This Chapter is Taken from The Book “Glimpses of The Life and Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi” described by Frank H. Humphreys.
Realisation is nothing but seeing God literally. You must read all I write literally. Our greatest mistake is that we think of God as acting symbolically and allegorically, instead of practically and literally.
Take a piece of glass, paint colours and forms on it, and put it into a magic lantern, turn on a white light, and the colours and 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 is it 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 asleep 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 there was a piece of glass in front of the light, for the light would have shown 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 is it with an ordinary man. His mind is like the screen. On it shines the light, dulled and changed because he has allowed the many-sided world to stand in the way of the Light (God) and break 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 causes, 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 say, “This is God animating a body,” which body answers, more or less perfectly, to the direction of God, as a ship answers more or less perfectly to her helm.