Mind-stuff

by Paramahansa Yogananda

From science, man learns the philosophic truth that there is no material universe, its warp and woof is maya, illusion.
How did Christ resurrect his crucified body? How did Lahiri Mahashaya and Sri Yukteshwar perform their miracles? Modern science has as yet, no answer, though with the advent of Atomic Age the scope of the world-mind has been abruptly enlarged. The word 'impossible' is becoming less prominent in man's vocabulary.

The 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 Absolute Unity; to appear as separate and diverse manifestations of a creation He wears a false or unreal veil. That illusory dualistic veil is maya. Many great scientific discoveries of modern times have confirmed this simple pronouncement of the ancient rishis.

Newton's Law of Motion is a law of maya. "To every action there is always an equal and contrary reaction; the mutual action of any two bodies is 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."…

Physical science, then, cannot formulate laws outside of maya: the very fabric and structure of creation. Nature herself is maya; natural science must perforce deal with her ineluctable quiddity. In her 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 discover 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….

Among the trillion mysteries of the cosmos, the most phenomenal is light. Unlike sound waves, whose transmission requires air or other material media, the light waves pass freely through the vacuum of interstellar space…light remains the most subtle, the freest from material dependence, of any natural manifestation.

In the gigantic conceptions of Albert Einstein, the velocity of light - 1,86,300 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 of a universe in flux. On the sole 'absolute' of light velocity depends all human standards of time and space. Not abstractly eternal as hitherto considered, time and space are relative and finite factors. They derive their conditional measurement-validities only in reference to the yardstick of light velocity. With a few equational strokes of his pen, Einstein banished from the universe every fixed reality except that of light.

In a later development, his Unified Field Theory, the great physicist sought to embody in one mathematical formula the laws of gravitation and of electromagnetism. Reducing the cosmic structure to variations on a single law, Einstein has reached across the ages to the rishis who proclaimed a sole fabric of creation: a protean maya. 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 realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one the most significant advances," Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington writes in The Nature of the Physical World. "In the world of physics we watch a shadow graph performance of the drama of familiar life... To put the conclusion crudely, the stuff of the world is mind-stuff."

The New York Times gave the following report of a 1937 demonstration of the electron microscope... : "The principle of the electron microscope was first discovered in 1927 by Drs Clinton J. Davisson and Lesser H. Germer of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, New York City, who found that the electron has a dual personality, partaking the characteristics of a particle and a wave. (That is both matter and energy.)..."

From science, then, it must be so, let man learn the philosophic truth that there is no material universe, its warp and woof is maya, illusion. Under analysis all its mirages of reality dissolve. As, one by one, the reassuring props of a physical cosmos crash beneath him, man dimly perceives his idolatrous reliance, his 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 'death' of matter has given birth to an Atomic Age.

Light velocity is a mathematical standard or constant not because there is an absolute value in 1,86,300 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…

"Let there be light! And there was light". In the creation of the universe, God's first command brought into being the structural essential: light. On the beams of this immaterial medium occur all divine manifestations…

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 or through the light rays of earth, water, fire, and air…

The law of miracles is operable by any man who has realized that the essence of creation is light. A master is able to employ his divine knowledge of light phenomena to project instantly into perceptible manifestation the ubiquitous light atoms. The actual form of projection, whatever it be: a tree, a medicine, a human body, is determined by the yogi's wish and by his power of will and of visualization…

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda