The Voice of Babaji: A Trilogy On Kriya Yoga – Quotes
The Apparent Evolution of God (p.205)
Swami Vivekananda gave to his Western audience, as to his Indian disciples through his lectures and class talks, a mastery and lucid account of the doctrine of maya, which is the most difficult aspect of the system of advaita to understand. He told them how significant the conception of maya was, as a prologue to the understanding the Reality. We shall here briefly expound the Swami’s teaching about maya. According to advaita, Reality is the non-dual spirit, free from all distinctions, limitations and relations. But then, what about the pluralistic universe of which all of us seem to be a part? The answer is that the universe is a transfiguration (vivarta) of the Absolute. This is what Swami Vivekananda says: according to the proper Advaitists, the followers of Shankaracharya, the whole universe is the apparent evolution of God. God is the material cause of this universe, but not really, only apparently. The celebrated illustration used is that of the rope and the snake, where the rope appeared to be the snake, but was not really so. The rope did not really change into a snake. Even so this whole universe as it exists is that Being. It is unchanged, and all the changes we see in it are only apparent. The world, in short, is a superimposition on Brahman. Its appearance does not affect the Absolute in any way. Even while it appears, Brahman remains the same, unaltered and unchanged.
By what is the superimposition of the world on Brahman. What does this transfiguration of Brahman into the world effect? The Advaitin calls that maya, which performs this impossible trick. It is no use asking how the non-dual Spirit appears as the world of plurality. Making apparently possible what is essentially impossible is maya. It is no doubt difficult to understand how this is so. That is why Swami Vivekananda repeatedly declares that the philosophy of advaita is very hard to understand. “The advaita system”, he says, “requires years to understand and months to explain.”
This theory of maya has been the most difficult thing to understand in all ages. There are three levels from which maya can be viewed, Swamiji calls them, “the three steps in our knowledge of things.” The first level is that of the man who remain in ignorance and hugs that ignorance taking it to be knowledge. The second is that of the philosopher, who has become aware of his ignorance and so struggles to extricate himself from its strangulation. The third, is that of the realized soul, to whom and in whom there is no ignorance at all. To the man of the world the problem of how the one appears as the many has no arisen. He takes the world of plurality to be real as it appears. To him each thing is individual and separate from every other. To the man of realization there is no problem at all, for Brahman is the sole reality for him. Maya is that which is not. In one of his conversations with a disciple, the Swami says that until Brahman is realized as vividly as a fruit on the palm of one’s hand, the question about world appearance cannot be adequately settled. Once Brahman is realized such a question never crops up, nor is there need for a solution.
In fact, from the standpoint of the jnanin, this universe does not exist at all. It is all illusion. The whole of this universe, these devas, gods, angels and all other beings born and dying, all the infinite number of souls coming up, are all the one Infinity. The highest doctrine of Vedanta, thus, is that this universe, as we know and think of it, does not exist, that the unchangeable has not changed, that the whole of this universe is mere appearance and not reality. It states that this idea of parts and little beings and differentiations is only apparent and not the nature of the thing itself. From this point of view, which is, in truth, the whole view, there is no individual soul, no bondage, no liberation and no striving for liberation. Brahman alone eternally exists. There is nothing else besides Brahman.
To the inquiring mind, however, maya is a riddle. It is a riddle, because it can be described neither as existent nor as nonexistent. So long as one remains in ignorance, the world exists, but at the onset of wisdom, it disappears. Since maya is removed by knowledge, it cannot be described as existent and since it makes the world appear, it cannot be nonexistent. When one is in ignorance, he sees the phenomenon and does not see God. When he sees God, this universe vanishes entirely for him. Ignorance or maya, as it is called, is the cause of all this phenomenon, of the Absolute, the unchangeable, being taken as this manifested universe. This maya is neither absolute zero nor non-existence. It is defined as neither existence nor non-existence. It is not existence because that can be said only of the Absolute, the unchangeable and in this sense, maya is nonexistence. Again, it cannot be said it is non-existence, for if it were, it could never produce the phenomenon. So, it is something, which is neither. In Vedanta philosophy it is called anirvachaniya or inexpressible. And what is anirvachaniya, is a paradox. Employing a Sanscrit proverb which is very expressive, Babaji says, “It is a headache without a head!” Thus to the logical intellect, maya is not a theory, but a statement of facts, whose soul is contradiction.
Whatever the phenomenon of life and the world is, it will be found on examination to be a mixture of the contradiction of existence and non-existence. Let us cite only one instance from the many that Swami Vivekananda gives on the contradiction of relative knowledge and ignorance. “It seems that man can know everything, if only he wants to know, but before he has gone a few steps, he finds an adamantine wall which he cannot pass. All his work is in a circle. The problem nearest and dearest to him are impelling him on, calling him day and night for a solution, but he cannot solve them, because he cannot go beyond his intellect. And yet that desire is implanted strongly in him.
Thus, buffered by nature, which is another name for maya, we go from one extreme to another, from life to death, from pleasure to pain etc. It is a back and forth movement seemingly interminable, like worms which are rushed from one whirlpool to another in a swift-moving current. As the author of the ‘Panchadasi’ puts in, we go from one condition of existence to another. This is maya. Thus, maya is a statement of the fact of this universe, of how it is going on. It exhibits the contradictory nature of the world, which is a mixture of life and death, good and evil, knowledge and ignorance.
Millions of Beings (p.207)
The world of maya, when analyzed resolves itself into names and forms, namarupa. It is a combination of the three categories desa, kala and nimitta, space, time and cause, which are themselves reducible to nama rupa, which constitutes the universe. Apart from the ocean, there is no wave. Remove the name and form of the wave, there is ocean alone. So, this maya is what makes the difference between me and you, between all animals and man, between gods and men. In fact, it is this maya that causes the Atman to be caught, as it were, in so many millions of beings and these are distinguishable only through name and form. If you leave it alone, let name and form go, all this variety vanishes forever and you are what you really are. This is maya.
The Advaitin speaks of the world as illusory and refers to maya as the principle of illusion. But there is a popular sense in which the term illusion is used, which does not suit the advaita view of maya. Swami Vivekananda warns against the interpretation of maya as illusion in this sense. In one of his London lectures he says: “Most of you are by this time familiar with the idea of maya and know that it is sometimes erroneously explained as illusion, so that when the universe is said to be maya, that also has to be explained as being illusion. The translation of the word is neither happy nor correct.” It should be noted, however, that the Swami is against a particular sense in which the term “illusion” is used and not against the expression as such. For he himself uses the term in several places, but after making its legitimate meaning clear. “Illusion,” he says on one place, “is taking the real for the unreal, not nothing at all.”
Maya is not illusion, as it is popularly interpreted. It is not nothing at all. In other words, maya does not signify a substractless illusion or sunya, as in nihilistic Buddhism. But in the sense of taking the real for the unrealand vice versa, coupling the true and the untrue, maya is illusion. Maya is real, yet it is not real. It is real in that the real is behind it and gives it an appearance of reality. That which is real in maya is the reality in and through maya. Yet the reality is never seen, and hence, that which is seen is unreal and it has no real independent existence of itself. It is dependent upon the real for its existence.
A host of questions is usually raised with reference to the ontological status of maya, the how and why of it. What is maya? Is it identical with or different from Brahman? If it is identical, the evil and ignorance of the world of maya will belong to Brahman. If it is different, there will be duality. Where does maya reside? Not in Brahman, because Brahman is self-luminous and ignorance cannot reside in it, nor can the individual soul, because the individual is a product of maya. What is the content of maya? This again cannot be the Self for the Self is intelligence. Was there a beginning of maya? What was before it? How did it come into being and why? These are some of the questions which are invariably asked, concerning maya. Some of them are due to misunderstanding and the others are illogical. Because maya is a fact we experience, we call it a positive entity. Because no beginning can be assigned to it, all beginning being in it, we say it is beginningless. Because it cannot be pigeonholed into any category of understanding, such as existence, non-existence, real, unreal etc., we regard it as indeterminable. And so, all the difficulties that maya raises in our intellect, constitute an ornament to it and not a defect in it.
If maya were explicable in terms of our categories, it would cease to be maya. Only if maya was real, the non-duality of Brahman would be destroyed. But maya is not real, and so Brahman nature is not affected. It is the same Brahman, which appears as the world of maya. Somehow the distinctions appear. We cannot say how. Constituted as we are, as individual souls, we are aware of ignorance. This experience itself shows that ignorance is not final, and therefore not real. If a locus and content are to be assigned, it must be the self alone, since there is nothing else besides it.
As for the questions of how and why, they are illogical. The how refers to the mechanical causation, and the why, to the teleological. Causation is within maya. Therefore there can be no cause of maya. The question, what is the cause of maya, illusion, has been asked for the last three thousand years and the only answer is that when the world is able to formulate a logical question, we shall answer it. The question contains a self-contradiction. It would mean, what caused the uncaused, what conditioned the unconditioned? The truth is that the very concept of causation is phenomenal. It does not apply to Reality. Similarly, the question, why, is illogical. To ask why maya came is a useless question, because the answer can never be given in maya and beyond maya who will ask it?
Evil creates why, not why the evil. It is evil that asks why. Illusion destroys illusion. Reason itself, being based upon contradiction, is a circle and has to kill itself. All questions are in maya. Beyond maya there is no question, at all. All that we can know, and need to know is that we can get beyond maya, i.e., know that there is no maya at all in reality. It is only so long as we hold onto maya, as if it were something real, that it can bind us. If we let go of it and witness it only, then we can admire the picture of the universe undisturbed. The teaching about maya is not to make us clever about it, but to enable us to know that we are the non-dual self and not the helpless creatures of circumstances, we imagine ourselves to be. This seems to be the prominent note struck by the Swami in his discourses on Vedanta. It has the merit not merely of conformity with the exposition of the doctrine by the classical Advaitins, but also of simplicity and clarity, which must appeal to the modern mind.
