Avadhoot Dandekar

What is Maya? What is Advaita?

Advaita (A Poem)

You are not the body. You have the body.

You are not the mind. You have the mind.

You are the Soul. You are pure Consciousness.

Is this not really liberating?

Illusion doesn’t mean non-existence. It is a temporary existence.

The world is relatively real, not absolutely real.

In darkness, a rope may appear like a snake.

In a mirage, water appears real from a distance.

While dreaming, the dreamer sees the dream as real.

While waking to the waker, the dream is unreal.

To the dreamer, the world looks real.

To the awakened, the world looks like a dream.

This is Maya. What is Maya?

Maya is, when temporary looks permanent.

When secondary looks primary.

When a dependent looks independent.

When relative looks absolute.

When the mortal looks immortal.

Break the Maya. Bring in Awareness.

Everything is absolute.

This is Advaita.

You are that. Tatavamasi.

How to explain Maya (illusion) to a modern mind, a mind of science? 

Ask a quantum scientist, what about the measurement problem? He may go crazy and say, “Shut up and calculate.” That is a bias in Science.

Well, the collapse of a wave function is like Maya. It is difficult to explain to a modern mind obsessed with calculations.

In management, we often say that excessive analysis can lead to paralysis. But I will not say, “Just shut up and meditate.” That would be another kind of bias. No, I will say meditate and calculate. You calculate to the extent that calculation is possible. But there is a point beyond which there seems to be nothing physical. Even the physical equations break down within the Planck epoch (0 to 10^-43 seconds). You must then take shelter in meditation. Mindfulness helps you break Maya to witness the immortal.

Tip!!

We have this habit of seeing everything as a physical thing. The space can be objective and subjective. In science, the observer plays a key role. The observed reality is partial. The observer becomes a witness when he shifts from outer space, which appears objective, to inner space, which seems subjective. The mental space is an inner space. Buy Me a Coffee

Mind is a prism of duality. We see a partial reality through the mind. We see a fragmented reality. The mind has to be transformed to see non-dual reality. Advaita means non-duality. The mind has to attain to Shunyata to see this non-dual reality. Mindfulness helps attain Shunyata.

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