by Jayaram V
In the great epic Mahabharata, when Duryodhana enters the hall
of illusion
(maya sabha), he loses his way, becomes confused and envious. Seeing
his predicament when Draupadi, laughs at him, he becomes uncontrollably
angry, feeling insulted, and vows to take revenge against the Pandava
clan for their audacity to display their power and wealth to belittle
him in the presence of women. It is in the hall of illusions that
the seeds of the great Mahabharata war were actually sown which
germinated and ultimately consumed the whole Kuru family bringing
them untold misery and great destruction. The epic Mahabharata shows
in many ways how human beings can bring misery and destruction to
themselves and others through their weaknesses, egoism and selfishness,
unmindful of the consequences of their thoughts, desires and actions
and where they may lead them eventually.
The world in which we live is also not very different from the
hall of illusions we read about in the Mahabharata. We also live
here enveloped by illusion, in a state of ignorance about ourselves,
whereby we fail to discriminate between truth and false hood, become
confused, engaging ourselves in egoistic struggles and binding actions,
and lose our connection with God and our own divinity. If some one
comes and tells you that you are a divine soul, you think about it
in disbelief, with no conviction of your own that you could not
have been here unless there was some underlying purpose. We all
want to believe that we are not mere mortals and that there is something
about us that extends beyond what we know and what we can feel and
touch. But our rationale minds would not be satisfied with mere
assurances of religious scriptures or the teachings of self-realized
masters. We need proof, which will not come, however, unless we
stand on the edge and take a deep plunge.
One of the unique concepts of Hinduism is maya, which is actually
used to describe our current state of existence, how much alienated
we are from our true nature and how deeply entangled we become with
the objects of our desires, weaving in the process a web of deceptions
around ourselves that keep us conveniently concealed from the truth
of who we are or what we should have been. It is a state in
which each individual soul considers itself to be someone else,
separate and distinct from the rest of creation and God Himself. Our scriptures make it
clear that our world is a trap and maya is the trapping mechanism.
It is the idea of butter or the temptation of curiosity or some
wicked desire that brings us here in the first place and puts us
in contact with the objects of our world. Once we taste it, we enter
into a make believe world and stop thinking about going back. We
become involved with the process of becoming and being, as embodied
souls, imprisoned in our own thoughts and desire bodies, undergoing
births and deaths, binding ourselves to the consequences of our
own actions and delaying our own liberation.
And who unleashes this potent force? God is described in the
Hindu scriptures as Mayavi, the grand master of illusion. He casts
his net of illusion to catch the individual souls that are swimming
in the waters of life as free souls, enjoying the highest bliss. He then drops
them in the lap of His dynamic energy or Shakti to take care of
the rest of the process. Maya or illusion thus becomes a very potent
instrument in the hands of the Divine Prakriti, the Primal Nature. Through the
force of illusion, She holds the beings under its sway. This objective
is accomplished through the interplay of the triple gunas, the sattva,
rajas and the tamas and the grand play of desires caused by the
formation of the ego and loss of buddhi or the power of discrimination.
Under their influence, the indwelling Purusha becomes attached to
the outside world and thereby suffers from delusion of the mind
and lack of discrimination and true knowledge. God is also described
as the concealer. He hides Himself from Himself in our minds and
bodies and there by perpetuates the belief that He is not what He
is or that He is different from what He is. Maya therefore is not
only a binding mechanism but also a concealing mechanism.
The Gita teaches us how to deliver ourselves from this delusion
of mind and thereby from our bondage to the cycle of births and
deaths and the pairs of opposites such as pain and pleasure or happiness
and sorrow. The true meaning of the word "moksha" is not salvation
but destruction of moha or delusion that precedes salvation. To
achieve this a correct understanding of the mechanism of maya is
essential, which is described in brief in the following lines.
1. The Senses
The sense which are ten in number (five external and five
internal) are the main instruments of
Maya through which it deludes the beings by developing in them the
desire for sense objects. According to the Bhagavadgita, out of
desire comes attachment and out of attachment a man becomes deluded.
2. Loss of buddhi (discrimination)
Senses are imperfect instrument of truth. They cannot go beyond
the sense objects. Therefore they actually breed ignorance. Beings
who depend upon the senses cannot go beyond the visible and perceptible
world. This results in ignorance and the loss of wisdom to know
the reality from unreality, to discern correctly truth from untruth,
good from bad, divine from demonic, right action from wrong action
and so on. Out of the ignorance thus born, the individual soul indulges in wrong
actions, beliefs, thoughts, false knowledge, ignorant masters, egocentric
view of life and incorrect worship of God. Thus it becomes bound
to the material and the mortal existence.
3. Desires and attachment
The person under the influence of Maya is always attached to
the world
outside him. Not only to the world, but very much to his own egoistic
identity of himself, his possessions and his relations. Memories
pursue him, time haunts him and thoughts possess him. By becoming
attached to the world, conditioned by memory and accumulated knowledge,
he develops envy and selfishness and also many such negative qualities
as pride, fear, greed, anger, malice, caprice, cruelty, callousness,
lust and intense desire for success and personal advancement. Life
becomes a battle field in which he alone has to win. There is no
place for failure and weakness. Attracted to pleasures, averse to
pain, fearful of loss and hopeful of gain, unable to go beyond the
lures and temptations of the world, though aware that all is vain
in the end, he plods on, striving and struggling, as if death would
never touch him
4. Sense of duality and multiplicity
The man of delusion cannot see the One hidden in all. He sees
only the diversity and the multiplicity of the life and the world
around him. Feeling lonely and isolated, unable to trust others
and the world he lives in, as if the world is an enemy determined
to subdue him and destroy him, he suffers from intense anxiety
about himself and his future. Because of the sense of duality he loses his unified
vision and sees the world in terms of pairs, divisions, groups,
categories, numbers and opposites, and in short, in terms of relative
and subjective reality.
5. Transience, Instability and Destructibility
One of the characteristic features of illusory existence is that
it gives us the impression that our existence is finite, unstable, impermanent and ever changing. When
an individual soul is drawn into this ever changing unstable world,
which we call samsara or the world of cause and effect, it is
attracted to the sense objects and in the process becomes
subject to the conflicting emotions caused by the pairs of opposites such as pain and pleasure,
gain and loss etc. It suffers from the insecurity and fear of death
and becomes selfish and possessive. The souls develop qualities
which direct their behavior. Those of demonic
nature use cruelty, death and destruction as the means for establishing their
control and supremacy over others.
6. Ego and False identification
Under the influence of illusion, the jivas or individual
souls develop ego sense,
the sense of separateness and pride in their individual merit, personal
possessions and achievements.
The ego is responsible for the sense of ownership and doership,
identification of the individual with his body and mind, and failure
to know his true nature. It makes the individual souls think and act selfishly and egoistically
as if they are different from the others and engages them in acts
of self preservation characterized by competition and conflict
and cooperation and friendship. Thus the ego ultimately lands all
the beings into suffering, delusion and bondage to the earthly life.
7. Incorrect Relationship with God
The beings under illusion cannot see the Invisible God and so
they cannot correctly comprehend Him. They cannot see Him in all
and all in Him. They cannot go beyond the senses and the gunas and
experience the soul consciousness. Even if they do, they cannot
contain that experience in their limited consciousness. Because of egoism they
would not acknowledge God
and would not surrender themselves to Him. Due to their inherent imperfections
and negative qualities, they fail to show true devotion to God
and realize Him in themselves.
8. Mortality and the Cycle of birth and death
Under the influence of illusion, when a jiva or being
indluges in egoistic actions,
accepting the sense of doership, with a desire to enjoy the
fruit of actions, it becomes subject to the laws of karma and dharma
and returns again and again to the world of mortality. Depending
upon its previous actions, it takes birth in different wombs, circumstances
and families and pays the price in the form of suffering from the consequences of
its previous actions.
This process goes on repeatedly till it realizes its folly and
engages in right actions with the right attitude, which is prescribed in the
Bhagavadgita and lays a foundation for its progression towards
its freedom and self-realization.
9. Deliverance from Maya
Not everything is lost for the souls in this world. It is possible
for a soul to escape from the net of illusion by overcoming
its limitations with the help of the
teachings of Lord Krishna who showed the true path of liberation to Arjuna in the middle of the
battle field. By following the Bhagavadgita, a person can
stabilize his mind by controlling his senses and desires; become
a humble devotee of God by concentrating his mind on Him fully,
surrendering to Him unconditionally and absorbed in him through
single minded devotion; perform desireless actions knowing that
only the senses, the organs of the body and the gunas are acting,
offering the fruit of actions to God; and attain the Supreme
Self.
10. What is Truth?
We all suffer from the grand illusion that what we know and
experience through our senses is the truth and that we are capable of
knowing the facts of our existence with the help of our minds
and senses, where as the truth is we cannot discern reality with
our limited consciousness.
We cannot answer the question about truth truthfully, because we do not know the answer.
We may give an answer, some answer, but that answer would not be correct.
It may satisfy our mental curiosity but not our soul's deepest
yearning to be itself. The predicament we face is how can we define something that we have
not been able to experience consciously? How can we bring that
into our field of experience when it does not exist here. We may explain
the transcendental truths of our existence and describe
it in roundabout ways, but we cannot translate it perfectly into
words unless we can contain and maintain the absolute truth in an
absolute way.
With regard to truth, we can take many stand points
and justify each of them with necessary validations which we can
conceive of. We can make each point of view stand by itself or stand
tall or short in comparison with the rest. But we cannot bring them
all together or hold them all together as one complete and whole
truth. That is what Truth is all about. It is everything as well
as nothing. It is multidimensional, indefinable and all
encompassing. It reconciles everything into itself and resolves everything
and anything into one harmonious whole, something which our human
minds can never do, accustomed as they are to relative thinking
and perceptivity. This is the limitation of the human existence
and human intelligence, brought about by the divine play of maya.
It is what happens when you come under the influence of maya and
even not aware of it. You see but you do not actually see. You
live, but you are not sure whether it is the right way of
living. You know something, but you are not sure whether it is
the truth. You are not sure whether you are awake when you are
conscious and asleep when you are unconscious. You are not even
sure why you are here and for what end.
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