Full Submission: The Greatest Illusion / Time Posted by Narada on April 19, 1998 at 22:45:50:
Definition: Maya is a Sanskrit word imbued with much meaning. It is "illusion", and the power to create illusions, and yet these illusions are the whole sum and substance of creation. Maya is the divine power by which God deludes aspects of itself into believing that they are separate individual beings experiencing the temporal unfolding of their own experience. Maya is the magic will of God creating all the exquisite dramas of life on all planes of possibility.
Creator: The Original Being
Primary Category: Reality
Secondary Categories: Science, Language
Relation To The Core Wave: What is time? How has our perception of time changed over the centuries? What transcends our ideas about time? What is really going on?
Quotes: "The power of illusion may be compared to an introspective deliberation which would plan things. It may be represented as a "divine thought" of which the universe would be the materialisation."
"From the point of view of man "the power of illusion appears to be of 2 kinds. It is a covering which, like a veil, obstructs perception, and it is an evolving through which the illusion becomes an independent, self-propelling entity."
"An illusion is a false appearance, but an appearance is of necessity based on reality; for no illusory thing can exist without support, and the reality of the support remains, pervading the illusion. In worshiping the illusion, or its manifestations, one worships the reality behind it, the unknowable Imensity on which it rests."
"The transcendent power of illusion prevents the basis of all, the Self-illumined imensity, from being dis-covered. It forcibly deceives the minds of even the Seers soaked in the secret knowledge of the scripture."
"Maya is the teacher of magicians. He created the science of magic... he is still worshipped today by all magicians."
"The nature of illusion is represented by the No. 1."
Quote from "proof many gods of India" by
"The sense of an existence separate from Krsna is called Maya (Ma-not, Ya-this). "
Quote from "Bhagavad-Gita As It Is" by A C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
"Though the futures there for anyone to change, still you know it seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past."
Jackson Browne
Encapsulation: Our view of what the world is, is deeply entangled in our experience of time itself.
Main Submission: Since Einstien physicists have treated the apparent flow of time as a subjective illusion. Time is seen as another dimension of extension, and nothing can be said to move or change- all time being already existing. I wish I could find an appropriate quote from Einstien to go here as I know he was quite articulate about this.
Recent developments of complexity theory and chaos theory are changing our perception of time again. It is argued that the future of complex systems fluctuates wildly with the most infintesimal changes of the original conditions. Therefore in a sense it does not exist except as a strange attractor toward certain probabilities. (I hope this is not taking too much poetic liscence with my oversimplification)
Deeper: My own memories disappear into the mists as I look further and further back in time. Perhaps this is not a fault of my memory but the true perception of the past as a mist of possibilities inherently as unknowable as the chaos of the future. If this is so then to "prove" a particular past moment as "having happened" is only to show that there is a trajectory of cause and effect that leads from one imagined situation to the other. Only this moment can be said to be real now, and perhaps it has not "one set past," anymore than it has one set future.
Connections: Alien Dreamtime: The Australian Aboriginal concept of the origins of the world seems to me to be rather close to the last paragraph above. "Time" dissappears into an archetypal realm where aspects of the pervading personality of existance are responsible for the creation of the forms we see around us.
The Big Bang Never Happened: If time itself is an illusion then what is it that cosmologists are studying if not their own minds?
The Game: "Illusion" and the "game" are deeply interwoven concepts, for nothing in the game is "real". In the back of Hesse's G B G there are three life stories, and the last is entirely concerned with a yogi's demonstration of the power of Maya (illusion). To quote from there-"and was what he was experiencing this moment, what he saw before his eyes, awakening from rulership and war and imprisonment, standing beside the spring, his gourd from which he had just spilled a little water, together with what he was now thinking about it all-was not all this made of the same stuff? Was it not dream, illusion, Maya?"
Geographic Location: Wherever it was in Europe that they made the first wind up clock
Images and Clips: Dear Beautiful Time Traveller a collage by Narada
Access and Distribution: Quotes from a wonderful book called "The Gods of India- Hindu Polytheism" by Alain Danielou copyright1985, published by Inner Traditions International Ltd 377 Park Ave South New York New York 10016