“The doctrine of the unreality of this Universe…”

DAILY THEOSOPHY QUOTES

Wednesday 3rd July 2013

“Maya is the perceptive faculty of every Ego which considers itself a Unit separate from, and independent of, the One infinite and eternal SAT, or “be-ness.” Maya is explained in exoteric philosophy and the Puranas, as the personified active Will of the creative God – the latter being but a personified Maya himself – a passing deception of the senses of man, who began anthropomorphizing pure abstraction from the beginning of his speculations. Maya, in the conception of an orthodox Hindu, is quite different from the Maya of a Vedantin Idealist or an Occultist. The Vedanta states that Maya, or the deceptive influence of illusion alone, constitutes belief in the real existence of matter or anything differentiated. The Bhagavata Purana identifies Maya with Prakriti (manifested nature and matter). Do not some advanced European metaphysicians, such as Kant, Schopenhauer, and others, assert the same? Of course they got their ideas about it from the East – especially from Buddhism; yet the doctrine of the unreality of this Universe has been pretty correctly worked out by our philosophers – on general lines, at any rate. Now, although no two people can see things and objects in exactly the same way, and that each of us sees them in his own way, yet all labour more or less under illusions, and chiefly under the great illusion (Maya) that they are, as personalities, distinct beings from other beings, and that even their Selves or Egos will prevail in the eternity (or sempiternity, at any rate) as such; whereas not only we ourselves, but the whole visible and invisible universe, are only a temporary part of the one beginningless and endless WHOLE, or that which ever was, is, and will be.”