Maya and Freedom

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The senses drag the human soul out. Man is seeking for pleasure and

for happiness where it can never be found. For countless ages we are

all taught that this is futile and vain, there is no happiness here.

But we cannot learn; it is impossible for us to do so, except through

our own experiences. We try them, and a blow comes. Do we learn then?

Not even then. Like moths hurling themselves against the flame, we

are hurling ourselves again and again into sense-pleasures, hoping to

find satisfaction there. We return again and again with freshened

energy; thus we go on, till crippled and cheated we die. And this is

Maya.

 

So with our intellect. In our desire to solve the mysteries of the

universe, we cannot stop our questioning, we feel we must know and

cannot believe that no knowledge is to be gained. A few steps, and

there arises the wall of beginningless and endless time which we

cannot surmount. A few steps, and there appears of wall of boundless

space which cannot be surmounted, and the whole is irrevocably bound

in by the walls of cause and effect. We cannot go beyond them. Yet we

struggle, and still have to struggle. And this is Maya.

 

With every breath, with every pulsation of the heart, with every one

of our movements, we think we are free, and with very same moment we

are shown that we are not. Bound slaves, nature's bond-slaves, in

body, in mind, in all our thoughts, in all our feelings. And this is

Maya.

 

There was never a mother who did not think her child was a born

genius, the most extraordinary child that was ever born; she dotes

upon her child. The child grows up, perhaps becomes a drunkard, a

brute, ill-treats the mother, and the more he ill-treats her, the

more her love increases. The world lauds it as the unselfish love of

the mother, little dreaming that the mother is a born slave, she

cannot help it. She would a thousand times rather throw off the

burden, but she cannot. So she covers it with a mass of flowers,

which she calls wonderful love. And this is Maya.

 

- Swami Vivekananda

 

.... to be continued