he had a peculiar but illuminating vision while meditating. That was a bloody year in Europe, with the Great War that had erupted the previous year still going strong. The scale of suffering caused by that war had never been seen before, partly because our technological capacity for destruction had reached new levels with the advent of machine guns and automated artillery that could gun down many men quickly. In Yogananda’s engrossing vision, he was in the middle of a naval battle when his ship was blown up, and he jumped into the sea to save himself. A bullet in his chest then struck him, and it seemed to him that he was in the process of dying. Suddenly, he found himself back in India, meditating in the middle of a room in Calcutta, in hysterical tears after his vision of the near-death experience. He wondered: was he 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!’5
Later, he entered a cinema to see newsreels of World War I and, upon seeing the horrific devastation, asked, ‘Lord … why dost Thou permit such suffering?’ The answer not only gave him a new way of looking at the world but also a new understanding of the concept of Maya, which he had read about but now intuitively understood by seeing the actual European battlefields and the many dead:
‘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.’6
