Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) was a spiritual teacher and mystic who introduced millions in the West to the science of meditation and the ancient philosophy of yoga through his classic work Autobiography of a Yogi.
He taught that beneath all religions lies one truth — that every soul is a spark of the Divine Light.
He bridged Eastern and Western thought, showing that the language of science and the language of Spirit both point to the same reality: everything in creation is energy, vibration, and consciousness — the living presence of God expressed as light.
His message was simple yet revolutionary: by stilling the mind and opening the heart, we can experience our oneness with that infinite light within.
Everything we believe to be solid — our bodies, our possessions, even the ground beneath our feet — is, in truth, made of light.
Not the light we see with our eyes, but divine light — the vibrational essence of Spirit, the thought of God made visible.
We live inside this divine radiance, though our senses translate it into form, color, and texture so that our minds can comprehend creation.
It’s as though God, in His mercy, slows down His own infinite brilliance until we can live within it.
And in that slowing, we call it matter.
We call it reality.
But it is all Spirit.
The table before us, the mountain, the ocean, the body — all light interpreted as substance.
As Yogananda taught, “Matter is spirit in its lowest vibration, and spirit is matter in its highest form.”
When Jesus said, “I am the light of the world,” He wasn’t speaking metaphorically.
He was revealing the deepest truth — that all creation, all life, even our human identity, are fragments of that one eternal light, refracted into individual souls.
As we begin to “die to ourselves” — to the illusion of being separate bodies, separate minds — the illusion thins, and we glimpse the true world.
It is not a place of matter, but of energy, of consciousness, of unbroken light.
We do not disappear when the body fades; we return to what we’ve always been.
We awaken from the dream of form and find that the dreamer was divine all along.
Carl Jung once suggested that dreams are images of God, messages from the soul speaking in the language of Spirit.
And those who paint or write their dreams, he said, find peace because they engage directly with that divine dialogue.
In dreams, the laws of matter bend and dissolve — not because they are suspended, but because we momentarily return to our truer state: beings of light, creating form by thought.
In this sense, waking life and dream life are not so different.
Both are God speaking through images, teaching us to see beyond them.
Every form, every face, every event is a beam of light asking to be remembered as Spirit.
“In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” — John 1:4
Dear God,
Teach me to see beyond the surface of things — beyond matter, beyond fear, beyond the illusion of separation.
Let me feel the pulse of Your light within all I touch, all I see, all I love.
When my body fades and my senses quiet, let me awaken not into darkness, but into the brightness of Your eternal Spirit —
where dreams, light, and life are one.
Amen.
