One day Narada, the wandering saint, and cosmic traveler, was walking with Lord Krishna. Narada had a unique skill. He casually asked the most difficult questions to try and coax Krishna into answering them. This question had been bothering Narada for some time, and he had been waiting for an opportune moment.
“Can you tell me, Krishna, what is Maya? I have heard and read so much about it and yet have never experienced it”, Narada blurted out, the excitement evident in his voice. Krishna laughed and told Narada to ask any other question. He told him how Maya is one of the trickiest things to reveal, but Narada refused to budge. Krishna finally gave in and promised to reveal the secrets of Maya to him. “It’s going to be a long answer, so while I lie in the shade of a tree, can you please get me some water?” Narada skipped and danced his way to a small village nearby. The sun was beating down, and he felt thirsty. When he reached the well, he saw a beautiful girl drawing water from it. Her almond eyes, oval face, and slim waist sparked a desire in his heart that he had never felt before. When he asked her for water for Krishna, she shyly smiled and told him that he looked tired and that he should drink water and wash up first. Narada takes the first sip of water and suddenly forgets about the lord waiting for him. As he gazes into her eyes while she pours water, he feels himself dissolving into them. Her father, a landowner, sees this radiant monk at this doorstep and invites him inside for dinner. The woman coyly moves aside, and Narada steps into the house. As they eat dinner, the girl’s father notices the glances exchanged between Narada and his daughter. He finally breaks the awkward silence by telling Narada he has been looking for a match for his daughter for a long time. Since he does not have a son, all this land and cattle belong to his daughter, and if he agrees to marry her, he can stay with them and help manage the affairs. Narada readily agreed, and the couple was united in marriage within a few days.
Narada was ecstatic. He thoroughly enjoyed his marital life and had some beautiful children within a few years. His father-in-law passed away, and he inherited all the land. He was an able administrator, and the family enjoyed a prosperous life. He watched his children play under the setting sun, and a wave of bliss filled his chest with a warmth he had never experienced before. Suddenly, the sky darkened, and it started raining. Storm clouds engulfed the village, and the whole village was flooded within a few hours. Narada hurried with his wife and children to the highest part of the house. They waited and watched the water rise, and suddenly a wave swept them away. Narada shrieked in distress as he saw his children swept away. He held on tightly to his wife to try and save her. However, the water was unrelenting, and she was swept away. A visceral cry escaped Narada’s throat as he felt unbearable pain in the pit of his stomach. “Krishna,” he cried, not able to bear it anymore. Suddenly, the flood disappeared, and he stood before Krishna.
“Where have you been, Narada” Krishan asked him with a smile. It’s been thirty minutes since you went to get water. Narada stood with his head bowed down. What he experienced was twelve years of married life was a mere thirty minutes of separation from Krishna.
It seems almost insulting to the rational mind to accept that this world as we see it is an illusion. How can our job, our salaries, our boss, the code we write, and the car we drive be an illusion? Any philosophy that states this has to be a load of rubbish, isn’t it? Let’s forget philosophy for a moment and look at neuroscience.
Dr. Lisa Barrett, a leading neuroscientist, states that our brain predicts (almost) everything we do.
Neuroscientists like to say that your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body but ultimately constructed by your brain.
Dr. Lisa Barrett
Dr. Barret gives a fantastic example in her book Seven and a Half-Truths of the Human Brain. A man who served in the Rhodesian army was deep in the forest conducting a drill with a set of soldiers. He suddenly saw a group of guerilla fighters with guns marching a few meters away. Instinctively, he flipped the safety of his rifle and aimed it at the leader carrying an AK-47. Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder as a colleague asked him not to shoot since it was just a little boy with a stick leading his cattle. For years the man had struggled to reconcile what he saw and had finally reached out to Dr. Barret for an explanation.
She summarizes this episode by explaining that your brain is stuck in a dark and silent skull from the moment you are born. It continuously receives sensory data from all your sense organs as a barrage of light waves, smells, and air pressure changes (sound). How can your brain make sense of all this data?
That’s why it uses memories. It scans a lifetime of past experiences, including the changes your body experienced during a similar situation. Did your heartbeat increase? Did your breathing become shallow? The brain then asks, “the last time I was in this situation, what did I do next”? That answer becomes your experience.
If you thought this was amazing, there is more. Dr. Lisa says that the whole constructive process of the brain manufacturing a reality for you is happening predictively. Your brain is hardwired to help you survive. She gives the example of how you feel satiated within a few seconds of drinking water. The water takes twenty minutes to reach your bloodstream. However, as soon as you sip water, your brain anticipates the effect of gulping water. Hence, it causes your thirst to abate before the water reaches your bloodstream.
Dr. Lisa says that the brain’s predictions are not linear. In most scenarios, the brain creates a variety of predictions, and the most probable one becomes the meaning of your sensory experience. That’s why when a stressed soldier sees a bunch of moving shapes being led by a man with a stick, his brain shows him guerilla fighters with guns.
I want you to pause for a bit and reflect on the enormity of what you read. Thousands of years ago, Indian saints summarized our reality by stating Bramhan Satya Jagat Mithya. They used the example of how you see a piece of rope in the dark and mistake it for a snake. When you shine the light on the snake, it’s revealed to be a rope. They said the same illusion that makes us see the rope as a snake also makes us see ourselves as separate beings, not Brahman (universal consciousness). Dr. Lisa’s findings validate what has been stated by our Upanishads for centuries.
For centuries, our saints have been criticized for calling this world unreal or Maya. Advaita Vedanta always maintained that when they called the world unreal, it did not mean the world did not exist.
It simply meant that your experience of the world was a hallucination because an untrained mind could never look past the predictions created by the brain to see the world as it exists.
That’s why I call liberation a neurobiological hack. You use techniques such as meditation and bhakti to rewire the mind and overcome the limitations imposed by nature.
Applying this Wisdom at Work
We have built our lives and careers based on the advice we have received from society. However, based on Dr. Lisa’s research, our experience of society is a shared hallucination, and it stops us from doing so many good things. We underpay our nurses and teachers while paying software engineers hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Every single economist will justify it as market economics of demand and supply, but that is a collective illusion. Nothing stops us from creating a new illusion where everyone is paid fairly, and people do the work they love versus running after jobs that are incredibly stressful and provide very little internal satisfaction. I can apply this argument to every aspect of our lives, but I will leave it to you, dear reader, to accept the enormity of what I just discussed with you. If you don’t take my word seriously, you may want to listen to Steve Jobs’s worldview. His wife, Laurene, shared it in a recent interview.
Outside of the natural world, all the systems that govern our lives are built and designed by other humans. You, as a human, can interrogate it and change it. This leads to human progress.
Understanding Maya In The Spiritual Journey
Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa, the legendary Avatara, gives a beautiful example of Maya. He talks about how Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana were walking in a straight line in a jungle. Rama depicts the Paramatma or the universal soul. Sita represents Maya, and Lakshaman depicts the individual soul or Jivatma. The individual soul can only see the universal soul when Devi Sita showers grace and move out of Lakshman’s way.
Let’s dive deeper into Maya. Advaita Vedanta states that pure consciousness (Chitta) is the only reality. However, Maya makes you believe that you are separate and that God or the supreme divine exists outside you. Before we walk the spiritual path, we see ourselves as sentient beings who live at the intersection of the body and mind. Imagine that you are standing in front of a mirror and can see your reflection. When trapped in Maya, we play the role of the reflection in the mirror. That’s why a person who is not enlighted is called chidabhasa or reflected consciousness. When such people say Aham Bhramasmi, it’s the reflected consciousness that says I am pure consciousness. We can also say that the reflection in the mirror acknowledges that it’s a reflection of the person outside the mirror of Maya, which is Chitta or pure consciousness.https://youtu.be/uLVFQSQsix0
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