No book on spiritualism would be complete without a take on maya. Maya has been described by most spiritual people as delusion of the mind. Guru Vashisht has given fabulous interpretations of maya throughout his lessons to Ram called Yog Vasishta, the Supreme Yoga by Swami Venkateshananda.
Quote 1
“Whatever is seen, either in a dream or in the waking state, has space alone as support. It is born of space and it is of the nature of space (void). This space is not other than the supreme, infinite consciousness. Nothing, not even this body, has ever been created; hence nothing exists. The infinite consciousness experiences the existence as if in a dream. The diversity that arises in consciousness, on account of the limitlessness of its potentiality, appears to give rise to diversity of creatures.”
In case this quote encourages you to take a sabbatical, don’t. We will get to the bottom of it within a page or two.
Quote 2
“All things in this world are forever unreal, but they are also real because of the consciousness that is the sole reality and their content. Whatever that consciousness decides ‘This is such and such’ that it becomes, whether it is real or unreal. Such is the nature of consciousness.
This consciousness conceived of a body, and it becomes aware of the body. It is self-awareness that becomes aware of the body, not the other way round. At the beginning of creation there was nothing else and only consciousness was: and therefore the world-appearance arose in that consciousness like a dream. In whatever manner consciousness conceived the world to be, that alone it became. What else is this world? Since the world is nothing other than consciousness or Brahman, it is declared to be so by the scriptures.
Yet, like a frog in the blind well, foolish and ignorant people base their understanding on the experience of the moment and, on account of their perverse understanding, they are deluded into thinking that the body alone is the source of experience or awareness. But we have nothing to do with them. However intelligent a person may be, if he is unable to dispel one’s doubts, such a person is ignorant. If self-awareness is one of the characteristics of the physical body, then why does a corpse not experience anything?
The truth is the other way round. It is the consciousness of Brahman, the infinite consciousness, that appears as this universe – just as the dream objects appear in your consciousness. Brahman is the infinite consciousness; he conceives of this dream-city, which is the virat or the cosmic person. This cosmic person is the creator Brahma and is also of pure consciousness, although it is known as this universe.
Whatever was conceived of in the dream-creation of Brahma the creator, alone, is experienced here in that same manner. Thus the body has two states – the living and the dead. Even so this creation appears and disappears. It has no cause other than Brahman, hence it is none other than Brahman. Whether the body exists or not, this consciousness experiences what it is aware of anywhere at any time, before and after ‘death’ ! It is consciousness alone which conceives of ‘the other world’ and experiences it as such. Such deluded experience does not cease until one resorts to the right means of liberation when the mental conditioning ceases and the consciousness becomes unconditioned.”
If you are still awake, maybe it’s time for a coffee break!
The Indian scriptures have spoken about maya being a world of perception and duality. All that we know about our world and in fact the cosmos is defined by the scriptures as a projection of the mind.
Though this is hard to swallow, the sages of yore learned these truths in deep states of meditation. If Rama was real (and I believe he was) and if Guru Vashisht was his teacher, then what he taught was knowledge beyond the realm of perception.
The Supreme Thought
It is difficult sometimes to understand people like Gurudev or Guru Vashisht or the exponents of the Upanishads because they speak with their background of knowledge and their level of understanding. So, in order to help you understand what these people mean, when they say that the world is nothing more than a thought-form and the creation of the cosmic mind, I have worked it out in simpler words.
All of us sit down to think and sometimes our minds visualize creatively, not necessarily events, but anything we feel like visualizing. For example, if I were to ask you to visualize a goat-man, I am sure you would be able to, through imagination, create the image of a man who has some similarities to a goat. Artists do this all the time. They visualize and paint what is not real but what they imagine to be. In the earlier pages of this text, you’ve probably read and figured out that any mental activity consumes energy. Telepathy or visualization both fall in the same bracket. What I am trying to explain here is that you have the ability to create in your vision anything hypothetical that you may want to and that it is a consumption of a minute amount of energy.
When it comes to healing remotely, there are many people in India, who can cure the pain of a person across the world by using energy through the mind and visualization. This is utilization of visualization at a higher level. There have been so many mentalists who have been able to move matter by concentration of their mind. The best case and example that I have heard of is Yuri Geller who could bend spoons and move things even while he was talking through the television. People who were watching the show found their forks and spoons bent in their homes.
So let’s apply this concept at the level of the Supreme Consciousness. The thought or visualization or imagination by the Supreme Consciousness, uses a zillion times more energy than that of a mere mortal. Being the supreme form of existence, those thought forms of the Consciousness Supreme, manifest as planets, beings, and other life forms.
This is why Guru Vashisht has always said that the world is not real, it is made of only creative visualization of the thought of the creator. Understanding this can help you figure out maya and delusion but not necessarily help you live in that realization unless you invest a lot of your life in transcending sensory perception. Please believe what I have to say and work your life accordingly. You can still worship yourself and revere yourself having accepted someone else’s testimony rather than spending half your life in trying to realize it.
To examine this subject at a much lower level of understanding (as promised a few lines ago), we need to accept that our senses have a limited range of perception. For example, a brick wall presents a solid, impenetrable obstacle for the physical body but presents a paper thin, easily penetrable “non-obstacle” for a spirit body (see chapter 3-“Matter with a different vibration”). Please also read the following essay presented by Vijay Mehra (a senior corporate executive in the USA), where he explains through empirical evidence, how little our senses really perceive. He then turns you turtle, by speaking of scientific postulations about the “observed” universe being but a function of the observer. This is pretty much how our sages defined maya.
Is science finally catching up? How long will it be before science proves that the observer and the observed and the observation are all three a part of the same consciousness?
The day this happens, this book will have to be shifted from the “Philosophy” section to the “Science” section of a book shop.
Limitations of Perception
Dear Reader: Have you ever wondered….what is reality? Have you ever caught yourself saying ‘if I can see it I will believe it?’
Well consider this: what you see with your naked eye is less than 0.00000000005% of the electromagnetic spectrum that exists, as proven by scientists (see figure below please):
This means that when as human beings we say “I need to see it to believe it”, we are essentially implying that unless ‘the seen by us’ falls within that 0.00000000005% of the band of ‘what is’, we will claim ‘because we can’t see it, we don’t believe it.’ Pretty narrow-minded, wouldn’t you agree?
Here are a few more facts, hard scientific facts mind you, that will help you realise how limited our sense perception is to realizing and fathoming what really is. Consider this:
• Just as the example above shows our sight is limited to only about 0.00000000005% of the electromagnetic spectrum, can you guess how much of the acoustic spectrum we can hear as human beings? The answer is less than 1%. That’s right: we hear less than 1% of all the sounds that are prevalent on planet earth alone.
• As you read this book you might think you are ‘sitting still’ or ‘lying still’ and reading. Wrong. You are travelling 220 kilometres/ second across the galaxy of the Milky Way. Can you even fathom how fast you’re travelling right now? Are your ‘senses’ picking that up at all?
• What you think of as ‘your body’ and seems ‘very solid’ to you is actually mostly empty space. That’s correct. The atoms in your body are mostly 99.9999999999999999% empty space.
• When you ‘see a rainbow’ the colours are not ‘out there’, they’re in your eyes and assimilated by your brain. The conical photoreceptor cells of the human eye create the signals which the human brain interprets as the ‘colours of the rainbow’. For animals without conical photoreceptor cells in their eyes, the same rainbow that appears to have seven colours to you and me, appears in shades of grey.
Also consider a few more things science told us about reality over several thousands of years:
• The earth was flat and that if we went beyond the horizon we would ‘fall off’ the edge. We now know reality to be very different.
• The earth was still and the sun revolved around the earth. We now know reality to be very different.
Fast-forward to today and we now know via Quantum Physics that the fundamental principles of the universe, as postulated by Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton, no longer hold in the Quantum Physics world, and this has been empirically proven by scientists in the laboratory and is undisputed in the scientific community . Specifically, Scientists have now found that the ‘observed universe’ is a function of the ‘observer’, and that the notion of a ‘universe out there’ independent of an ‘observer’, is essentially an illusion, is not true. The famous ‘double-slit’ experiment done in a laboratory proved this beyond doubt .
Quantum Physics also shows via the phenomenon of ‘Quantum Entanglement’ that two or more particles can communicate faster than the speed of light at far ends of the universe. This collapses Einstein’s theory of the speed of light being the fastest in the universe, AND it opens up the possibility of explaining the concept of ‘telepathy’ scientifically .
So……if any of this has ‘piqued your interest’ to better understand ‘what is’ and to better understand your true nature, please read on. The point is not to make any ‘wild connections’ without empirical experience or evidence, but rather, to open your mind’s eye, Dear Reader, to the fact that perhaps there’s ‘more out there’ than what you are directly perceiving with your senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch etc. This ‘acknowledgement’ or ‘opening up your mind’ is the first step toward ‘unconditioning’ or ‘unlearning’ what is blocking you from getting to know your True Self. The journey toward getting to know your True Self will change your life, and the life of those around you. That’s a guarantee.
The more you get into understanding your own true nature, the more you will be able to understand the nature of ‘what is’ and ‘who you really are.’