The Tricks of Maya (Page 3 of 3)

Man cherishes his false beliefs because he has come to relish them. Maya has succeeded in so thoroughly indoctrinating him, that through his long life as an individual soul, man has fondly clung to the false idea of his separate existence. All his thoughts, ideas, emotions, experiences and activities have ever assumed, confirmed and demonstrated to him the existence of the separate ‘I’. To give up this deep-rooted Belief - which he does not even suspect to be false - to yield what he believes to be the core of his identity, would mean to surrender all that seems to constitute his very existence. This is a prospect utterly beyond the capacity of the unenlightened even to contemplate, let alone to accept.
To shed this last vestige of falsehood – to yield one’s cherished identity - is therefore the most difficult of all tasks. Yet, in truth, this falsehood has no more substance than any of the earlier deceptions, which prior to awakening had seemed to the aspirant such unchallengeable certainties. Identification with the ego-mind too must eventually come to an end; it meets its doom when the soul renounces all craving for separate existence.

Countless are the falsehoods which Maya-ridden man, in the stupor of his ignorance, is duped into accepting; but from the very beginning all falsehoods carry within themselves the seeds of their own unmasking. Sooner or later in the evolutionary progress of the aspirant, their hollowness becomes evident and he recognizes them in their true colours for the innate falsehoods they are.
Even in the very depths of ignorance, at the inception of man’s evolution, there is a faint stirring of challenge to the first falsehood that fastens itself upon the soul. However feeble and inarticulate this slender beginning of a protest, it is the dawn of that quest for the final truth which will ultimately lead to the annihilation of all ignorance, all falsehood. The usurpation of every subsequent falsehood is accompanied by a spontaneous, though slow growth of inner restlessness - a slight tremor of suspicion, a vague quiver of fear-born of the divine ferment implanted in the depth of the soul for its ultimate salvation.

Identification with the body, for example, brings with it the fear of one’s death, the fear of losing others. And in the very profundity of this fear — in man’s heart of hearts — is seeded the first little sapling of suspicion that depending for abiding happiness merely upon the possession of perishable forms is building castles of hope on shadows of sand.

This is true of reliance on earthly possessions for security, and of all the other false premises with which Maya so enticingly paves the road of deception on which it is its diabolic business to lead man to his undoing. By the grace of God, however, there is a hollow sound to every flagstone of falsehood over which man is lured to walk toward his doom. The false note in the very sound, the sense of walking on camouflaged pavement of thin ice, betrays the fancy trappings of Maya to the growing spiritual intuition of the victim and eventually leads him to full consciousness of the Truth.
To achieve this, however, the aspirant must retrace his steps over the treacherous road he had traveled, and this is a task fraught with the most acute dangers. For not only is the surface flimsy and slippery, but Maya has cunningly changed the camouflage and shifted the landmarks, so that the victim now finds himself tragically lost in the labyrinth of a wilderness.

Frantically now he tries to escape, and in his anxiety is again and again fooled into following the innumerable false Maya lights that beckon him to bogus safety. Maya’s task now and it is expert at it — is to conceal from the aspirant the one and only path that leads to his redemption. There is but one effective counter force that can thwart the design of Maya and guide the aspirant to divine safety: the grace of the Perfect Master, who alone knows all the tricks of Maya and who alone on this earth is impervious to the wiles of Maya.

Through the grace of the Master the aspirant is enabled to distinguish the one true light from the myriad false ones, and to find his way out of the karmic wilderness into the eternal stronghold of God’s Truth which is impregnable to the assaults of Maya.

Not until then does the soul become lucidly aware of the all-absorbing Truth that in the divine fact of Reality, Maya, and the whole universe of deception created by it, do not exist. Not until then does the soul know itself to be what it has always been eternally self-realized; eternally infinite in all-knowledge, all-bliss, all-power and all-existence; eternally free from duality; eternally, inseparably all-one in God.