Life and Death: Great Indian Myths: Moksha and Maya

By Deepak Chopra

Everyone loves the new story India is telling, and I'm no exception. A society lives by the story it tells about itself. India's new tale of power has spread worldwide - about the booming economy, the upsurge of IT tycoons, the outsourced workers who are learning to sound like Americans over the telephone.

It's a new myth overtaking an ancient culture. But on the streets of Delhi, I still see the same costumes of sadhus and saints from my youth, and the packets of butter still bear the likeness of Krishna. But in rural India, the new power story has barely scratched the surface of our ancient mother culture.

Myth expert Joseph Campbell said that he trusted myth more than history because myth is truer than history. In order for a Gandhi to topple the British colonial system, he had to offer the country a new myth to live by.

All great social movements and revolutions, including communism, are a product of myth, as are racial equality, feminism, the ecology and peace movements.

Today myths get encapsulated as icons and celebrities and even as brands and products and services... they define and then redefine our deepest aspirations. They give us model heroes and archetypal adventures. A straight line runs from Lord Rama to John Wayne, and India has kept that line intact for 5,000 years, giving this culture an inner strength that has outlasted countless empires.

There are two key Indian myths: Moksha and Maya. Within these two spheres the whole invisible world of gods, heroes, quests, and powers are contained.

Moksha speaks to the primacy of consciousness as the stuff from which all reality is created. Maya is the distraction that keeps us constantly in search of truth. Paleo-linguists tell us that the word 'maya' is not correctly understood as "illusion" but as "measurement", and from this we get the terms matter, meter, mother, mata, matrix, matrika, music and myth itself.

Myth is the womb of creation. In the words mentioned above, one can see the unfolding of civilisation because these words symbolise the finite against the infinity of moksha. Right now, we happen to be in a cycle where matter, money, and measurement count more than the infinite, but India no doubt will survive this side trip, too...

I will count India as a new nation only if its young people are still empowered by myth. The world is homesick for a return to the soul, and India embodies the soul in a thousand mythic ways. As modern people we are tempted to shun this identity. Computers aren't sold by ads that say, "Buy this. It comes from an ancient society". But if our entrepreneurs rashly wrench India's identity into the bleakness of cyberspace, they will unwittingly break the mythic thread that no outside power ever could.

Myths hurt us when they betray the soul journey that everyone is making. India's new tale of power could become just another crass myth, or pseudo-myth, with no inner fire. My mother came from a generation that got up before dawn to pray at the temple; I did that to get to medical school class and my children wake early to check the Internet.

But has the inner journey changed? Make no mistake, India is in charge of this journey. Our empowerment is measured in millennia, not market shares. As India takes its share of the global market, she must not forget that Indian culture has something much more precious to offer in return: the value of myth, something that will survive in a world grown sick of crass culture.

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See also: Life and Death, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)