Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas predate third 1920's Hubble Revolution by millennia/eons

November 24, 2008

>

> The third revolution began in the 1920's, and the full impact of its

> accompanying paradigm shift has yet to be fully felt. While not a

> commonly accepted term, I would dub it the Hubble Revolution, after

> the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who first came to the

> conclusion that our Milky Way galaxy - thought at the time to

> comprise the entire universe - was merely one single " island

> universe " in a seemingly infinite sea of hundreds of billions of

> other galaxies.

>

" The Eternal Religion

Hinduism is so ancient its origins are lost in the mist of

prehistory. Many sages are associated with it, but none claim to be

its first prophet. Hindus believe their religion has existed forever,

even before the universe came into being. They say the truths of

their faith are inherent in the nature of reality itself, and that

all men and women peering into the depths of their inner nature will

discover the same truths for themselves.

The image too many outsiders have of the Hindu tradition is of

primitive, superstitious villagers worshipping idols. As we get to

know the Hindus better, we'll see that their understanding of who and

what is God is is incredibly sophisticated. In fact, their view of

the world and our place in it is so stunningly cosmic in scope that

our Western minds start to boggle!

Let's enter the universe of Hinduism, an amazing world where inner

and outer realities reflect each other like images on a mirror, and

the loving presence of the divine is a close as the stillness behind

your own thoughts...

Beginningless Truth

You might think it takes a lot of chutzpah (if I may borrow a Jewish

term) to claim that your religion is eternal. What Hindus mean when

they say this is their tradition doesn't come from any one founding

father or mother, from any single prophet towering over the bastion

of hoary antiquity. In fact, the first few verses of the Veda, an

incredibly old book, parts of which were composed 6,000 years ago,

acknowledge the sages who were already ancient to its composers

living in 4000 B.C.E.!

Very old Hindu texts speak of a time when it became almost impossible

to survive on Earth because of ice and snow. This could be a

reference to the last Ice Age, some Hindu scholars believe.

Archaeologists have unearthed small statues of goddesses from 10,000

years ago (that's about the time the Ice Age was ending) like those

being worshipped in Indian villages today. So even if we're not

willing to grant that Hinduism is eternal, we still have to admit it

got a jump on the other major religions...

I'd really like to bring home to you the vastness of the time scale

Hindus are talking about here. One area where Hinduism and Judeo-

Christian tradition agree is in saying that at the moment we're in

the seventh day of creation. But according to the Hindu sages, a day

for God is a bit longer than our human day of 24 hours.

The following schema was taught to me by Swami Veda Bharati, a

renunciate who lives in a tiny ashram in Rishikesh in northern India.

He's a devotee of the Divine Mother. (The Goddess is a major league

player in Hinduism, and you'll soon see.)

Swami Bharati's time frame, preserved in the Hindu mystical

tradition, starts with a day and a night in the life of our local

creator god. Years here mean human years:

One day and night in the life of Brahma is 8,640,000,000 years.

The lifetime of Brahma is 311,040,000,000,000 years.

One day and night in the life of Vishnu equals 37,324,800,000,000,

000,000 years.

The life of Vishnu is 671,846,400,000,000,000,000,000 years long.

One day and night in the life of Shiva lasts 4,837,294,080,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000 years.

Shiva's lifetime corresponds to 87,071,293,440,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000 years.

One glance from the Mother of the Universe equals 87,071,293,440,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

It might surprise you that Hinduism speaks of gods dying. Not to

worry--they're reborn again later like the rest of us! According to

Swami Veda Bharati's tradition, at any one moment there are trillions

upon trillions of Brahmas, Vishnus, and Shivas manifesting their

universes within the endless expanse of the Divine Mother's awareness.

This, folks, is Hinduism's Big Picture...

Inner Vision

But the thought I'd like to leave you with is that for many millennia

the Hindu sages have claimed that if we purify our minds with

spiritual practices and open our hearts to learn from her, the Mother

of the Universe begins to share her secrets with us.

In the West, we peer into space with powerful telescopes hoping to

learn the origin of the universe. The Hindu approach is to couple

astute observation of the world outside us with a self-disciplined

inner journey. Peering into the depths of consciousness in our own

minds, we connect with the consciousness that underlies the entire

cosmos. Truths other cultures need radio telescopes to ferret out

simply present themselves to our concentrated inward attention.

To India's mystics, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are not just characters

invented to make a good story. They represent actual states of divine

awareness that are available to devotees, provided only that the

devotee is prepared to do the spiritual work to access them.

In fact, in Hinduism the point of doing spiritual practices is to

attain jnana, living knowledge of Divine Being. It's an ambitious

agenda! (Jnana means knowledge, specifically knowledge that you know

in your soul, not just your brain. It's related to the English words

gnosis or gnostic.)...

The BIG Picture

Why did God create the universe? Hinduism offers several suggestions:

1. He was lonely. He looked around and saw He was by Himself. He

desired to become many. And whatever God wants, God gets. The moment

that wish entered His mind, an infinite number of souls emerged from

His limitless intelligence to keep Him company.

2. She likes to play. The Goddess can't sit still for a moment. She's

always got to be doing something. All these worlds are Her game, or

" Her sport " as Hindus like to say.

3. The Divine Being is so brimming with bliss, He/She spills over.

Shiva/Shakti (God and Goddess who are both two and one in Hinduism)

spontaneously generate cosmoc after cosmos. Creative energy simply

pours out of the Divine. It's the nature of the Supreme One to

create, as it's the nature of light to shine.

In the Western religious traditions, God creates us out of nothing.

In Hinduism, Divine Being creates us out of itself. This means we are

literally one with the divine, one with everything else in the

universe, and one with each other.

Hinduism is about finding our place in an immense universe. It shows

us how to deal with suffering and where to find joy. It reveals how

learning to know our own inner Self is the key to entering the

consciousness of God.

In the Western world, until very recently, there's been a tendency to

consider Hindus " primitive " and " supertitious " because they believe

there is a living spirit everywhere. What I hope you remember is that

Hindu thought isn't primitive at all. In fact it's fantastically

sophisticated. Hindus look at reality through a different lens than

Westerners do, but in the context of Hindu culture, their

understanding of who God is, how His laws operate, and what our

position is in relation to him is just as insightful as the Western

viewpoint.

The least you shouls know:

- The Hindu tradition is extremely mystical.

- Hindus consider their faith to be " the eternal religion. "

- Time doesn't end; it spins on in cycles through eternity.

- Direct personal expereince of God is the purpose of life.

- Everything arise out of consciousness.

Linda Johnsen, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hinduism, pages 1-15

Paperback: 432 pages

Publisher: Alpha; 1st edition (October 11, 2001)

ISBN-10: 0028642279

ISBN-13: 978-0028642277

" In Vedic mythology, a fabled dawn time existed in the distant past,

when human beings had direct contact with the divine intelligence

emanating from Brahma—the seat of creative power and intelligence in

the cosmos. This archaic Golden Age (the Satya Yuga) lasted some 4800

years. After the Golden Age ended, humanity entered a denser era,

that of the Silver Age, lasting only 3600 years. In this age,

humanity’s connection with the source was dimmed, and sacrifices and

spiritual practices became necessary to preserve it. The Bronze Age

followed, and humanity forgot its divine nature. Empty dogmas arose,

along with indulgence in materialism. Next we entered the Kali Yuga—

in which we remain today—where the human spirit suffers under gross

materialism, ignorance, warfare, stupidity, arrogance, and everything

contrary to our divine spiritual potential. As the teachings tell,

Kali, the creator-destroyer Goddess, will appear at the end of Kali

Yuga to sweep away the wasted detritus of a spirit-dead humanity,

making way for a new cycle of light and peace. "

www.hinduwisdom.info/

In the Vedas

The Rig Veda describes the origin of the universe as:

" Then was not non-existence nor existence: there was no realm of air,

no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? and what gave shelter?

Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? Death was not then, nor

was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day's and night's

divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed by its own nature:

apart from it was nothing whatsoever. Darkness there was at first

concealed in darkness this. All was indiscriminated chaos. All that

existed then was void and form less: by the great power of Warmth was

born that Unit. Thereafter rose Desire in the beginning, Desire, the

primal seed and germ of Spirit. Sages who searched with their heart's

thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.

Transversely was their severing line extended: what was above it

then, and what below it? There were begetters, there were mighty

forces, free action here and energy up yonder. Who verily knows and

who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this

creation? The devas are later than this world's production. Who knows

then whence it first came into being? He, the first origin of this

creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye

controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps

he knows not " - (Rig Veda 10.129.1-7) A Deva, in Hinduism, is a

deity, controlling forces of nature such as fire, air, etc. ...

But the Rig Veda's view of the cosmos also sees one true divine

principle self-projecting as the divine word, Vaak, 'birthing' the

cosmos that we know, from the monistic Hiranyagarbha or Golden Womb.

The Hiranyagarbha is alternatively viewed as Brahma, the creator who

was in turn created by God, or as God (Brahman) himself.

In The Puranas

The later puranic view asserts that the universe is created,

destroyed, and re-created in an eternally repetitive series of

cycles. In Hindu cosmology, a universe endures for about

4,320,000,000 years (one day of Brahma, the creator or kalpa) and is

then destroyed by fire or water elements. At this point, Brahma rests

for one night, just as long as the day. This process, named pralaya

(Cataclysm), repeats for 100 Brahma years (311 trillion human years)

that represents Brahma's lifespan. It must be noted that Brahma is

the creator but not necessarily regarded as God in Hinduism. He is

mostly regarded as a creation of God / Brahman. The Puranas are part

of Hindu Smriti; these religious scriptures discuss devotion and

mythology. ... Brahma is the Hindu god (deva) of creation, and one of

the Hindu Trinity - Trimurti, the others being Vishnu and Shiva. ...

We are currently believed to be in the 51st year of the present

Brahma and so about 155 trillion years have elapsed since He was born

as Brahma. After Brahma's " death " , it is necessary that another 100

Brahma years pass until he is reborn and the whole creation begins

anew. This process is repeated again and again, forever.

Each Maha Yuga consists of a series of four shorter yugas, or ages.

The yugas get progressively worse from a moral point of view as one

proceeds from one yuga to another. As a result each yuga is of

shorter duration than the age that preceded it. The current Kali Yuga

(Iron Age) began at midnight 17 February / 18 February in 3102 BC in

the proleptic Julian calendar.

Quoted views on Hindu cosmology

Arthur Holmes on Hindu cosmology

Professor Arthur Holmes (1895-1965) geologist, professor at the

University of Durham. He writes regarding the age of the earth in his

great book, The Age of Earth (1913) as follows:

" Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of

the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been

devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these

occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing

concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a

sacred book. "

Alan Watts on Hindu cosmology

Alan Watts, a professor, graduate school dean and research fellow of

Harvard University, drew heavily on the insights of Vedanta. Watts

became well known in the 1960s as a pioneer in bringing Eastern

philosophy to the West. He wrote:

" To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new

discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for

astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of

kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000,000 years). The fact that the

wise men of India have not been concerned with technological

applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that

technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it. "

Count Maurice Maeterlinck on Hindu cosmology

Count Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian writer of poetry,

a wide variety of essays. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature.

In his book Mountain Paths, says:

" he falls back upon the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those

of the Sacred Books of India with a Cosmogony which no European

conception has ever surpassed. "

Huston Smith on Hindu cosmology

Huston Smith born in China to Methodist missionaries, a philosopher,

most eloquent writer, world-famous religion scholar who practices

Hatha Yoga. He has said of Hinduism:

" The invisible excludes nothing, the invisible that excludes nothing

is the infinite – the soul of India is the infinite. "

" Philosophers tell us that the Indians were the first ones to

conceive of a true infinite from which nothing is excluded. The West

shied away from this notion. The West likes form, boundaries that

distinguish and demarcate. The trouble is that boundaries also

imprison – they restrict and confine. "

" India saw this clearly and turned her face to that which has no

boundary or whatever... India anchored her soul in the infinite

seeing the things of the world as masks of the infinite assumes –

there can be no end to these masks, of course. If they express a true

infinity... And It is here that India's mind boggling variety links

up to her infinite soul. "

" India includes so much because her soul being infinite excludes

nothing... It goes without saying that the universe that India saw

emerging from the infinite was stupendous. "

" While the West was still thinking, perhaps, of 6,000 years old

universe – India was already envisioning ages and eons and galaxies

as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. The Universe so vast that

modern astronomy slips into its folds without a ripple. "

Dick Teresi on Hindu cosmology

Dick Teresi, author and coauthor of several books about science and

technology, including " The God Particle "

" Indian cosmologists, the first to estimate the age of the earth at

more than 4 billion years. They came closest to modern ideas of

atomism, quantum physics, and other current theories. India developed

very early, enduring atomist theories of matter. Possibly Greek

atomistic thought was influenced by India, via the Persian

civilization. "

Guy Sorman on Hindu cosmology

According to Guy Sorman, visiting scholar at Hoover Institution at

Stanford and the leader of new liberalism in France:

" Temporal notions in Europe were overturned by an India rooted in

eternity. The Bible had been the yardstick for measuring time, but

the infinitely vast time cycles of India suggested that the world was

much older than anything the Bible spoke of. It seems as if the

Indian mind was better prepared for the chronological mutations of

Darwinian evolution and astrophysics. "

Carl Sagan on Hindu cosmology

Carl Sagan was a distinguished Cornell University astronomer and

Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

" The main reason that we oriented this episode of Cosmos towards

India is because of that wonderful aspect of Hindu cosmology which

first of all gives a time-scale for the Earth and the universe -- a

time-scale which is consonant with that of modern scientific

cosmology. We know that the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and

the cosmos, or at least its present incarnation, is something like 10

or 20 billion years old. The Hindu tradition has a day and night of

Brahma in this range, somewhere in the region of 8.4 billion years. "

" As far as I know. It is the only ancient religious tradition on the

Earth which talks about the right time-scale. We want to get across

the concept of the right time-scale, and to show that it is not

unnatural. In the West, people have the sense that what is natural is

for the universe to be a few thousand years old, and that billions is

indwelling, and no one can understand it. The Hindu concept is very

clear. Here is a great world culture which has always talked about

billions of years. "

" Finally, the many billion year time-scale of Hindu cosmology is not

the entire history of the universe, but just the day and night of

Brahma, and there is the idea of an infinite cycle of births and

deaths and an infinite number of universes, each with its own gods. "

Roger Bertschausen on Hindu cosmology

Roger Bertschausen is the Reverend at Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist

Fellowship

" We in the West have long had trouble with time. Early Judaism,

Christianity and Islam had no inkling of the long age of the

universe. Cosmologies from these religions were based on the notion

that the universe started at a finite point in the recent past. St.

Augustine set the beginning of the universe at 5000 BCE. For

centuries, this figure was embraced by most Westerners. (And some

continue to believe it.) Additionally, the early Christians also

believed that the end of time as we know it was close at hand. "

" This view of time contrasts sharply with other religious

perspectives on the age of the universe. In the Hindu tradition, for

example, one day in the life of Brahma lasts 4,320,000,000 years. And

Brahma lives for the equivalent of 311,040,000,000,000 human years.

The historian of religions Huston Smith reports one way of conceiving

of the Hindu time-frame. "

Heinrich Zimmer (Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1945)

Zimmer, unpacking the Brahmavaivartapurana says,

" Suddenly the empty sheaves of numbers were filled with the dynamism

of life. They became alive with philosophical value and symbolic

significance. So vivid was the statement, so powerful the impact,

that the story did not have to be dissected for its meaning. The

lesson was plain to see. But the wisdom taught in this myth would

have been incomplete had the last word been that of the infinity of

space and time. The vision of the countless universes bubbling into

existence side by side, and the lesson of the unending series of

Indras and Brahmas, would have annihilated every value of individual

existence. Between this boundless, breath-taking vision and the

opposite problem of the limited role of the short-lived individual,

this myth effected the re-establishment of a balance. We are taught

to recognize the divine, the impersonal sphere of eternity, revolving

ever and agelessly through time. But we are also taught to esteem the

transient sphere of the duties and pleasures of individual existence,

which is as real and as vital to the living man, as a dream to the

sleeping soul. "

Professor Arthur Holmes (1895-1965) geologist, professor at the

University of Durham. He writes regarding the age of the earth in his

great book, The Age of Earth (1913) as follows:

" Long before it became a scientific aspiration to estimate the age of

the earth, many elaborate systems of the world chronology had been

devised by the sages of antiquity. The most remarkable of these

occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose astonishing

concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti, a

sacred book. "

Dick Teresi author and coauthor of several books about science and

technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni

magazine and has written for Discover, The New York Times Magazine,

and The Atlantic Monthly. He says

" Indian cosmologists, the first to estimate the age of the earth at

more than 4 billion years. They came closest to modern ideas of

atomism, quantum physics, and other current theories. India developed

very early, enduring atomist theories of matter. Possibly Greek

atomistic thought was influenced by India, via the Persian

civilization. "

Nancy Wilson Ross (1901 -1986) made her first trip to Japan, China,

Korea and India in 1939. She was the author of several books

including The World of Zen and Time's Left Corner. Miss Ross lectured

on Zen Buddhism at the Jungian Institute in Zurich. She served on the

board of the Asia Society of New York which was founded by John D.

Rockefeller III since its founding in 1956 and was on the governing

board of the India Council. In private life she was known as Mrs.

Stanley Young.

She has written:

" Anachronistic as this labyrinthine mythology may appear to the

foreign mind, many of India’s ancient theories about the universe are

startlingly modern in scope and worthy of a people who are credited

with the invention of the zero, as well as algebra and its

application of astronomy and geometry; a people who so carefully

observed the heavens that, in the opinion of Monier-Williams, they

determined the moon’s synodical revolution much more correctly than

the Greeks. "

" Many hundreds of years before those great European pioneers,

Galileo and Copernicus, had to pay heavy prices in ridicule and

excommunication for their daring theories, a section of the Vedas

known as the Brahmanas contained this astounding statement:

“The sun never sets or rises. When people think the sun is setting,

he only changes about after reaching the end of the day and makes

night below and day to what is on the other side. Then, when people

think he rises in the morning, he only shifts himself about after

reaching the end of the day night, and makes day below and night to

what is on the other side. In truth, he does not see at all.”

" The Indians, whose theory of time, is not linear like ours – that

is, not proceeding consecutively from past to present to future –

have always been able to accept, seemingly without anxiety, the

notion of an alternately expanding and contracting universe, an idea

recently advanced by certain Western scientists. In Hindu cosmology,

immutable Brahman, at fixed intervals, draws back into his

beginningless, endless Being the whole substance of the living world.

There then takes place the long “sleep” of Brahaman from which, in

course of countless aeons, there is an awakening, and another

universe or “dream” emerges. "

" This notion of the sleeping and waking, or contracting and

expanding, of the Life Force, so long a part of Hindu cosmology, has

recently been expressed in relevant terms in an article written for a

British scientific journal by Professor Fred Hoyle, Britain’s

foremost astronomer. "

According to Guy Sorman, visiting scholar at Hoover Institution at

Stanford and the leader of new liberalism in France:

" Temporal notions in Europe were overturned by an India rooted in

eternity. The Bible had been the yardstick for measuring time, but

the infinitely vast time cycles of India suggested that the world was

much older than anything the Bible spoke of. It seem as if the Indian

mind was better prepared for the chronological mutations of Darwinian

evolution and astrophysics. "

According to John Major Jenkins, a leading independent researcher of

ancient cosmology:

" Our understanding of the true age of the ancient Vedic civilization

has undergone a well-documented revolution. Feuerstein, Frawley, and

Kak have shown conclusively (In Search of the Cradle of Civilization)

that the long-accepted age of the Vedic culture—erroneously dated by

scholars parading a series of assumptions and unscientific arguments

to roughly 1500 BC—is much too recent. Evidence comes from

geological, archaeological, and literary sources as well as the

astronomical references within Vedic literature. The corrected dating

to eras far prior to 1500 BC was made possible by recognizing that

precessional eras are encoded in Vedic mythology, and were recorded

by ancient Vedic astronomers. As a result, the Indus Valley

civilization appears to be a possible cradle of civilization, dated

conservatively to 7000 BC. Western India may thus be a true source

of the civilizing impulse that fed Anatolia in Turkey, with its

complex Goddess-worshipping city-states of Çatal Hüyük and Hacilar.

However, there are layers upon layers of even older astronomical

references, and legends persist that the true “cradle” might be found

further to the north, in Tibet or nearby Central Asia.

The work of these three writers shows that biases and assumptions

within scholarly discourse can prevent an accurate modeling of

history and an underestimation of the accomplishments of ancient

cultures. The analogous situation in modern Egyptology and

Mesoamerican studies also requires that well-documented new theories —

often exhaustively argued, interdisciplinary, and oriented toward a

progressive synthesis of new data — should be appraised fairly and

without bias.

Next to the Australian aborigines, the Vedic civilization is perhaps

the oldest continuous living tradition in the world. Its extremely

ancient doctrines and insights into human spirituality are

unsurpassed. We might expect that its cosmology and science of time

has been as misunderstood as its true antiquity. In looking closely

at Vedic doctrines of time, spiritual growth, calendars, and

astronomy, we will see that a central core idea is that of our

periodic alignment to the Galactic Center. And, according to these

ancient Vedic beliefs, the galactic alignment we are currently

experiencing heralds our shift from a millennia-long descent of

deepening spiritual darkness to a new era of light and ascending

consciousness. "

Maya or Illusion

For many thousands of years, it is argued, the mystics have had a

cosmological and epistemological view of things that the Western

world is just beginning to understand. Cosmologically, Western

science has understood only recently that the universe is extremely

old. In 1965 the temperature of the universe was measured for the

first time, resulting in our present estimate of the age of the

universe as 15 billion years old. In the ancient literature of the

India one does not, of course, find such precise figures. Instead

there are analogies such as the following. Imagine an immortal eagle

flying over the Himalayas only once every 1,000 years; it carries a

feather in its beak and each time it passes, it lightly brushes the

tops of the gigantic mountain peaks. The amount of time it would take

the eagle to completely erode the mighty Himalayas is said to be the

age of the present manifestation of the universe. Such a conception

of time, which predates modern science by thousands of years, is

thought to be remarkable, especially when it is compared to the slow

realization of Western science and religion to the possibility of a

less humanlike time scale.

Eastern mysticism is also consistent with the results of quantum

physics. The mystics have always rejected the idea of a hidden

clocklike mechanism, sitting out there, independent of human

observation. The number one truth is that reality does not consist of

separate things, but is an indescribable, interconnected oneness.

Each object of our normal experience is seen to be but a brief

disturbance of a universal ocean of existence. Maya is the illusion

that the phenomenal world of separate objects and people is the only

reality. For the mystics this manifestation is real, but it is a

fleeting reality; it is a mistake, although a natural one, to believe

that maya represents a fundamental reality. Each person, each

physical object, from the perspective of eternity is like a brief,

disturbed drop of water from an unbounded ocean. The goal of

enlightenment is to understand this--more precisely, to experience

this: to see intuitively that the distinction between me and the

universe is a false dichotomy. The distinction between consciousness

and physical matter, between mind and body, is the result of an

unenlightened perspective.

Maya (Sanskrit: " illusion " ) is a fundamental concept in Hindu

philosophy, notably, in the Advaita (Non-dualist) school of the

orthodox system of Vedanta. Maya denotes the power of wizardry with

which a God can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an

illusion; by extension it later came to mean the powerful force that

creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real.

Maya, as per Hindu thought, is illusion, and what mankind understands

to be reality is in fact the dream of Brahma. Brahma is the creator

and great magician who dreams the universe into being. The dream

itself is maintained by Vishnu, the Preserver, who uses maya to spin

the complex web that we know as reality. It is not that the world

itself is an illusion, only our perception of it. Whereas we suppose

the universe to be made up of a multitude of objects, structures and

events, the theory of maya asserts that all things are one. Rational

categories are mere fabrications of the human mind and have no

ultimate reality.

In much of Hindu thought maya is illusion, and what humankind

understands to be reality is in fact the dream of Brahma. He is the

creator god and great magician who dreams the universe into being.

The dream itself is maintained by Lord Vishnu, the Preserver, who

uses maya to spin the complex web that we know as reality. It is not

that the world itself is an illusion, only our perception of it.

Whereas we suppose the universe to be made up of a multitude of

objects, structures and events, the theory of maya asserts that all

things are one. Rational categories are mere fabrications of the

human mind and have no ultimate reality.

Modern Indian spiritual teachers assert that if the West had followed

the Greek philosopher Heraclitus rather than Plato, the history of

ideas would be very different and the concept of maya would be

central to Western as well as to Eastern thought. Although Plato's

teaching resembles maya when he writes that " the visible world is a

pale shadow of a true reality beyond " , he believed that each aspect

of the world had a separate, distinct identity. Heraclitus posited

instead a theory which was based on the assumption of the inseparable

interconnectedness of the universe. His theory of Becoming asserts

that all things are in a state of constant flux; always in the

process of becoming something else. This hypothesis is echoed today,

some 2,500 years later, by Chaos Theory, which the American science

writer James Gleick defined as " the science of process rather than

state, of becoming rather than being " .

Maya is thus that cosmic force that presents the infinite Brahman

(the supreme being) as the finite phenomenal world. Maya is reflected

on the individual level by human ignorance (ajñana) of the real

nature of the self, which man has mistaken for the empirical ego but

which is in reality identical with Brahman.

So why does all this worldly illusion exist? Ramakrishna called the

world, " The Great Play of the Mother of the World. " This is

the " play " of Matter--the material world. It is somewhat like a stage

play. We are all creatures of spirit with various coatings of matter

hiding the spirit from the light. As we act out our Karmic roles in

this great play, we remove the coatings of matter and release the

light within us. The more light we accumulate within us, the more we

can see the light hidden in other people and things. In reality, the

whole world play exists for us to seek God Consciousness. All people

are either striving toward the light or hiding from it. Those who are

hiding are caught up in the Maya.

So, everything which has existence, everything in the phenomenal

world is Maya. It is safe to say that " Everything is Maya. " How does

that affect us in our daily life? It affects the choices we make and

therefore the Karma we make for ourselves as a result of those

choices. So how should we deal with the Maya of existence? We should

try to look for the Reality behind the veils of Maya. Primal Energy

is the Infinite Transcendental Essence which permeates all existence.

It is like Infinity in manifestation, if such a thing were possible.

But to carry this analogy further where it is more understandable, we

can best see everything in the universe as a differentiation or

gradation of Primal Energy.

Thus, at the root of all existence--all Maya--is Primal Energy.

Primal Energy is also the Great Aum, " The Word, " or even God, if you

will. Thus, when Hindus clasp their hands together and bow towards

each other, they are saying, in effect, " The God within me greets the

God within you. "

Water of Illusion

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus used a river as an analogy for his

Theory of Becoming, teaching that one cannot step into the same river

twice. Maya, too, is often associated with water, the medium that

forever changes as it flows from place to place. Water is often a

symbol and an agent of illusion. When Lord Vishnu is compelled to

lift the veils of maya for the benefit of his followers, water is

never far away.

A well-known Hindu parable tells of a sage (Narada) who underwent

such rigorous penance that he felt entitled to demand fro Lord Vishnu

the secret of maya. The god responded by ordering the mortal to dive

into a nearby river. When the sage emerged, he did so as a woman,

oblivious of her former existence. After a lifetime of success and

failure, happiness and tragedy, she finally threw herself in despair

onto the funeral pyre of her husband who had been murdered. The fire

was instantly quenched by water. The sage regained his former body,

and in that moment Lord Vishnu appeared. " This is Maya, " he said,

and the sage came to understand the nature of illusion and the

workings of the universe...