{"id":2594,"date":"2013-07-13T01:42:38","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=2594"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:42:38","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:42:38","slug":"28-maya-vol-12-essays-divine-and-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/12-essays-divine-and-human\/28-maya-vol-12-essays-divine-and-human","title":{"rendered":"-28_Maya.html"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
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Maya<\/b><\/span><\/font>
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\tThe world exists as symbol of Brahman; but the mind creates
\nor accepts false values of things and takes symbol for essential reality. This is ignorance or cosmic illusion, the mistake of the
\nmind & senses, from which the Magician Himself, Master of the Illusion, is calling on us to escape. This false valuation of the
\nworld is the Maya of the Gita and can be surmounted without abandoning either action or world-existence. But in addition,
\nthe whole of universal existence is in this sense an illusion of Maya that it is not an unchanging transcendent and final reality
\nof things but only a symbolical reality; it is a valuation of the reality of Brahman in the terms of cosmic consciousness. All
\nthese objects we see or are mentally aware of as objectively existing, are only forms of consciousness. They are the
\n\tthing-in-itself turned first into terms & ideas born of a movement or rhythmic process of consciousness and then objectivised, in consciousness itself and not really external to it. They have therefore a fixed conventional reality, but not an eternally durable essential
\nreality; they are symbols, not altogether the thing symbolised, means of knowledge, not altogether the thing known. To look
\nat it from another point of view Existence or Brahman has two fundamental states of consciousness, cosmic consciousness
\nand transcendental consciousness. To cosmic consciousness the world is real as a direct first term expressing the inexpressible;
\nto transcendental consciousness the world is only a secondary & indirect term expressing the inexpressible. When I have the
\ncosmic consciousness, I see the world as my Self manifested; in transcendental consciousness I see the world not as the manifestation of my Self but as a manifestation of something I choose to be to my Self-consciousness. It is a conventional term expressing
\nme which does not bind me; I could dissolve it and express myself otherwise. It is a vocable of a particular language expressing
\n    <\/span> <\/p>\n

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something in speech or writing which could be equally well
\nexpressed by quite another vocable in another language. I say tiger in English; I might equally have spoken Sanscrit & used
\nthe word shardula; it would have made no difference to the tiger or to myself, but only to my play with the symbols of speech
\nand thought. So it is with Brahman & the universe, the Thing in itself and its symbols with their fixed conventional values, some
\nof which are relative to the general consciousness & some to the individual consciousness of the symbol-being. Matter, Mind,
\nLife for instance are general symbols with a fixed general value to God in His cosmic consciousness; but they have a different
\nindividual value, make a different impression or represent themselves differently, as we say, to myself, to the ant or to the god
\nand angel. This perception of the purely conventional value of form & name in the Universe is expressed in metaphysics by the
\nformula that the world is a creation of Para Maya or supreme Cosmic Illusion.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n

It does not follow that the world is unreal or has no existence worth the name. None of the ancient Scriptures of Hinduism
\naffirms the unreality of the world, nor is it a logical consequence of the great but remote and difficult truth words are so
\ninadequate to express. We must remember that all these terms, Maya, illusion, dream, unreality, relative reality, conventional
\nvalue, are merely verbal figures and must not be pressed with a too literal scholastic or logical insistence. They are like the
\npaint-brush hurled by the painter at his picture in desperation at not arriving at the effect he wanted; they are stones thrown
\nat the truth, not the truth itself. We shall see this clearly enough when we come to look at the Cosmos from quite another standpoint,\u2014the standpoint not of Maya, but Lila.<\/span><\/font>1<\/font><\/sup><\/span>
\n\t\t\tBut certain great metaphysical minds, not perceiving sufficiently that words like
\neverything else have only conventional values and are symbols of a truth which is in itself inexpressible, have drawn from the
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\n

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\n

1 Illusion is itself an illusion. That which seems to the soul escaping from ignorance to
\nbe Maya, an illusion or dream, is seen by the soul already free to be Lila of God and the spirit’s play.
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ideas suggested by these words, the most rigorous and concrete
\nconclusions. They have condemned the whole world as a miserable & lying dream, all the more hateful & profitless for a certain
\nelement of ineffugable reality which the more clear-sighted part of their minds was compelled to realise & partially to admit.
\nThe truth in their premises has made their doctrines a mighty instrument for the liberation of great & austere souls, the error
\nin their conclusion has afflicted humanity with the vain & barren gospel of the vanity not only of false mundane existence, but of
\nall mundane existence. In the extreme forms of this view both nature & supernature, man & God are lies of consciousness,
\nmyths of a cosmic dream & not worth accepting. Amelioration is a chimera, divinity a lure and only absorption in a transmundane impersonal existence worth pursuing. The worshippers of God, the seekers after human perfection, those who would raise
\nhumanity from nature to supernature, find in their path two great stumbling blocks, on one side, the lower trend of Nature
\nto persist in its past gains which represents itself in the besotted naturalism of the practical man & the worldling and on the
\nother, this grand overshooting of the mark represented not only by the world-fleeing ascetic, who is after all, within his rights, but
\nby the depressing pessimism of the ignorant who mean neither to flee the world, nor, if they did, could rise to the real grandeur of
\nasceticism, but are still imbued intellectually & overshadowed in temperament by these high & fatal doctrines. A better day will
\ndawn for India when the shadow is lifted and the Indian mental consciousness without renouncing the truth of Maya, perceives
\nthat it is only a partial explanation of existence. Mundane existence is not indispensable either to God’s being or to God’s
\nbliss, but it is not therefore a vanity; nor is a liberated mundane existence\u2014liberated in God\u2014either a vain or a false existence.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n

The ordinary doctrine of Maya is not a simple truth, but proceeds upon three distinct spiritual perceptions. The first &
\nhighest is this supreme perception that the world is a mass of consciousness-symbols, having a conventional value, beings
\nexist only in Brahman’s self-consciousness & individual personality & ego-sense are only symbols & terms in the universal
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symbol-existence. We have said that & we shall see that we
\nare not compelled by this perception to set down the world as a myth or a valueless convention. Nor would the Mayavadin
\nhimself have been brought to this extreme conclusion if he had not brought into the purity of this highest soul-experience his
\ntwo other perceptions. The second of these, the lowest, is the perception of the lower or Apara Maya which I have indicated in
\nthe opening of this essay\u2014the perception of the system of false values put by mind & sense on the symbol facts of the universe.
\nAt a certain stage of our mental culture it is easy to see that the senses are deceiving guides, all mental opinions & judgments
\nuncertain, partial & haunted & pursued by doubt, the world not a reality in the sense in which the mind takes it for a reality, in the
\nsense in which the senses only occupied by & only careful of the practical values of things, their vyavaharic artha, deal with it as
\na reality. Reaching this stage the mind arrives at this perception that all its values for the world being false, perhaps it is because
\nthere is no true value or only a true value not conceivable to the mind, and from this idea it is easy for our impatient human
\nnature to stride to the conclusion that so it is & all existence or all world-existence at least is illusory, a sensation born of
\nnothingness, a play of zeros. Hence Buddhism, the sensational Agnostic philosophies, Mayavada. Again, it is easy at a certain
\nstage of moral culture to perceive that the moral values put by the emotions, passions and aspirations on actions & experiences are
\nfalse values, that the objects of our sins are not worth sinning for & even that our principles & values do not stand in the
\nshock of the world’s actualities, but are, they too, conventional values which we do not find to be binding on the great march
\nof Nature. From this it is natural & right to come to vairagya or dissatisfaction with a life of false valuations and very easy to
\nstride forward, again in the impatience of our imperfect human nature, to the consummation of an entire vairagya, not only
\ndissatisfaction with a false moral life, but disgust with life of any sort & the conclusion of the vanity of world-existence. We have a
\nmental vairagya, a moral vairagya and to these powerful motives is added in the greater types the most powerful of all, spiritual
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vairagya. For at a certain stage of spiritual culture we come to
\nthe perception of the world as a system of mere consciousness values in Parabrahman or to a middle term, the experience,
\nwhich was probably the decisive factor in the minds of great spiritual seekers like Shankara, of the pure & bright impersonal
\nSachchidananda beyond, unaffected by & apparently remote from all cosmic existence. Observing intellectually through the
\nmind this great experience, the conclusion is natural & almost inevitable that this Pure & Bright One regards the universe as
\na mirage, an unreality, a dream. But these are only the terms, the word-values & conventional idea-values into which mind
\nthen translates this fact of unaffected transcendence; & it so translates it because these are the terms it is itself accustomed
\nto apply to anything which is beyond it, remote from it, not practically affecting it in tangible relations. The mind engrossed
\nin matter at first accepts only an objective reality; everything not objectivised or apparently capable of some objective expression
\nit calls a lie, a mirage, a dream, an unreality or, if it is favourably disposed an ideal. When, afterwards, it corrects its views, the
\nfirst thing it does is to reverse its values; coming into a region & level where life in the material world seems remote, unspiritual
\nor apparently not capable of spiritual realisation, it immediately applies here its old expressions dream, mirage, lie, unreality or
\nmere false idea and transfers from object to spirit its exclusive & intolerant use of the word-symbol reality. Add to this mental
\ntranslation into its own conventional word-values of the fact of unaffected transcendence the intellectual conclusions & temperamental repulsions of mental & moral vairagya, both together affecting & disfiguring the idea of the world as a system of
\nconsciousness values and we have Mayavada.   <\/span> <\/p>\n

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\t\t\t<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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