No concept has more incisively explained the dualistic nature of our material world than the Hindu-Buddhist doctrine of “Maya.” Maya is the philosophical and religious thesis that while God is One, his material creation presents itself in an illusory manifestation of dueling opposites. Dualism is the hallmark of creation. That is, light and dark; good and evil are inextricably bound together in the fabric of the physical universe, but they are not of the true nature of God. God is Light only and Good only. God’s Light is so all-encompassing that shadows do not exist within it; His goodness is elevated to such a height that evil could not exist other than as it is manifested in the physical world. Just as a painter renders the material form of figures and objects with contrasts of lighter and darker pigments, God has manifested the beings and objects of material creation in contrasts of light and shadow. These contrasts disappear entirely into the Light of God when viewed from the point of view of true enlightenment or “God-Realization” as Yogananda calls it.
The road to enlightenment, therefore, lies in tearing asunder the “veil of illusion” that separates us, creatures who experience ourselves and our world only through the distorted lens of maya, from the One-ness of God. Our lenses are the five senses and the veil of illusion expresses itself in our individual egos, hard shells we develop that (we believe) separate our inner souls from the Reality of God. The human ego believes that it controls the reigns of the sense organs and therefore cannot see beyond their sensory stimuli to the Infinite and Absolute that lie just behind the veil.
To me, the doctrine of maya is like a scalpel that slices through our illusory view of life and explains all of human conflict and suffering in a single, blinding burst of insight. It is because of maya that human beings are said to be asleep and in need of “Awakening.” In “The Matrix” movies, Keanu Reeves plays a man asleep in a computer-driven virtual world he manipulates from inside a cocoon-like box that insulates him from the true sensory world of which he was ignorant. James Cameron expands on this theatrical conceit in “Avatar.” Yet, when Keanu Reeves’ character awakens to the real world, he finds it to be a cold and bleak place of hard surfaces. He awakens to a world of relative sensory deprivation; a monastery, perhaps, in which the only route to enlightenment would seem to be through a sort of fasting against sensory stimuli. “The Matrix” is not a movie about enlightenment, however: the Awakening theat true spiritual disciples experience when they shatter the veil of maya is not to a bleak white room, but to the light-energy and bliss of God. In spiritual terms, what we can learn from “The Matrix” is that in order to shake off maya, man must consciously become aware of the illusory power of sensual input by going to an inner place in which the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of our world are turned down low if not off.
Since nearly all of us, Westerners and Easterners alike, prefer to live a wordly life to a path of monastic devotion to a saintly guru, it is hard to expect that many of us are truly willing to seek enlightenment. The real question for Western man thus becomes, is it possible to advance ourselves spiritually while engaging actively in our world; that is, while acting on the stage of maya? The great lesson that Western civilization has imparted to the world is the conviction (and perhaps the evidence) that we can act here and now to manipulate the variables of maya to make the physical world a better place for sustaining human life. Still, the Eastern teaching that all worldly action is a manifestation of maya is the more humbling lesson of civilization. The cause of personal enlightenment is served with difficulty in a life-long pageant of worldly deeds and adventures. Thus it is not surprising that in the ancient Indian tradition, an older family man walks off on his own toward the end of his life to become a mendicant seeking union with God, once his wordly duties to family and society have been completed.
Bird of Spirit 
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