An article by Paramhansa Yogananda first published in the East-West Magazine in October of 1933
When you watch the latest perfected moving pictures, you realize how life-like the electric shadows seem. In a revival of an old picture I once saw the great and noble Lincoln shot and killed. I wept. My heart ached and I was sorry that I had witnessed such a cruel act and I couldn’t understand why such a wonderful and innocent man like Lincoln should be slain. I sighed to myself: “Lincoln is dead, gone forever, never to come back again.” My heart ached and I was very sad. I felt like a rebel against the cruelty of God and Nature.
Then it occurred to me that I could stay there and wait for the picture of Lincoln to start all over again. The picture came after a couple of short reels, and when I saw Lincoln born anew and growing on the screen, I was very happy, and in joy I said: “Oh, I have seen Lincoln born again after he was killed and dead forever, as no man hath seen, and now I don’t want to see him dead again.” Then I left the picture house.
Some day, likewise, when you come to realize that this universe is nothing but a series of comedies and tragedies shown by the Cosmic Operator on the screen of time and consciousness, you will weep no more for your lost loved ones, whose life films have flickered on the screen of experience in this Cosmic Movie House. Maybe, if you become quite familiar with the Cosmic Operator by meeting Him in Silence, He will repeat before your consciousness the specific true-to-sight, true-to-meaning, true-to-touch talkies which you long to see with all your lost loved actors in them.
God shelves old films of life and seldom shows them over unless some devotee, through deep desire, appeals to Him to see those old familiar films again on the screen of his consciousness. The Master Operator constantly throws on the screen of consciousness the pictures of new Soul actors, or of old Soul actors, dressed in new garments of flesh in a surrounding of constantly changing backgrounds of past and present environments. The great Story Writer revamps His old tales and repeats them on the screen of history.
In the situations I encounter today I recognize characters that were once shown to me in different forms and settings. Now they are all old and familiar to me and a voice says: “The newest surprise that each one is to get at the end of the trail of all desires, is to discover that he was always a Son of God and that he had only forgotten it while wandering through the maze of earthly desire and experience.”
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