Maya – Sri Paul Twitchell
May 9, 1963
Dear Gail:
Maya is a force of illusion which leads us to believe in our phenomenal world. It is a Hindu word referring to illusion of the false reality, of seeing something which is actually not there. In other words man is seeing the phenomena instead f the reality of life; the reality being that of God’s world.
Maya is a spell of the senses. It is a hypnotic weave of the desire world in which we live, that we see constantly with the five senses; the physical world. This universe is called the prison house of Maya because man has allowed himself to fall out of the Audible Life Stream, and wander about unaided. He thinks and sees all life as material and lets the materialistic guide him instead of the intuitive. Maya puts man in a bondage and holds him there with its alluring song, in the world of sense and matter. It actually is a force made up for the downward pull of man; and faculties of perversions (Kama, Krodha, Lobha, Moha, and Ahankara) are the forces or channels it uses to keep one in bondage.
Here Sri Paul Twitchell uses the Hindu concepts of upper and lower polarities to demonstrate the concepts of higher (Spiritual Plane) and lower, (Material Planes) ideas of duality. In Eckankar as in Sikhism, Sat Naam or Sat Purush are terms for the non-dual God, while Kal Niranjan is the lower manifestation of the dual God on the lower planes. Usually Maya is a female and is depicted as the wife of Kal, the two working in tandem to keep Soul entrenched in lower desire that It may never escape to be free as It was created to be. The Soul must find Its way through harsh self-created conditions necessary for It to learn to discern what choices aid It or hold It back, that It may climb the spiritual ladder to attain the states of consciousness of the true spiritual planes. The “faculties of perversion” are: Kama = Lust, Krodha = Anger, Lobha = Greed, Moha = attachment or temptation, and Ahankara = Pride. The five passions of the mind are offset by the five virtues.
The Isha Upanishads has a line something like this: “Reality is One, but men call It by various names.” What is reality? It is that known to orthodox religions as the force of spirit; to science as a field of electro-magnetic force. Maya blinds us to seeing this true field of electrical force which surrounds all, is in all, and above all. Therefore Maya is the illusion of diversity – form, place, and time, which are classed by the Orientals under the general term Maya, illusion, lila or sport. The word Maya signifies the great sea of shadows – the sphere of things as they seem to be as distinguished from a blank sheet of paper which represents one thing and the Reality, the It, as IT eternally is. The mothers of the various World Saviors generally bear names derived from the word Maya, as for example, Mary, for the reason that the various redeeming deities signify realization born out of illusion, or wisdom rising triumphant from the tomb of ignorance. Philosophic realization must be born out of Maya and rise through many tribulations into the light of eternity.
Here he is telling some of the differences between all of the lower planes, and the Soul Plane, which he calls Reality. It is the first plane of the spiritual realms that is known to many cultures of spirituality, but not all. Shamus-i Tabrizi, a Sufi ECK Master called God of the Soul Plane the Real, just as Guru Nanak called it Sat Naam. He is also using physical plane scientific terms to add an area of comparison for the general person to be able to make the physical to spiritual connection insofar as the interpretation of terms and ideas, all lower and mental aspects of identification on the Physical Plane. His mentioning electro-magnetic force is one example, but there are others, such as Dr. Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone 1, or Life-Energy, which is comparable in some ways and still beyond Physical Plane science in others,
For this reason I did the discourse of Time prior to this letter. Time is an illusion when seen in its true form. So are numbers. Numbers partake of the Maya of diversity, for they are infinite in their combinations and their progression is limited only by the rational capacity of the mathematician. We find that Pythagoras declared the monad, or the 1, to signify Reality, but the duad, or the 2, illusion. Now it’s here that I point out that even the Astral Plane is that of illusion, or a Maya world. Here illusion is particularly powerful, and the Astral light which comes to one occasionally is supposedly dangerous for one might believe it is the true spiritual illumination, but are carried to their destruction through it. One falls into a snare and delusion, and the receiver of this light will drift into oblivion in a mystic ecstasy, where fantasy rules.
The ideal of Hinduism is the One Reality, the Brahman. All else is Maya, or illusion. This Reality may take human form as in Krishna; yet in the Inner Shrine looms the vast and awful Vishnu, and the devotee is haunted by the sense of reality. Is not Krishna the maya also? And his activities, are they not lila 2? However, the central aim of all scriptures is to relate the religious hero to the Eternal, to show how the Eternal is like him, and that his saving grace avails for all who turn to him. All saviors make the staggering claim that “I and my Father are One!” Meaning they are the channels through which the power flows. Yet all scriptures appear to lose much of their meaning when we find that the saviors’ incarnations are due to maya, or to magic or to lila. Buddha is claimed to have stepped through the Veil into the earth plane in the scripture called “The Light of Asia,” translated by Arnold.
In the Svetasvatara Upanishad, a savior Rudra-Siva emerges from a background of monistic philosophy and demands bhakti (devotion) from personal worshippers, and then as if to save the face of the monist, declares the world to be illusion, unreality, and maya. Illusion is then the feeling that all that we live in is nothing, and that we are already dead, although imprisoned in a world of senses and matter until the Master or someone is able to release us . The Zen Buddhists say outright to live like one already dead – meaning of course not to live in this world, not to take any part in it; exist only because nothing is in harmony with the world except the body, and that is only partially so.
Since this is a warring universe, and everything in it is under attack, including the body, there is nothing one has need for in it. The body is always under attack by bacteria, germs and invisible influences. It is constantly giving away under such attacks – and for that reason the occultists always say, “Be yourself, live in the Spirit and let the body go back to dust.” As we eat to please the body, we find that the body is being eaten by bacteria, etc. in order to feed themselves. Not a pleasant thought, but nevertheless true. This body is hardly more than a Genetic Entity (G.E.) which is like a growing vegetable and wouldn’t have any life, if it wasn’t able to trap the spirit of force within itself in order to have movement and action. Otherwise it is hardly worth the time to make its life worth living. There has always been a constant fight against the spirit and matter.
You see Maya is actually the dream world in which you live in that dual viewpoint which sees good and bad. Therefore what is called sin is but an illusion and when the mind or thought are polarized with God, there can be no Maya for you have no illusion. You are beyond good and evil, beauty and ugliness. What causes this blindness to true reality is desire – this puts the veil between us and the Reality. Unattachment breaks through the veil so that nothing stands between the Self and Reality.
The Maya-Desire has two principle functions or powers: (1) Avarana, which veils the eye of reason, blinds it to all but the immediate object of the particular desire, shuts it off from all sense of proportion, of balance, of the truth in the mean. (2) Vikshepa, which flings, or drives or pushes the whole Self (jivatma) in pursuit of the desired object, to the neglect of all duties. The counteracting, neutralizing, opponents of these two forces are, respectively, the force of Vairagya, which consists of disillusionment, dispassionate, desirelessness, distaste, disgust, with the world. Mujanibat, is that word used of those born of sensitive experience of one’s own and much more, of other’s miseries, and the persistent pursuit of the Truth.
Within the rest of this letter Sri Paul Twitchell uses many examples to display the duality of life, as it is perceived from the Physical Plane. This dual nature becomes self-evident upon reaching the awareness of being able to witness the eternal nature of the Atma, or Soul within Its relation and interaction to and with Spirit, which is the active factor of the Godhead, or as we ECKists call IT, Sugmad. Once this level of realization is reached and this state is viewed directly from within, the lower states never again look or seem the same as they had previously. This change of consciousness is one that occurs from the lowest state all they way through and up to the highest that is available to the individual at that point. It may come al at once as a single experience, or it may come in parts over a period of time (as viewed by the physical self) that upon completion give that one an understanding that had not been available to them before. This experience can be so deep and authentic in its veracity that time and the world can literally be seen as having stopped while that Soul is in the midst of gaining an understanding of the entire concept, but perceives it far beyond the mental way of understanding, into a far more complete and all-inclusive experience of seeing, hearing, knowing and being.
There is little need for the actual suffering in life as the Orthodox religions teach because Maya is the instrument of suffering. Once you can see behind the curtain of Maya and find the true Reality, the world changes. No longer are you able to bear the smallness of life! You are then in position to rise above all the things which make life dull, drab, unbearable and without hope.
More later.
From Letters to Gail Vol.2 © Eckankar 2014
2 Lila, ( Sanskrit: “play,” “sport,” “spontaneity,” or “drama”) in Hinduism, a term that has several different meanings, most focusing in one way or another on the effortless or playful relation between the Absolute, or brahman, and the contingent world.
