Swadharma » maya

Misinterpreting Freedom

Sonali — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 13:52:48 +0000

Recently, I was discussing Hinduism and the ideas of freedom and maya with one of my close friends. When I explained to her that for me, the goal of Hinduism — and of my life — is to become free and to understand that there is more to reality than just this physical world, she made a really interesting point: doesn’t such thinking justify our lack of concern about the deterioration of the world around us?

In other words, if we assume that the world is an illusion, it becomes really easy to do all sorts of terrible things; if the world isn’t real, then it doesn’t really matter if we pollute it, or brings species to extinction, or exhaust our natural resources, or wage wars; thinking that the world is an illusion may give some people license to damage the earth.

I wasn’t sure how to respond, other than that people who honestly believe that there is something beyond this world would naturally act in ways that help others and in ways that don’t damage the earth…But I thought she had a really important point, that it is really easy to misinterpret this idea of freedom.
How would you guys respond to this? How can we know the correct way to interpret our religion, assuming that my earlier explanation is “correct”?

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Worshiping God as Mother

Sonali — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:15:40 +0000

Since we recently celebrated Navratri, the idea of worshiping God in the form of Mother has increasingly been on my mind. A close family friend recently sent me an email about a service she had attended in the New York Ramakrishna Vedanta Center, where the topic of the lecture was “Worship of God as Mother.” I really liked one of the explanations that Swami Yuktatmananda gave during the lecture:

It is like as long as a child is playing with toys his mother attends to all her other duties; but the moment the child throws away all toys and cries for Mother, she runs to him and take him in her lap. Mother — Mayamaya — also lets us play with things of world until we are not satisfied with them. As long as we are happy with the worldly enjoyments, she lets us be absorbed in them. Once we are done with these joys, we begin to search for something abiding, permanent. We begin the search for Mother, and finally find her so close to us.

I thought it was a really beautiful way of explaining Maya, as well as our relationship to God.

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Faith, truth, and reality

Divya Kishore — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:05:45 +0000

On Friday we discussed the convergence of, and tension between, reason and faith. Harvard in particular is an interesting environment — as a leading educational institution in the world, its values are well-grounded in ideals of reason and truth. Faith — widely known to be that which we believe in, but which doesn’t often manifest itself in tangible forms of proof — can be a difficult thing to reconcile with our ideals of knowledge and truth.

How do we go about approaching what we know and what we believe?

Someone once told me that before you can move forward with what you believe, you have to hold what you believe to be true. To be honest, I somewhat disagree with this point of view. This goes back to the idea that one religion is “right” while others aren’t. For example, should faith be guided by historical accuracy? Should we try to prove which religious texts are accurate, and in effect, follow them? Should we try to prove a monotheistic or pantheistic view of the world? Should we question whether the mythology of Krishna and Arjuna and Shiva and Parvati really occurred, and should the answer influence our belief in God?

I think back to the story of Narada, a devotee who asks Vishnu to show him the truth of Vishnu’s maya. Vishnu instructs Narada to jump into a pond, from which Narada emerges as a princess named Sushila. Sushila is married and bears children, but when her father and husband break out in a bloody feud, resulting in her son’s death, she throws herself upon the funeral pyre from her grief. Narada wakes up in his previous form, but when Vishnu asks him what was the name of the child who died, Narada cannot answer.

This story tells us that the world surrounding us is maya, an illusion that we construct to perhaps assign false meaning to our lives. Hinduism teaches that it is through the goodness of our deeds and actions that we are liberated from our maya, so our current lives are certainly not useless or completely insignificant. However, using the “truths” we extract from the world (maya) around us to guide our beliefs in a higher power can be a faulty method. For all we know, we could very well be like Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in Narnia, or like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot… or like Sushila, currently stuck in a pond of ignorance, with Vishnu, symbolizing the reality of the supreme, divine, and infinite, waiting to pull us out.

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Psychology and Maya

Sonali — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 05:33:54 +0000

Yesterday in my psychology class, we learned about the nature of vision and perception — some of you probably knew all of this earlier, but the information was new to me — our experience of the world is not only entirely subjective, it is basically entirely created by our mind! For example, we all should see a large hole in certain parts of our vision (the blind spot) because this is the place where the optic nerve connects to the brain; however, our brain just fills in the spot based on the characteristics of rest of the image it is seeing. Our brain fills in shadows where it thinks we should be seeing them, inserts sounds it thinks we should be hearing, and essentially is the basis for why we see the world the way we do.

What is this other than the Hindu concept of maya (illusion)? Just as psychology suggests that our perception of the world is a construction of our minds, Hinduism, too, suggests that this world is illusory and impermanent. While I do not know much about the theory behind maya, it is definitely a fascinating parallel to examine.

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