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WATCHING THE COSMIC MOTION
PICTURE OF LIFE
In this hall of life, we are all motion picture actors as well
as movie fans. We entertain, inspire and instruct others with the
show of our experiences; and we ourselves watch the ever-changing,
interesting pictures of other lives.
The pictures of current events are filmed in the east, west, north
and south. The various nations with their strange and colorful actings
of diverse customs, traditions and occupations amid varying scenic
and climatic environments, offer infinitely rich and inexhaustible
material for producing life-films of ever-new interest.
Educational, sensational, comical, saddening and inspiring pictures
are taken by the mind-camera of the average man, every day, any
time, anywhere. There are many comic films in life. Inspiring scenes
help us when we behold the unrolled film of the lives of great men
and great adventurers such as Lincoln, Gandhi, Mme. Curie, Byrd,
Emerson and thousands of other unique personalities, as well as
the heroic world figures of religious teachers, such as Jesus, Buddha,
Zoroaster, Confucius, Mohammed, Krishna and others.
We watch, moved and entertained, the mental motion pictures as
filmed in Shakespearean tragedies and other great dramatic writings,
in the house of our imagination. The pictures of world events, daily
facts, evoked by our newspapers, hold our passing interest. The
pictures of the sufferings of others bring a tear, a determination
to help them. Through their sorrow, we find our own joy in helping
them.
Sympathetic higher beings entertain themselves with the joy of
helping mortals. If they cried, and became identified with the tears
of others, they could not render help. For sorrow increases sorrow,
which can only be diminished and healed through contact with the
potent salve of unshakably happy minds. Hence, in watching the tragic
mistakes or misfortunes of other lives, or of our own, we should
feel only tears of joy because of our ability and absolute power
to help. There cannot be room for the dark disturbing emotion of
grief in children made in the likeness of God.
Individuals who are highly nervous, or who are suffering with
the malady of melancholia, or anaemic pessimism, or who are stricken
with spells of despair at the approach of the least difficulties
of life—these do not profit by watching the pictures of tragedy
in other lives. They will have fainting spells; they cannot thus
learn the lesson of the result of wrong behavior and thus desist
from error, nor can they render help to those who are suffering,
since they themselves are not free from pain.
Thus, one must be thoroughly prepared mentally to watch profitably
the motion picture of the tragedy of trying experiences in the lives
of others, in order to be able to render help in making others look
upon life as only a picture for their entertainment and instruction.
The great wars of Europe and Asia, the natural cataclysms of earthquakes
and floods, the famines, prosperous eras, influence of world-saints,
statesmen, and villains, the work of the colossal geniuses of the
ages—the poets, business men, writers, courageous reformers,
great lovers, and heroes—these events and these natures have
all played their parts in the studio of the centuries.
Everything took time; to the consciousness of man everything seemed
to last long. Each life seemed almost unending, each great event
was all-absorbing, but when the Director of Life called "Cut!"
the film was finished. The greatest lives, the complex knotted existences,
the whole history of nations, your life and mine, past, present,
and future (if we could but see), which seem to drag on minutely,
could nevertheless be filmed and each life shown in a couple of
hours. One's life, lived through a hundred years, seems so long-drawn-out
when taken through the slow mental camera, but with the telescopic
lens of retrospection, one sees the whole panorama at a glance.
Is this life a movie show? The millions of geologic years, the
constellations of heaven, the floating vapors, atomic combinations,
earth materials, oceans, continents, nations and their histories,
millions of births and the almost complete change by death every
hundred years of all the earth's inhabitants, the various great
intellectual, spiritual, and material civilizations, their rise
and fall—with this background, we can see all life as a vast,
ever-changing, ever-new, ever-entertaining mighty film in the hall
of introspection. This life is a picture shown in serials and by
installments, infinitely interesting, ever-fresh, ever-stirring,
ever-complex. The master minds and world-changing men such as Jesus,
Buddha, Socrates, Asoka, Mohammed, Caesar, William the Conqueror,
Darwin, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and other outstanding pioneers
and leaders are the great stars of the motion picture productions,
who command universal attention from their audiences.
The pictures of life must always be different to be interesting.
One does not want to see, again and again, the same comedies of
lives or the same news of prosaic facts, or the same tragedies of
harrowing or gruesome experiences. One wants variety, and can hardly
bear to see the same picture twice. That is why the Great Director
of the motion picture of life keeps everything changing. You can
not drink twice from the same running water; you can not watch the
same event twice. The water passes by; the events change; you are
not now the same man that you were a second ago—your thoughts
have changed, your sum total is in a different proportion.
Why not then take life simply as a motion picture? To do that,
you must steel your mind against sorrow. You must be prepared for
variety. You must be a motion picture player, an entertainer, as
well as one of the audience, in watching your own pictures and the
pictures of others. While playing the part of combating disease,
or fighting failures, or undergoing accidents, or enduring the trials
of life, you must know that you are just playing a part.
Just as an actor in the moving pictures is untouched by the sorrow
he has to depict in his characters, so must you remain untouched
by the changing pictures of inevitable misfortune, sickness, sudden
failure and unforeseen obstacles in life. Sickness, failure and
grief are so, simply by the relative standards of human consciousness.
A disciplined consciousness, united to cosmic consciousness, never
inwardly experiences sickness, or suffering, or failure. As God's
children, we are always perfect, and we must recover that consciousness
by wisdom and true understanding of the meaning of life and its
problems.
Care not if you are not the principal player in the movies of
life. No motion picture is made up of only one player, or one event.
Your part in playing, if short or obscure, is yet very important,
for without you the "plot" of life is incomplete. In the
Universal Director's eyes, he who plays his life's part well, whatever
that may be, is made a star to shine in His immortal galaxy.
Most of our troubles spring from not knowing what our parts are.
This results from not developing our innate intuitive soul faculties.
Rouse the all-feeling, all-seeing wisdom by regular meditation,
and find your part. Then you must play and watch your own playing,
or the playing of others—be it the news of plain facts, or
a comedy of errors, or the tragedy of trying experiences—with
an inwardly entertained mind. There is no room for pain, grievance,
or boredom in watching the movies of our own lives. The retrospective
consciousness of man can play all the noble parts of life joyously,
untouched by suffering. These cosmic movies are all for our entertainment.
The Great Director of the Motion Picture Company of Life is made
of joy. We, as His children, are made in His image of joy. From
joy we came, in joy we live, in joy we melt. He brought out this
cosmic motion picture to keep Himself entertained. Having come out
of His being, we are endowed with the same quality of super-consciousness,
by which we can watch the pictures of life, of birth, death and
world events with the same divinely enjoying spirit.
You watch a tragedy in a motion picture house, and when it is
over, you say: "O, it was a fine picture!" So must you
be able to look upon the pictures of trials of your own life and
say: "O, my life is interesting, with troubles and difficulties
to be overcome. These are all my stimulants to show me my errors,
and help me assume the right mental attitude by which I can watch
with joy the fascinating spectacle of life."
The consciousness of man is made of God and is pain-proof. All
physical and mental sufferings come by identification, imagination,
and wrong human habits of thinking. We have to travel along the
labyrinthine path of life, visiting many motion picture houses of
varied experiences, entering them with the consciousness of being
entertained and instructed.
Then life and death will be watched with an unchangeable, joyous
consciousness. We will find our consciousness to be one with cosmic
consciousness, unchanged by the human waking of birth or the sleep
of death. Thus we will watch the cosmic motion picture with perennial,
ever-new joy.
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