A couple of weeks back, I posted about the Hindu concept of Maya. To recap my limited understanding of it, Maya states that we live in an illusion. My thought for an illustration of this involves looking at a tree. When you look at a tree, you don’t experience the actual tree…you experience the light reflecting off of it. That light is in no way the tree. And once the light enters our eyes, the image is interpreted as “tree.” Our other senses result in a similar illusion. You can smell a pine tree and recognize it as such. However, those broken-off molecules are but a fraction of what comprises the whole tree. Touch, perhaps comes closest, but bark is not an entire tree.
Quantum physics has shown that everything is really energy, and that energy is constantly regrouping and creating new forms. So then, reality would be this unimaginably enormous “cloud” of energy constantly regrouping in some kind of dance, and some of those groupings make up our sensory organs and brains which interpret the gross effects of the energy and then label those effects as tree, thee, and me. All this to say that we think we know reality, but it is demonstrable that we don’t.
I find it interesting that the word Maya is a joining of Ma (Source) and Ya (spreading out). To me, this spreading out of source brings to mind the Big Bang and its explosion of the singularity into everything we know, including ourselves, all of it interconnected. Yet, we can’t experience this directly. So if all of the energy that we perceive as Maya was once that singularity, then all that we perceive now is really an expanded version of that singularity; all part of one thing. And we view this from within as something separate from ourselves. So Maya includes the illusion of separation.
Now let’s consider that all beings with senses also have this sensory experience of Maya and respond accordingly by finding food, mates, and shelter and avoiding predators. It would seem that Maya is all they know.
So what sets humans apart? My term for the additional experiential layer is “Story.” Reality is the vast expanse of energy combining over time into different forms. Our sensory experience of this is Maya, the illusion, including the illusion of separateness. Story is the uniquely human interpretation of our experience of Maya. A shared anthropocentric explanation of what is. And it acts as a justification of our actions.
So where is the problem in this? If other beings also experience separateness in Maya and act toward personal gain (food, shelter, mates) what is the problem? The problem is abilities. The non-human world is self-regulated because behavior is limited by nature. The beaver builds its dams, but not ten huge dams – that would be a waste of energy. The vulture feeds itself by cleaning up death. It is not intent on fitting into the cycle, but by following its instincts, it does. If a population of a species is able to overcome the threat of predators, starvation from overpopulation will still control population. Everything balances out. So animals stay in balance with nature via limitation and inherent contentment with natural design.
Humans then arise and evolve the combination of opposable thumbs, symbolic thought, and language. And with these come the ability to bend nature’s checks and balances (for a time). We adapt. This is often thought of as a good thing, but we’ve not also advanced our view of reality. We’ve become like toddlers in a teenage body, having the ability to fulfill our desires without care for consequences. Within nature, we have devoured rainforests and wiped out species to fulfill our desires. Within our own kind we have enslaved others or in other ways had them fulfill the energetic cost of creating our own benefits. We then use The stories we write to justify this (manifest destiny, crusades, etc.) without seeing what it does within the context of the integrated reality. A line from the song “The Last Resort” by The Eagles sums this up well: “We satisfy our endless needs and justify our bloody deeds in the name of destiny and in the name of God.” But we can’t overcome nature itself. Eventually the bill for our actions becomes due.
Of course, energy can’t be destroyed, so reality will tick on no matter what. But we have the definite potential of destroying ourselves and other beings with us if we don’t get past this phase of existence. And it is my belief is that we can’t get past this phase until we see our stories for what they are: Justifications to pursue our own pleasure in an illusion of separateness
We may be genetically wired to have stories, but one of the benefits of being human is the ability to change and write a new story. My hope is that we will learn from the stories we’ve been living and use them as lessons for the stories of a new world. We cannot sensorially overcome Maya. But we can take a step back and be aware of it and its illusion of separateness. We can write that new story that sees us as one with all that is. At this point we can play with Maya and look at nature with wonder rather than fear. Otherwise, we may end up fulfilling the last line from The Last Resort on a global scale: “They called in paradise, I don’t know why. You call some place paradise, kiss it goodbye.” But I firmly believe that, before we can truly change the trajectory of our existence, we have to recognize the layer of Story for what it is and change that story.
There’s a song for this that has yet to be recorded with voice, but I’ll just do my usual trick here to share it.