Questioning Maya – September 2, 2010

If you are questioning the truth of the Hindu doctrine of “maya,” that the physical world is essentially illusory, then consider this. Do you ever think about a place you’ve left behind? What is left of it besides your memory? Only the place you occupy at the present moment feels real – other places appear to be mere projections of the mind.
Of course, you can go back and visit those locales from whence you came and when you are there, the reality of your former surroundings becomes primary again. Still, by the same token, the place you are in right now will recede from your consciousness. Add to this the fact that your past home has now changed, perhaps radically, in the intervening years, and the illusory properties of the physical world seem even more pronounced. We cannot recapture the past, we can only confront the hallucination of the present. In a funny way, our shared physical world is both real and not real at the same time. This is the paradox known as maya.

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