In Sanskrit, there is a beautiful word called Maya, which means illusion. Philosophers say that the world is just an illusion. We find it very difficult to accept this. How can we believe that what we see, touch, feel is just an illusion when there is a physical reality to it?
A small story:
Once, a philosopher was explaining to a man that the whole world is just an illusion. The man got angry thinking that the philosopher was just trying to fool him into thinking that what he could see with his eyes and feel with his touch was all his hallucination. He picked up a stone and threw it at the philosopher’s foot. The philosopher shrieked in pain.
The man retorted, ‘Why are you yelling? Isn’t this world just an illusion? How are you then feeling pain?’
The concept of illusion has to be clearly understood. What we see is difficult to accept as illusion. That is why, in the East, we have a term to describe this: Maya. Ya ma iti maya: that which is not there but which disturbs you as if it is there is maya. We do not see reality as it is but we see it through our lens of past and future.
We associate the reality with our past and extrapolate the future from it. We are not able to view it in an unbiased fashion. Just like how the sky is untouched by the clouds moving in front of it, in the same way, your true Self is untouched and separate from your body or mind or thoughts. It is something beyond these. Maya makes you believe that you are just the body or the mind. It limits the true and eternal You to the ephemeral body and the transient mind.
The Paramahamsa Upanishad, one of the Hindu scriptures that defines the qualities of an enlightened Master says, ‘What is the state of the illumined man? All selfish attachments have dropped from him. He lives his life for the welfare of all. He faces heat and cold, pleasure and pain, honor and dishonor with equal calm. Free from the sway of doubt and false knowledge, he lives united with the Lord of Love. Entering the non-dual state, he attains the goals of evolution.’
When you are under the sway of illusion it does not mean that the world itself is an illusion. It means that what you see is illusory because what you see is different from reality; what you see is a mere projection of your mind and your mind is only a collection of thoughts, which in turn is a collection of deductions based on past happenings and ideas instilled in you by others. This is what is meant by illusion. What you create with your mind, with your set of instilled beliefs causes you to see the world in a particular way. That is the illusion that you are experiencing.
Each one experiences things in their own way, through their own illusion. That is why although the world is the same, people’s experience of it differs. Each one has his or her own illusory view of life. Illusion or Maya has to be understood in this fashion.
All forms of duality, such as pain or pleasure, happiness or joy, are projections of this illusion. That is why an enlightened person who is believed to be out of illusion, experiences permanent bliss and none of these conflicting emotions.
When the great Master, Lord Krishna says in the timeless piece of philosophy and poetry, the Bhagavad Gita, ‘The true yogi or spiritually evolved person is wide awake when the world sleeps’, he does not mean in the literal sense that the enlightened person is awake when the world is sleeping at night. What He means is that the enlightened person has broken the veil of illusion and he realizes that the perceptions of the opposites are only transient and not the Truth. So, he is not swayed by the opposites. He is no longer in the dream world that most of us are living in.
Legend has it that Janaka, a ruler in ancient India, who was a highly learned sage as well, had a person going around his capital, Mithila, shouting: Jagrat! Jagrat! many times a day. This means: Wake up! Wake up! Not only did his subjects need to be woken up from physical sleep, but also prodded into wakefulness and awareness from their unconscious and subconscious. Do not think that you dream only when you are sleeping. Even in the waking state, you are weaving your dreams of the future and are not aware or conscious of the present. Everyone is in his own dream world, his own version of reality, which is nowhere close to the actual reality.
When you realize this consciously and break out of it, you will find that the entire Existence is so beautiful; it is God and you are God because the entire Existence is one. During nighttime, we are aware that we are dreaming, during daytime we are not aware that we are dreaming, that is the only difference. With fantasy, we are not just limiting ourselves, but are actually disrespecting ourselves. When you feel someone is more handsome than you are, you create a space, a gap between you and your body. You lose your uniqueness. You create dis-ease within yourself. God is not an engineer; he is an artist; he is a painter, a sculptor; no one being is like another because God has created each of us in a unique way.
When you see some hero on the television flexing his muscles, you yearn to be just like him. I am not saying that the desire to be physically fit is bad in itself. But, when you start being driven by the desire to look like someone else, you create a rift in your being, a wound in your being. Do not impose limits and thresholds and standards on yourself based on others. Compare yourself with your own self and see how you can better your standards and raise the bar. When you are thinking about others all the time, you are in the past or in the future, with your fantasy. When you are in your own boundary, you are in the present.
Living in the present moment is the missing link that helps you to traverse the horizontal and vertical lines at the same time and space.
Every moment is a possibility that you can explode in all directions. In quantum spirituality, there is no attachment or detachment. If you are not in awareness, you detach and attach. When you are in awareness, there is no attachment or detachment. You simply are, that’s all. You will not even be able to associate yourself with these opposites. Read more: Bliss is the Goal and the Path by by Paramahamsa Nithyananda.
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