The World is Like a Movie, a Dream, a Video Game
The voice in Yogananda’s vision went on to tell him: ‘Creation is light and shadow both, else no picture is possible.’ The voice went on to make the point that, in a motion picture, pain and tragedy seem real, but that a man or woman no more dies than an actor who portrays death in a movie scene is actually dead. Ceaseless joy, Yogananda writes, is not the state of this world.
Yogananda and the Law of Miracles
This idea of the world being light is also the explanation Yogananda gives for the many miracles he describes in his book. If the world is insubstantial and made of light, any miracle can be projected onto the screen of reality, and the script can be changed by someone who has mastered the knowledge of Maya. This is how the masters can do things that seem incomprehensible to those of us who are readily caught up in the illusion:
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.8
Yogananda goes further and explains how the master’s powers of will and visualization can project onto reality any phenomenon, raising questions about what constitutes a miracle if everything we see is an illusion:
Through a master’s divine knowledge of light phenomena, he can instantly project the ubiquitous light atoms into perceptible manifestation. The actual form of the projection, whether it be a tree, a medicine, or a human body, is in conformance with a yogi’s powers of will and of visualization.9
The Ultimate Metaphor: The World Is Like a Video Game
The dream, the stage play, and the motion picture are useful metaphors, but none of them can serve as the ultimate metaphor for the nature of reality because they lack one element that the masters tell us we have: the element of free will, the agency to change the script!
