Hinduism and Maya: The cause of Maya

By www. hinduwebsite.com

Hinduism and Maya: The cause of Maya

Maya is the power that deludes. From where does this power come? It comes from Prakriti or Nature. Prakriti is the creation of God. First He creates Prakriti and then enters into it. And when He enters into it, He becomes enveloped with his own maya leading to his own delusion and bondage.

How the delusion is caused? It is caused through the senses. The Bhagavad gita explains the process, " By constantly thinking of the sense objects, a mortal being becomes attached to them. Attached thus he develops various desires, from which in turn ensues anger. From anger comes delusion, and from delusion arises confusion of memory. From confusion of memory arises loss of intelligence and when intelligence is lost the breath of life is also lost (2.60-63)."

Maya causes delusion in many ways. Under the influence of Maya an individual loses his intelligence and power of discretion. He forgets his true nature. He loses contact with the self with in and believes that he is the ego with a body and a name. In that delusion, he assumes that he is doer of his actions, where as in truth he is is just an instrument of God, who is the real doer. He develops attachment with worldly objects and wants to possess them. He strives for wrong objectives in the world, having lost his connection with the real self and having forgotten the true purpose of his existence. 

He accepts as true what his senses confirm and ignores the truth that is hidden in every thing. Driven by passions and emotions, instincts and desires, he suffers from the distinctions of heat and cold, happiness and sorrow, success and failure, and union and separation. He becomes restless due to the unstable nature of his mind. Deluded thus, he pursues wrong aims, indulges in wrong actions and suffers from the consequences of his own actions and gets caught in the cycle of births and deaths.

One can overcome the power of maya, by developing detachment, by withdrawing the senses from sense objects, by surrendering to God and by performing desireless actions accepting God as the doer.

Nature of Reality

Does Hinduism consider the world in which we live as real or unreal? Hinduism considers the world in which we live as a projection of God and unreal. It is unreal not because it does not exist, but because it is unstable, impermanent, unreliable and illusory. It is unreal because it hides the Truth and shows us things that lead to our ignorance. It is unreal because it changes its colors every moment. What is now is not what is next.

In one moment so many things happen here. Many new souls enter. Many depart also. Friends become enemies and enemies friends. The sun and the earth change their positions continuously in space and time, while the wind moves, the rivers flow and the oceans shift their currents. The people who live on earth are also very fickle. Their minds are never stable. Their thoughts never cease. They seem to live today and disappear tomorrow. While all this is going on in the whole wide world, at the microscopic level, millions of atoms, cells and molecules in the bodies shift and change their positions or get destroyed. 

The world in which we live gives us an apparent illusion of stability, where as in truth it is not. It is an illusion to believe that this world is the same always, or that the people we deal with are the same all the time. The world is therefore an illusion, not because it does not exist in the physical sense, but because it is unstable, ever changing, impermanent, unreliable and most important of all never the same. Ask yourself this question. Are the same person you were a minute ago? 

The scriptures say that it would be unwise on our part to center our lives around such an unstable world, because if you spend your precious life for the sake of impermanent and unreliable things, you are bound to regret in the end for wasting your life in the pursuit of emptiness. The real world lies beyond our ordinary senses where our existence would be eternal and where things would not change the way they do in this plane. 

The philosophy is very simple but difficult to follow. After all what is illusion? It is something like a mirage which misleads you into wrong thinking and wrong actions. This world precisely does that. It offers you happiness but leads you into the darkness of suffering. It tempts you with many things and when you run after them you find them to be unreal and incapable of quenching your thirst for stability and permanence.

Courtesy to www. hinduwebsite.com

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