Thoughts...

Sri gurubhyo namaha.

I have been thinking. And I have been thinking. Trying to put into words the overwhelmingly disconnected thought stream is a bit difficult to say the least - though even that I can suffer, the martyr that I am. But it is the thought of the misery that I will be inflicting on the 'herbally challenged' readers who will be out of breath trying to keep up with the speed and flow (or not) of thoughts that makes me wonder.
As usual, the Mooligaisidhan is here to convince you that something is quite different to what you thought that something to mean! That something is Maya and its evolutes (which is quite simply, everything).

We have all become quite used to the idea of Maya being a negative kind of energy. It is the Illusion, the Veil, the Shadow, the Game and all the other knee jerk references to it. She (Maya) has been used as the supreme 'air brush' in the philosophical/theosophical and religious contexts to sort of touch and taint everything. She hides, they say. She holds your inner self from realising his/her own supreme nature, they say. Maybe they are right. But that doesn't necessarily mean it is impossible for Her to do anything else.

I often think that if Maya is a veil, then She is one which reveals more than She hides! Imagine this - Maya is the power which through Her operation lets the infinite jivas experience and learn the lessons each of them need to learn individually and as a collective, through or from the same set of objective principals. In a more reduced example, the same piece of rope is perceived as different jivas at different times and utilised to serve different purposes at different times, though the rope (objective principal in this instance) remains always the same. When energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it is impossible to keep 'creating' new things to keep generating the new experiences that are needed for the never ending journey of the jivas. Then how are endless universes born and absorbed? How is it that each individual jiva perceives and reacts differently to the same set of things? Like the physics experiment where there is a box with its lid painted totally black. Try this at home! Take a cardboard box and paint its lid totally black. Make a hole the size of a two euro (ok, 2 rupee!) coin on the lid so that its possible to see through the lid into the inside of the box. The box on the inside is white (or cream). Now put the lid on the box and ask anyone to look at it and guess which is darker/blacker, the lid or the inside of the box?? When you look at it, the inside appears to be darker black than the lid (which is painted black), though it is actually white. Apart from the 'intellectual' aspect of this which will explain the reasons why in terms of the properties of light, and the fact that it is an optical illusion, think about it. Tell me, just because the inside is 'not really' black did it make the appearance of darkness inside any less 'real' to the perceiver? If it was an illusion just like in a dream, then the darkness inside should disappear once the 'awareness' of its 'real' white inside becomes clear. Like the gold coins that were given to us in a dream are of no use in the shop when we wake up from the dream - the illusion of blackness on the inside of the box should disappear when the real colour is seen. To the perceiver the blackness still exists (even on being informed of the actual inside colour), though collectively standing on the outside of the 'actual perception, perceiver, perceiving tangle' we can theoretically confirm that the apparent blackness is only an optical illusion.
Maya is like that. When the great sages and seers of yore like Shankara, Vyasa and others described this world appearance in terms like 'illusion', 'dream like', 'unreal', etc, we have to keep in mind that they were speaking from the transcendental aspect where they were outside the 'perceiver, perception, perceiving' triad. Their words that life in the world cycle is like a mega illusion should not be used by us on this side of the divide as a means to escape or disentangle from the above mentioned triad. Like words that describe food do not by themselves satisfy the hunger of the hungry man, like the word water does not by its mere mention quench the thirst of the thirsty, the terms 'illusion', 'dream' etc will not bring about the realisation of the same to be true personally. While within the operational radius of the super power called Maya, even mighty Gods and seers are confounded in an instant. All our stories in the epics like Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the stories of the puranas etc abound with examples of Gods and great beings having the same alternating experiences of joy and sorrow. Just maybe the joys and delights of Indra might appear to be much more magnified than our own (for my delight in a Latte, Indra delights in Soma! for my delight in pursuit of the pleasures of the body, Indra delights with countless divine radiant damsels). But be sure, Indras sorrows are equally magnified (for my little scuffle to get a seat in a busy bus or train, Indra battles deadly asuras! for my little reprimand, Indra suffers with his body covered in thousand yonis!). In the end, it is really the same story. Albeit in an altered scale.

Maya is the veil which hides when the subjective reality overwhelms the objective and when the opposite is true Maya is the veil that reveals. While She veils uncountable things through Her all encompassing grip, She simultaneously reveals infinite things (out of actually nothing or the 'one' thing) so that the show can go on.

To be continued.......