| Craig Jensen 2004-12-27, 7:08 am |
| Whispers from Eternity
A Book of Answered Prayers
1949 Edition
by Paramahansa Yogananda
DREAMS OF GOD
(An Inspirational Revelation of what God is.)
The Spirit was invisible, existing alone in the home of all space. He
piped to Himself the ever-new, ever-entertaining song of perfect
beatific bliss. As He sang through His voice of eternity to Himself, He
wondered if aught but Himself were listening and enjoying His song. To
His astonishment, He felt that He was also the cosmic song and He was
the singing. Even as thus He thought, lo, He became two: Spirit and
nature, positive and negative, man and woman, the peacock and the
peahen, stamen and pistil of the flowers, the male gem and the female
gem.
All these He became in thought only, as yet. All these dualities He
only dreamt within Himself, as yet. Then He loved His dream of
dualities, and He thought: My dream is Reality! My imagination is
Truth!
So this vast cosmic dream became the cosmic soul of nature!
Then the Creator began to clothe His subtle dream with grosser
dream-decorations and to condense His beautiful dream; and He asked the
cosmic dream to awake into consciousness, to come to life and shine
like a piercing star of cosmic vitality in the dark skies of
consciousness. He said: "My shadows of imagination and My dreams must
have life; being a part of Me, they must be living, even as I am
living."
So the dream-thoughts began to take luminous forms, until all things
were created as light. Star, man, herb, flower and bee-all shone as
living stars in the limitless firmament of His dream. Being endowed
with motion, they danced and dazzled. Behold, the Spirit had become
God-the Father Protector of creation.
Now, although so many dazzling things were suddenly within Him and
about Him, He saw that they suffered from sameness; so He dimmed the
light of His power and focused all His rays in space and began to
condense His astral cosmos. Lo! All things began to change their
vibrations, becoming different in color and form and density. His
astral cosmos became frozen, and the earth took a brown, solid form,
and the lunar men became fleshly forms of definite, condensed dreams,
and the nightingale dreamed its feathery plumes, and the trees wore
flowers. He caused all things to dream with intensity, to dream
definitely and continuously; He caused them to dream astral and gross
dreams, even as He dreamt them into being. Thus the gross cosmos came.
The idea cosmos was born out of the Creator's desire to be twain. The
idea cosmos froze into the astral cosmos, and the astral cosmos froze
into the gross cosmos.
As in a dream one can create a complete idea universe, or can see a
cosmos made of lights, and can see, touch or hear a gross cosmos: so
God created in His one dream other dreams and the relative experiences
of an idea cosmos, of an astral cosmos, and of a gross cosmos. As in a
dream, one can think and feel, or can see electric lights or experiment
with the atomic or astral composition of the universe, or see or taste
or touch a piece of ice, or move across the hot sands of the desert of
Sahara, or can see people, born or as yet unborn: so God, the Creator,
began to dream of nebulae, of born and unborn planets of an astral,
electrical cosmos, of thermal laws and laws of gravitation, and of
thought, feeling, will, flesh and sensations.
This cosmic dream is like our human dreams. Our human dreams are
miniature and relatively changing dreams, created after the pattern of
the relatively unchanging (only changing in cycles) huge cosmic dreams.
While the human being dreams that he is dying from an accident, it is
hard for him to realize that the experience is a dream, but upon
awakening it is easy for him to forget the ugliness and the pain and
mental suffering endured during the fleeting life of the dream. It is
only when the dream breaks and is known to have been a dream that one
can laugh, realizing the unreality of that dream suffering.
The mental picture of an automobile accident, when condensed and
focused, becomes a dream reality. The accident in a dream is relatively
more real and painful than a like accident in a mental picture. If a
little condensed imagination can cause pain, then the condensed
imagination of a cosmic dream with all its trials must necessarily
create a greater complexity of pain and suffering. And it is only when
we are fully awake in cosmic consciousness in God, and not in our human
consciousness, that we can realize that all the trials and the joys of
the universe are but God's dream.
It is then that we can laugh at the trials and pleasures of life, and
laugh equally at birth and death. When one dreams about a wall and
knocks his dream-perceived head on the wall and it hurts, he must
realize that even dreams have power to hurt. As long as God makes a man
imagine or dream his body, it is subject to the joy and grief dreams of
life and death, of pleasure and pain, of heat and cold, for all of
these accompany the consciousness of the body.
The Invisible Dimensionless became visible with dimension-not in
reality, but in a cosmic dream. For, according to the laws of cause and
effect, the effect must be similar in essence to the cause. So this
universe body made up of bodies that appear so divided, separate,
relatively contradictory, full of wars between solids and liquids,
gases and energy-is in essence invisible and dimensionless. For the
universe and the body-cells of its being are the frozen thought of God.
Science shows us that all matter is frozen light. And light is the
frozen dream of God's intelligence. The universe, as an effect, could
not be different from the Spirit as its cause.
When the Invisible, the One, became the many, He condescended to give
freedom of choice and power of independent self-evolution to all His
creations. So He gave to everything His own power-"to be able to do
whatever one may want to do." Thus, all things went farther and farther
away from Him by believing in the cosmic delusion and painstakingly
working for it. Yet, all things, by the right use of self-evolving
reason, can move ever nearer and nearer to Him until the many again
become the One. But the cosmic creation, or nature-being conscious,
and having received unlimited independence-wants mostly to move
farther away from the Divine Father, or God, thus creating self-imposed
suffering from self-made or man-made laws of evil.
Man stands in a position of independence, able to reinforce the
misguided or wrong reason in him and so move away from God, or to
reinforce God's emancipating wisdom and help God bring him back to the
divine Oneness of infinity, as in the beginning. But God is powerless
to help man unless he will voluntarily accept God's ever-willing help.
God can help only those who help themselves. After having once given
unlimited personal freedom to man, God cannot become an autocrat and
prevent His independent creation from doing evil, for God would
contradict Himself should He take away the freedom of man after having
once given it to him.
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