[mah-yah, -yuh]
Delusion, the veil of illusion, which conceals one’s true nature, or conceals reality. It is used in contrast with the absolute reality.
▵ More Real than the Real
The nature of human experience is such that one can be easily deceived by the limitations of one’s own perception, thought, emotion, beliefs. What you think, or what you emote, can become far more important and far bigger than the creation itself. This past week, we have been on a tour of Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and back. One evening, someone asked me a question, ‘Sadhguru, why is it that god sent me here and now I have to work for my mukthi, or my liberation?’ Then I asked him, ‘Why do you believe that you are a god-send first of all? You don’t look like a god-send, to me.’ It just goes on endlessly like this.
People invest in one thing; from that, a world will grow out of it. One thought, one emotion, one idea, one attachment; out of that a whole universe will evolve. This is why, traditionally, they dismissed all of these experiences with just one word, ‘maya’. It is illusory, it is evolving out of your identity, it is evolving out of your thought, your emotion, your attachment. Just one thing is enough – a world will evolve, a universe will come out of it. It is happening, everybody has a universe of their own. And it looks real, more real than the real. So there is no time for the Real.
Endlessly you worry about the money that you don’t need, the future that you don’t have, the past that you cannot reclaim…
– Sadhguru
When you were a child, what little games you played were bigger than the universe; they were everything. Then your intelligence got hijacked by your hormones, the opposite sex became so big. It ruled everything, everything looked real. You became old, all those games and people became not so important, but by then you had gotten into a cycle of worry. Endlessly you worry about the money that you don’t need, the future that you don’t have, the past that you cannot reclaim, because now you have become a veteran worrier. As you age, you don’t need any reason, simply you can worry. It just goes on because you have created a false universe. And with your death, it is going to collapse, so it becomes restless and active. Somewhere it knows its existence is timed. So it is over-active and gives you all kinds of false perceptions.
▵ More Real than the Real (Isha)