The Grand Illusion

 

Photo Credit: Templepurohit

The Grand Illusion

In the great epic Mahabharata, when Duryodhana enters the hall of illusion (maya sabha), he loses his way, becomes confused and envious. 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 (maya), in a state of ignorance about ourselves, whereby we fail to discriminate between truth and falsehood, become confused, engaging ourselves in egoistic struggles and binding actions, and lose our connection with God and our own divinity.

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 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. 

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, whereas 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.

The way to realise the absolute truth is through meditation under the guidance of a realised Master. You have to do all the hard work – you have to completely, unconditionally surrender to the Master, accept him as Paramatma and then you will be able to experience soul consciousness and the flow of divine energy. The beginning of your inner journey!