Maha Yoga, The World #2 (by Who)

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5 The World from Maha Yoga, by Who ............... When we shall experience the Truth, we shall find that what now appears to us as this multiple world of names and forms in time andspace is just the real Self, who is the indivisible Reality, nameless, formless, timeless, spaceless and changeless. And it is axiomatic that appearance excludes the reality; as long as the rope is supposed to be a snake, it cannot appear as the rope it really is; the false snake effectually conceals the real rope. The same is the case with the Self. So long as the Self appears to us as the world, we shall not realise him as theSelf; the world-appearance effectually conceals the Self; and it will do so until we get rid of the appearance; and we cannot do so unless we understand that the world-appearance is unreal. For this reason the Reality — which is also the Self— is practically non-existent for him that believes the world to be real, just as the rope is non-existent for him that sees it as a snake. For this reason he is a

nastika(atheist), even though he may honestly believe that there is a Reality.Thus it happens that, because of this false belief, the Self,who is infinitely great and blissful, and who is our dearest possession, if we may call him a possession, is for the time being lost to us. And what greater loss can there be? But the idea of a self is innate to us. It is not open to us even to doubt the existence of a self of some sort. The Self is the only indubitable reality there is; if anyone questions the reality of the Self, he would at once put himself out of court; to be able to raise any question at all, he must admit he exists.Therefore it happens that, feeling the void due to the obscuring of the real Self, we fill it up with a false self. But since the world is taken as real, and we are unable to think of any reality beyond the world, we have to locate this hypothetical self in the world. And this can be only by identifying the Self

with the body. And as there are two bodies, the physical or gross one and the mental or subtle one, we cannot escape taking one or both of them as the Self. It needs to be understood that in both ways we fall into ignorance; the real Self is neither the body nor the mind, as we shall see later.By this ignorance we are disabled from conceiving of a real Self transcending both mind and body. Thus unless we are willing to renounce the belief that the world is real as such — that is, as the world — we shall never realise the real Self that the Sages have testified to. And this means that to get rid of the primary ignorance we must renounce the belief that the world is real, unless our minds are of such exceptional purity and harmony that we can put away all thought about the world and the body while engaged in the Quest. Therefore we need to listen to what the Sages tell us about the

world, and accept thei rteaching at least as tentatively true. The Sage of Arunachala tells us that the world is bothreal and unreal; and he tells us also that there is no self-contradiction in this. The world is real in one sense and unrealin another. The world is real because that which appears as the world is the Reality, which is the real Self; it is unreal, because, considered as world, it is a mere appearance of the Reality. Apart from the Reality the world has no existence. But its appearance as the world does not affect the Reality;f or It never really became the world, just as the rope never really became a snake.Thus we are taught that the world as such is unreal. It is not wholly unreal, because there is

something — the Reality,the Self — behind the false appearance. The meaning is that the Reality, being obscured by the world, does not appear to us as It really is. This teaching is briefly referred to as maya-vada; the world is declared to be maya, an illusory appearance of the Reality. Maya may be defined as that mysterious Power which makes the Real appear as something which It is not. ..................