Rama Katha Rasa Vahini - Post 41

RAMA'S TEACHINGS - WHAT IS MAYA

Often, He called Lakshmana to His side and told him, "Brother! Having come for this holy task, how can I stay on at Ayodhya? How can I enact the further chapters of the Ramayana from there? 

This is the purpose for which I have come. The fostering and protection of the good and the godly, the destruction of the wrong and evil that threaten the peace and welfare of the

world, the promotion of righteous behavior and activities ... these will proceed from now on". Thus, He informed his brother about what he had resolved upon and about the intent and meaning of His Incarnation as Man on earth. 

Off and on, he raised Lakshmana to the role of a vehicle for spreading his teachings, intended for the uplift of humanity and instructed him on the ideals of morality and progress. "Lakshmana!", he said once, "Affection for the body, attachment towards possessions of any kind, egoism that breeds the conflict of 'You' and 'I', the bonds that grow between the individual and his wife, children and property - all these are the consequences of the Primal Illusion, Maya. 

That Illusion is basic, mysterious, and wondrous. Maya establishes her domain over all beings and things, all species of living creatures. The ten indriyas (five senses of perception and five senses of action) have each its presiding deity and Maya perceives the objective world and derives pleasure therefrom, through their instrumentality. Every item and particle of such pleasure is Maya-produced and therefore illusory, evanescent and superficial. 

"Maya has two forms: One type is called Vidyamaya and the other Avidyamaya. The Maya named Avidya is very vicious; she causes boundless misery. Those drawn by it will sink into the depths of flux, the eternal tangle of joy and grief. The Maya known as Vidya has created the Cosmos, under the prompting of the Lord. 

For, she has no innate force of her own. Only while in the Presence of the Lord can she create the three-stranded Cosmos (Prapancha). (The three strands are Sathwa, Rajas and Thamas, each of which separately or in some kind of combination is characteristic of beings: Sathwa meaning the equal balanced temper, Rajas the sanguinary or the emotional, active temper, and Thamas, the ignorant, inert temper)

"The truly wise, the Jnani, who has realized the Reality, is the Person who has given up the rights and obligations of caste and society, of age and status and lives in the constant awareness that all this is Brahman. He has understood that there is no manifoldness or diversity here; it is all One. (Sarvam khalu idam Brahma; Na iha naanaa asthi kinchana). He knows that the entire Cosmos is constituted of the same Brahman, that there can be no second entity apart from Brahman.

Love.