VI MAYA AND FREEDOM "Trailing clouds of glory we come/' says the poet. Not all of us come trailing clouds of glory however, some of us come also trailing black fogs behind us; there can be no question about that. But every one of us is sent into this world as on to the battlefield to fight. We must come here weeping to fight our way, as well as we can, to make a path through this infinite ocean of life without leaving any track; for- ward we go, long ages behind us, and immense the expanse beyond. So on we go, till death comes, takes us ofl: the field, victorious or defeated, we do not know, and this is Maya.
Hope is dominant in the heart of childhood. The whole is a golden vision to the opening eyes of the child; his will he thinks is supreme. As he moves onward, at every step nature stands as an adaman- tine wall barring his further progress. He may hurl himself against it again and again, striving to break through. Through his life the farther he goes, the farther recedes the ideal until death comes, and there is release perhaps, and this is Mdya.
A man of science rises, he is thirsting after knowl- edge. No sacrifice is too great, no struggle too hope- less for him. He moves onward discovering secret 91 92 JNANA YOGA after secret of Nature, searching out the secrets from the innermost heart of Nature, and what for? What is it all for? Why should we give him glory? Why should he acquire fame? Does not Nature know infinitely more than any human being can know, and Nature is dull, insentient. Why should it be glory to imitate the dull, the insentient? Nature can hurl a thunderbolt of any magnitude to any distance. If a man can do one small part as much we praise him, laud him up to the skies, and why? Why should we praise him for imitating Nature, imitating death, imi- tating dulness, imitating insentience? The force of gravitation can pull to pieces the biggest mass that ever existed; yet it is insentient. What glory is in imitating the insentient? Yet we are all struggling after that, and this is Maya.
The senses drag the human soul out. Man is ask- ing for pleasure, for happiness where it can never be found; for countless ages every one of us is taught that this is futile and vain, there is no happiness here. But we cannot learn; it is impossible for us to learn, except through our own experience. We try them, and a blow comes; do we learn then? Not even then. Like moths hurling themselves against the flame we are hurling ourselves again and again into sense pleasures, hoping to find satisfaction there. We return again and again with freshened energy; thus we go on till crippled, cheated, we die, and this is Maya.
So with our intellect, in our desire to solve the mys- teries of the universe, we cannot stop our questioning, we must know; and cannot believe that there is no MAYA AND FREEDOM 93 knowledge to be gained. A few steps, and there arises the wall of beginningless and endless time which we cannot surmount. A few steps and there appears a wall of boundless space which cannot be surmounted, and the whole is irrevocably bound in by the walls of cause and effect. We cannot go beyond them. Yet we struggle; we have to struggle; and this is Maya.
With every breath, with every pulsation of the heart, with every one of our movements, we think we are free, and the very same moment we are shown that we are not. Bound slaves. Nature's bond-slaves, in body, in mind, in all our thoughts, in all our feelings, and this is Maya.
There was never a mother who did not think her. child a genius, the most extraordinary child that was ever born; she dotes upon her child. Her whole soul is in that child. It grows up, perhaps becomes a drunkard, a brute, ill-treats the mother, and the more he ill-treats her the more her love increases. The world lauds it as the unselfish love of the mother, little dreaming that the mother is a born slave, she cannot help herself. She would throw it off a thou- sand times, but cannot. So she covers it with a mass of flowers, calls it wonderful love, and this is Maya.
So are we all in this world, and the legend tells how once Narada said to Krishna, "Lord, show me Maya." A few days passed away, and Krishna asked Narada to make a trip with him towards a desert, and after walking for several miles Krishna said, "Narada, I am thirsty; can you fetch some water to me?" I will go at once, sir, and get you water." So Narada went. At a little distance from the place there was a 94 J NANA YOGA village; he entered the village in search of some water, and knocked at a door, the door opened and a most beautiful young girl appeared. At the sight of her he immediately forgot that his master was waiting, thirs- ty, perhaps dying for want of water. He forgot everything, and began to talk with the girl. All that day he did not return to his master. The next day he was again at the house talking to the girl. That talk ripened into love, he asked the father for the daughter, and they were married, and lived there and had children. Thus twelve years passed. His father- in-law died, he inherited his property, and lived, as he seemed to think, a very happy life with his wife and children, his fields and his cattle, his lands and his house. Then came a flood. One night the river rose until^ it overflowed its banks and flooded the whole of the village. Houses began to fall, men and animals were swept away and drowned, and everything was floating in the rush of the stream. Narada had to escape. With one hand he had hold of his wife, with the other two of his children, another child was on his shoulders, and he was trying to ford this tremen- dous flood.
After a few steps the current was too strong, and the child on his shoulders fell and was borne away. A cry of despair came from Narada. In trying to save that child he lost his grasp upon one of the others he was holding, and it also was lost. At last his wife, to whom he had clung with all his might and main to save her life, was also torn away by the current, and weeping and wailing he was thrown on the bank, where he fell upon the ground with bitter lamenta- MAYA AND FREEDOM 95 tions. Behind him there came a gentle voice: "My; child, where is the water? You went to fetch a pitcher of water, and I am waiting for you; you have been gone about half an hour." "Half an hour!" Twelve whole years had passed through his mind, and all these scenes had passed by in that half an hour — and this is Maya. In one shape or another we are all in it. It is a most difficult and intricate state of things to understand. What does it show? Something very terrible, which has been preached in every country, taught everywhere and only believed by a few, because until we get the experiences ourselves we cannot believe in it. After all, it is all futile.
Time, the avenger of everything, comes, and noth- ing is left. He swallows up the sin and the sinner, the king and the peasant, the beautiful and the ugly; he leaves none. Everything is rushing towards that one goal, destruction. Our knowledge, our arts, our sciences, everything is rushing towards that one in- evitable goal of all, destruction. None can stem the tide, none can hold it back for a minute. We may try to forget it, just as we hear of persons in a plague- stricken city becoming paralyzed, trying to create oblivion by drinking and dancing, and other vain devices. So we are all trying hard to forget it, try- ing to create oblivion with all sorts of sense pleasures. And this is Maya.
Two ways of living have been proposed. There is one method very common, which every one knows, and that is to say, "It may be very true, but do not think of it. *Make hay while the sun shines,' as the pro- verb says. It is all true; it is a fact; but do not mind 96 J NANA YOGA it. Seize the few pleasures you have, do what Httle you can, do not think of this negative side of the picture, always look towards the hopeful, the positive side." There is some truth in this, but there is also danger. The truth is that it is a good motive power; hope and a positive ideal are very good motive powers for our lives, but there is a certain danger in them. The danger lies in our giving up the struggle in despair, as is the case with every one who preaches: **Take the world as it is; sit down calmly, as comforta- bly as you can, and be contented with all these mis- eries, and when you receive blows, say they are not blows but flowers, and when you are driven about like a slave, say that you are free, just tell lies day and night to others and to your own souls, because that is the only way to live." This is what is called practi- cal wisdom, and never was it more before the world than in this nineteenth century, because never were blows hitting harder than at the present time, never was competition keener, never were men so cruel to their fellow-men as now, and therefore is this conso- lation offered. It is strongest at the present time, and it fails, it always fails. We cannot hide carrion with roses; it is impossible. It would not avail long; one day the roses would vanish, and the carrion would become worse than ever before. So with all our lives; we may try to cover our old and festering sores with cloth of gold, but there will come a day when the cloth of gold is removed, and the sore in all its ugli- ness is revealed. Is there no hope? True it is that we are all slaves of Maya, we are all born in Maya, we live in Maya.
MAYA AND FREEDOM 97 Is there then no way out, no hope? That we are all miserable, that this world is really a prison, that even our so-called trailing beauty is but a prison- house, and that even our intellects and minds are prison-houses, has been known for ages upon ages. There has not been a man, there has not been a human soul, who has not felt it some time or other, however he may talk. And the old people feel it most, because in them is the accumulated experience of a whole life, because they cannot be easily cheated by the lies of Nature; Maya's lies cannot cheat them much. What of them? Is there no way out? We find that with all this, with this terrible fact before us, in the midst of all this sorrow and suffering, even in this world, where life and death are synonymous, even here there is a voice that is going through all ages, through all countries, and through every heart. "This my Maya is divine, made up of qualities, and very difficult to cross. Yet those that come unto Me, I cause them to cross this river of life." "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.'* This is the voice that is leading us forward. Man has heard it, and is hearing it all through the ages. This voice comes to men when everything seems to be lost, and hope is flying away, when man's dependence on his own strength has been crushed down, when everything seems to melt away between his fingers, and life is a hopeless ruin. Then he hears it. This is called Religion.
On the one side, therefore, is the bold assertion, the most hopeful assertion, to realize that this is all non- sense, that this is Maya, but that beyond Maya there 98 JNANA YOGA is a way out. On the other hand our practical men tell us "Don't you bother your heads about such non- sense as religion and metaphysics. Live here; this is a very bad world indeed, but make the best of it." Which put in plain language means — live a hypocriti- cal, lying life, a life of continuous fraud, covering all sores the best way you can. Go on, patch after patch, until everything is lost, and you are a mass of patch- work. This is what is called practical life. Those that are satisfied with this patchwork will never come to Religion. Religion begins with a tremendous dis- satisfaction with the present state of things, with our own lives, a hatred, an intense hatred, for this patch- ing up of life, an unbounded disgust for fraud and lies. He alone can be religious who dares stand up and say as the mighty Buddha once said under the Bo-tree, when this idea of practicality appeared also before him and he saw that it was nonsense, and yet could not find a way out. The temptation came to give up his search, to give up the search after truth, to go back to the world and live the old life of fraud, calling things by wrong names, telling lies to oneself and to everybody — once came this temptation, but he, the giant, conquered it, and said: "Death is better than a vegetating ignorant life; it is better to die on the battlefield than to live a life of defeat." That is the basis of Religion. When a man takes that stand he is in the way to find the truth, he is on the way to God. That determination must be the first impulse towards becoming religious. I will hew out a way for myself. I will know the truth, or give up my life in the attempt. For on this side it is nothing, it is MAYA AND FREEDOM 99 gone, it is vanishing every hour. The beautiful, hope- ful young person of to-day is the veteran of to-morrow. Hopes and joys and pleasures will die like blossoms with to-morrow's frost. That is this side; on the other side there are the delights of conquest, victories over all the ills of life, victories over life itself, the conquering of the universe. On that side men can stand. Those who dare, therefore, to struggle for victory, for truth, for religion, are in the right way, and this is what the Vedas preach. "Be not in despair; the way is very difficult; it is, as it were, walking on the blade of a razor. Yet, despair not, awake, arise, and find the ideal, the goal."
Now all the various manifestations of religion, in whatever shape and form they have come to man- kind, have this one common central basis. It is the preaching of freedom, the way out of this world. They never came to reconcile the world and religion, but to cut the Gordian knot, to establish religion in its own ideal, and not to compromise with the world. That is what every religion preaches, and the duty of the Vedanta is to harmonize all these aspirations, to make manifest the common ground between all the religions of the world, the highest as well as the lowest. What we call the most arrant superstition and the highest philosophy really have a common aim in that they both are trying to show the way out of the same difficulty, and in most cases this way is through the help of some one who is outside this universe, some one who is not himself bound by the laws of nature, in one word some one who is free. In spite of all the difficulties and differences of opinion about the lOO JNANA YOGA lOO JNANA YOGA nature of the one free agent, whether he is God, whether he is a personal God, whether he is a sentient being Hke man, whether he is a conscious being, whether mascuhne, feminine, or neuter — ^and the dis- cussions have been endless — the fundamental idea is the same. In spite of the almost helpless contradic- tions of the different systems, we find the golden thread of unity running through them all, and in this philosophy, this golden thread has been traced, re- vealed little by little to our view, and the first step to this revelation is this common ground, that all are advancing towards freedom.
One curious fact is present in the midst of all our sorrows and joys, our difficulties and struggles, we are surely journeying towards freedom. The question was practically what is this universe? From what does it arise? Into what does it go? And the answer was, in Freedom it rises, in Freedom it rests, and into Freedom it melts away. This curious fact you can- not relinquish, your actions, your very lives will be lost without it, this idea of freedom, that we are free. Every moment nature is proving us to be slaves, and not free. Yet, simultaneously rises the other idea that still we are free. At every step we are knocked down as it were, by Maya, and shown that we are bound, yet at the same moment, together with this blow, together with this feeling that we are bound, comes the other feeling that we are free. Some inner voice tells us that we are free. But if we attempt to realize this freedom, to make it manifest, we find the difficulties almost insuperable. Yet, in spite of that, it insists on asserting itself inwardly, "I am free, I am MAYA AND FREEDOM lOI free." And if you study all the various religions of the world you will find this idea expressed. Not only Religion — do not take this word in the narrow sense — but the whole life of society, is the assertion of that one principle of freedom. All movements are the assertion of that one freedom. That voice has been heard by every one, whether he knows it or not; that voice which declares, "Come to me all ye that are weary and heavy laden." It may not be in the same language, or the same form of speech, but in some form or other, that voice calling for freedom has been with us. Yes, we are born here on account of that voice; every one of our movements is for that. We are all rushing towards freedom, we are all following that voice, whether we know it or not: like the flute player who attracted the children of the village; we are all following the music of the flute without knowing it.
Why are we ethical but that we must follow that voice? Not only the human soul, but all from the lowest atom to the highest man, have heard the voice and are rushing to meet it; and in the struggle are combining with each other, or pushing each other out of the way. Thus come competition, joys, struggles, life, pleasure and death, and the whole Universe is nothing but the result of this mad struggle to reach the A^oice. That is what we are doing. This is the manifestation of Nature.
What happens then? The scene begins to shift. As soon as you know the voice and understand what it is, the whole scene changes. The very world which was the ghastly battlefield of Maya is changed into something else, into something more beautiful, better.
I02 JNANA YOGA We need not curse nature, we need not say that the world is horrible, we need not say it is all vain, we need not weep or wail. As soon as we understand the voice we see the reason why this struggle should be here, this fight, this competition, this difficulty, this cruelty, these little pleasures and joys — that they are in the nature of things, because we are going towards the voice, to attain which we are called, whether we know it or not. All human life, all Nature, therefore, is struggling to manifest this freedom; the sun is moving towards the goal, so is the earth circling round the sun, so is the moon circling round the earth. For that goal the planet is moving, and the breeze is blowing. "For that goal the sun is shining and so is the moon, for that goal the wind is blowing and thunder is crashing, for that goal death is stalking about." They are all struggling towards that. The saint is going that way; he cannot help it; it is no glory to him. So is the sinner. The most charitable man is going straight towards that voice, he -cannot stop; the most hopeless miser is going towards the same destination; the greatest worker of good hears the same voice within, he cannot resist it, he must go towards the voice. So with the most arrant idler.
One stumbles more than another, and he who stum- bles more we call weak, he who stumbles less we call good. Good and bad are never two different things, they are one and the same; the difference is not one of -kind, but of degree.
Now, if the manifestation of this power of freedom is really governing the whole universe — applying that to religion, our special study — we find this idea has MAYA AND FREEDOM IO3 been the one assertion throughout. Take the lowest form of religion, where there is a departed ancestor, or certain powerful and cruel gods, and they are worshipped; what is the very idea of the god or de- parted ancestor? That he is superior to Nature, not bound by this Maya. The idea of Nature here is very small, of course. The worshipper, an ignorant man, of crude ideas, cannot pass through the wall of a room, cannot jump up into the skies, or fly through the air, and his idea of Nature is one of bondage to superior powers; hence the gods whom he worships can pass through walls, or the air, or change shape. What is meant by that, philosophically? That the assertion of freedom is there, that the gods whom he worships are superior to Nature as he knows it. So with those who worship still higher beings; it is the same asser- tion. As the view of Nature expands, the view of the soul as superior to Nature also expands, and at last we cogie to what we call Monotheism — that there is Maya, (this Nature,) and that there is some Being who is superior to the whole of this Maya, and this is the hope.
Vedanta begins where monotheistic ideas first appear, but the Vedanta philosophy wants further explanation. This explanation — that there is a Being beyond all these manifestations of Maya, who is superior to, and independent of Maya, and who is attracting us towards Himself, and that we are all going towards Him — is very good, says the Vedanta, but yet the perception is not clear, the vision is dim and hazy, although it does not directly contradict reason. Just as in your hymn it is said, "Nearer my I04 JNANA YOGA God to Thee," the same hymn would be very good to the Vedantin, only he would change a word, and make it, "Nearer my God to me." The idea that the goal is far off, far beyond Nature, attracting us all towards it, has to be brought down nearer and nearer, without degrading or degenerating it, until it comes closer and closer, and the God of Heaven becomes the God in Nature, till the God in Nature becomes the God who is Nature, and the God who is Nature becomes the God within this temple of the body, and the God dwelling in the temple of the body, becomes the temple itself, becomes the soul of man, and there it reaches the last words it can teach. He whom the sages have been seeking in all these places is in our own hearts. The voice that you heard was right, says the Vedanta, but the direction you gave to the voice was wrong. That ideal of freedom that you perceived was correct, but you projected it outside yourself, and that was your mistake. Bring it nearer and nearer, until you will find that it was all the time within you, that it is the Self of your own self. That freedom is your own nature, and this Maya never found you. Nature never had power over you. Like a frightened child you were dreaming that it was throttling you, and the release from this fear is the goal; not only to see it intellectually, but to perceive it, actualize it, much more definitely than we perceive this world. Then we shall know that we are free. Then, and then alone, will all difficulties vanish, then will all the perplexi- ties of the heart be smoothed away, all crookedness made straight, then will vanish the delusion of mani- foldness and nature; and Maya, instead of being a MAYA AND FREEDOM lOt^ I J horrible, hopeless dream as it is now, will become \ beautiful, and this earth, instead of being the prison- ] house it is now, will become our playground. Even j dangers and difficulties, even all sufferings, will be- i come deified, as it were, and show us their real nature,; will show us that behind everything, as the substance of evervthing. He is standing, and that He is the One Real Self.
VII THE ABSOLUTE AND MANIFESTATION (a) The Absolute.
The one question that is most difficult to grasp in understanding the Advaita Philosophy, and the one question that will be asked again and again and that will always remain after thinking of it all our life, is — "How has the Infinite, the Absolute, apparently become the finite?" I will take up this question, and, in order to illustrate it better, I will use a figure.
Here is the Absolute (a), and this is the Universe (b). The Absolute has become the Uni- verse. By this is not only meant the material world, but the men- tal world, the spiritual world — everything, heavens and earths, and all that exists. Mind is the name of a change, and body the name of another change, and so on, and all these changes compose our universe. The Absolute (a) appears to have become the Universe (b) by coming through time, space, and causation (c). This is the central idea of Advaita. Time, space, and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen, and when It is seen on the lower side It appears as the Universe. Now we at once gather from this, that in the Absolute, there is io6 Time. Space. Causation.
(b) The Universe.
THE ABSOLUTE AND MANIFESTATION IO7