Facing maya within
More often than not, something of such extraordinary psychological tenacity has evolutionary underpinnings, which means that they would have been favoured along the course of the natural evolution of our species due to conferring a prominent survival advantage. And it isn't hard to imagine how maya would have been favoured by evolution. The idea and experience of Brahman did little to improve the reproductive fitness of the primaeval human. All that they needed to perpetuate themselves—from invading neighbouring chiefdoms to warding off assailants—only made sense in the presence of maya, and it is the world of maya that our innate faculties needed to master. And maya remains as relevant to us today in our lives as it ever did, which effectively rules out the possibility of us ever losing this embedded mental programme.
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Facing maya within
Maya is real. It is as real as it is misunderstood. One can contend that it is less real than the absolute reality, that which Vedanta calls Brahman, but even such gradations are open to question. Swami Vivekananda has given a felicitous definition of maya—what we are and what we see around us. One can understand it simply as the manifold world we all know as 'our world'. And as much spirituality seeks to cut through maya to expose the absolute, the fact is that its tenacity remains scandalously underappreciated, precisely why most spiritual expeditions fall short of the finishing line. Its roots run into the greatest depths of psychology and preponderate on the unconscious, which makes it crucial to adopt a scientific approach towards countering it. More often than not, something of such extraordinary psychological tenacity has evolutionary underpinnings, which means that they would have been favoured along the course of the natural evolution of our species due to conferring a prominent survival advantage. And it isn't hard to imagine how maya would have been favoured by evolution. The idea and experience of Brahman did little to improve the reproductive fitness of the primaeval human. All that they needed to perpetuate themselves—from invading neighbouring chiefdoms to warding off assailants—only made sense in the presence of maya, and it is the world of maya that our innate faculties needed to master. And maya remains as relevant to us today in our lives as it ever did, which effectively rules out the possibility of us ever losing this embedded mental programme.
