The Redeeming Light (With Nayaswami Krishnadas)

Truth is one and eternal. Realize oneness with it in your deathless Self, within.

The following commentary is based on the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda.

The Book of Isaiah in the Bible, Chapter 9, tells us:

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.

What is this light of which so many Scriptures speak? In Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramhansa Yogananda, we read of an early experience the Master had with that light:

I was blessed about the age of eight with a wonderful healing through the photograph of Lahiri Mahasaya. This experience gave intensification to my [divine] love. While at our family estate in Ichapur, Bengal, I was stricken with Asiatic cholera. My life was despaired of; the doctors could do nothing. At my bedside, Mother frantically motioned me to look at Lahiri Mahasaya’s picture on the wall above my head.

“Bow to him mentally!” She knew I was too feeble even to lift my hands in salutation. “If you really show your devotion and inwardly kneel before him, your life will be spared!”

I gazed at his photograph and saw there a blinding light, enveloping my body and the entire room. My nausea and other uncontrollable symptoms disappeared; I was well. At once I felt strong enough to bend over and touch Mother’s feet in appreciation of her immeasurable faith in her guru. Mother pressed her head repeatedly against the little picture.

“O Omnipresent Master, I thank thee that thy light hath healed my son!”

I realized that she too had witnessed the luminous blaze through which I had instantly recovered from a usually fatal disease.

“Where My light is,” God once told a saint whom the divine light had healed, “no darkness can dwell.” The divine light – pure, calm, liberating – is the only final cure for every kind of delusion: ill health, emotional grief, and spiritual ignorance. Seek it daily in the silence, in deep meditation.

As the Bhagavad Gita says in the fifth Chapter:

For whom

That darkness of the soul is chased by light,

Splendid and clear shines manifest the Truth

As if a Sun of Wisdom sprang to shed

Its beams of light.

Thus, through holy Scripture, God has spoken to mankind.