A Light in the Darkness / Ein Licht in der Dunkelheit

“Take a piece of glass, paint colours and forms on it, and put the same into a magic lantern, turn on a little light, and the  colours and the forms painted on the glass are reproduced on the screen. If that light were not turned on, you would not see  the colours of the slide on the screen.

“How are colours formed? By breaking up white light with a many-sided prism. So it is with a man’s character. It is seen when  the Light of Life (God) is shining through it, i.e. in a man’s actions. If the man is sleeping or dead, you do not see his  character. Only when the Light of Life is animating the character and causing it to act in a thousand different ways, in  response to its contact with this many-sided world, can you perceive a man’s character. If white light had not been broken up  and put into forms and shapes on our magic lantern slide, we should never have known that there was a piece of glass in front  of the light, for the light would have shone clearly through. In a sense that white light was marred, and had some of its clearness taken from it by having to shine through the colours on the glass.

“So it is with an ordinary man. His mind is like the screen. On it shines light, dulled and changed because he has allowed the  many-sided world to stand in the way of the Light (God) and broken it up. He sees only the effects of the Light (God) instead  of the Light (God) Himself, and his mind reflects the effects he sees just as the screen reflects the colours on the glass.  Take away the prism and the colours vanish, absorbed back into the white light from whence they came. Take away the colours  from the slide and the light shines clearly through. Take away from our sight the world of effects we see, and let us look only  into the cause, and we shall see the Light (God).

“A Master in meditation, though the eyes and ears be open, fixes his attention so firmly on ‘That which sees’ that he neither  sees nor hears, nor has any physical consciousness at all — nor mental either, but only spiritual.

“We must take away the world, which causes our doubts, which clouds our mind, and the light of God will shine clearly through.  How is the world taken away? When, for example, instead of seeing a man you see and say, ‘This is God animating a body’, which  body answers, more or less perfectly, to the directions of God, as a ship answers more or less perfectly to her helm.

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A passage taken from the book “Ramana Maharshi and The Path of Self Knowledge”, by ARTHUR OSBORNE, from a letter written to a friend in London by F. H. Humphreys and published by her in the International Psychic Gazette, London.