Cosmic Game Magic Maya 1

The Magic of Maya

Just what is maya? Maya is a Sanskrit word meaning the divine power of illusion, the principle of appearance, the marvelous power of creation. The gods and goddesses were mayin, as they were “possessed of the power of maya” (Mahony, 1998, pp. 32-33). They were seen to be powerful magicians or crafty artists. In early Vedic India, maya referred to this mysterious divine ability to pull a rabbit out of a hat—“to create dimensional reality seemingly out of nothing” (p. 32). Mahony further explains:

The power of the gods’ maya allowed them to convert their divine ideas into manifest forms. Through the power of their imagination they constructed or fashioned the many and various physical objects that constitute the world as a whole. And it was through their maya that they projected themselves into those forms as a way to enliven them and to direct their activities. (p. 32)

Maya was seen as a miraculous power of transformation and creativity, an extraordinary imaginative art of truly universal import, “for without it the world would not exist, nor would it be capable of sustaining itself” (Mahony, 1998, p. 34). The world in which we live, from an early Vedic perspective, is a projection or artifact of divine imagination. As Shakespeare has Prospero say in The Tempest much later, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of” (OSS, 2003, online, [iv, I]) This world is often considered a dream from which we can awaken, as Grof (1998) maintains.

Campbell (1995) tells us that maya has three effects: obscuring, projecting, and revealing. The obscuring or veiling effect cuts off our vision of perfect unity. Its projecting effect casts forth “all of these broken reflections that we see around us” (p. 263). These two go hand in hand as we will see. Maya’s revealing effect occurs when we contemplate all of these different forms with the idea that we are in essence one with everything.

Traditionally maya has often been most associated with the Goddess, Shakti, which is another name for Shiva’s consort, Parvati, who also represents the powerful serpent energy of kundalini, while Kali is Parvati's terrible aspect). Maya is the delusive veiling power that Shakti uses to create the phenomenal world and make the one reality appear as many. “Maya is the external garb of the universe,” according to Svoboda (2004), who provides insight into Shakti’s maya:

Maya can exist only where there is duality. The universe is full of pairs of basic principles: male and female, positive and negative, active and passive. Our philosophy [in this case Tantra] maintains that the Soul is only one, indivisible, in the state of sat-chit-ananda (existence-consciousness-bliss). But the Soul cannot enjoy itself unless there is some observer, someone who can perceive the reality. Observers cannot exist when the whole universe is in a state of nonduality because all is one; no distinction between observer and observed would be possible. To satisfy this urge for an observer, Shakti projects herself . . . . The whole projection is spontaneous because of joy, the overwhelming joy of existence or sat-chi-ananda. Because the process of this projection is unknown to everyone it is called maya. (p. 61).

Dueling Dualities in Doubt

Considering opposites is itself often oppositional. The monotheistic religions have definite value judgments attached good/evil, right/wrong, male/female, up/down, heaven/hell, positive/negative, right/left etcetera. Notice that the first term of the binary pair is most often favored, although the favored term is on the left side as you look at it, if you and the binary were facing the same direction, the favored term it would be on the right. In quantum physics things get less oppositional, with Niels Bohr's complementarity principle. I like to think of opposites the way videogame icon, turned movie character, Lara Croft Tomb Raider does, as companions: “Nature is about balance, all the world comes in pairs, yin and yang, right and wrong, men and women, what’s pleasure without pain?” (de Bont, 2003). In short, just because there is a duality, it does not mean that there has to be a duel: Croft's way of seeing opposites is much more enlightened "to my way of thinking" to paraphrase another movie character, Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964). Since one aspect of play is a movement between two things, there must be at least two different things to begin with, and they do not always have to be at odds with one another.

Opposites, binary and otherwise are the way much of the world and nature itself works, from computers and electric generators down to archetypes and atoms. Van Eenwyk (1997) reminds us of Jung’s view that psychic energy is generated by the tension of the opposites—it is all about the exchange and flow of energies. It is natural that the archetypes would work this way because they are a part of the psyche, and the psyche is a part of nature (p. 24).

Presto-Chango—Cosmic Illusion and Confusion

Hindu mythology is sometimes confusing, because the Divine has many aliases reflecting different aspects of itself. Everything is a manifestation of the Divine, which is Brahman, although the names and genders change, it all goes back to the godhead. Avens (1980) notes that “On the mythological level where rational inconsistencies are appreciated rather than shunned, Brahman is also Maya-Shakti, the divine play (lila) of the universe with all its innumerable gods, goddesses and demons” (p. 7). Zimmer (1989) provides more background on this cosmic switcheroo:

The Primordial Power is ever at play. She is creating, preserving, destroying in play, as it were. This power is called Kali. Kali is verily Brahman, and Brahman is verily Kali. It is one and the same Reality. When we think of It as inactive, that is to say, not engaged in the acts of creation, preservation and destruction, then we call It Brahman, but when It engages in these activities, then we call It Kali, or Sakti. The reality is one and the same; the difference is in name and form. (p. 564)

As Mahamaya, the Goddess personifies the World Illusion, within the bounds and thralldom of which exist all forms whatsoever. . . . she is the primary embodiment of the transcendent principle, and as such the mother of all names and forms. “God Himself,” states Ramakrishna, “is Mahamaya, who deludes the world with Her illusion and conjures up the magic of creation, preservation, and destruction. She has spread this veil of ignorance before our eyes. We can go into the inner chamber only when She lets us pass through the door.” (p. 569)

Avens (1980) remarks that Maya-Shakti is the poetic basis for the consciousness of Brahman, who is a “mirror play of mutually interpenetrating events, persons and things.” (p. 83). Zimmer (1989) describes Brahman as equivalent to the unconscious:

that through which we live and act, the fundamental spontaneity of our nature. Proteus-like, capable of assuming the form of any emotion, vision, impulse or thought. It moves our conscious personality by premonitions, flashes of advice, and bursts of desire, but its source is hidden in the depth, outside the pale of sense experience and the mind-process. Brahman transcends these, hence is “transcendental” (what in modern psychology we term “unconscious”). (p. 79)

This poetic basis of consciousness, which Shakti represents is in keeping with Flournoy’s idea of the ludic or mythopoetic function of the unconscious (Ellenberger, 1970; Flournoy, 1900/1994). Thus, both Jung and Hillman fittingly draw parallels between the anima and Maya-Shakti (Avens, 1980). According to Hillman (1985):

anima refers to the reflexive instinct which Jung associates with the basis of consciousness; and he defines her as archetype of life as the personification which unconsciously involves us with larger collectivities of both inner and outer worlds. In this sense, Jung frequently speaks of anima as the projection-making factor, the Shakti and the Maya that give life to a person. (p. 105)

Roots of Maya

While we are on the subject of the poetic basis of consciousness, language springs from this as well, and thus belongs in this way to the Divine. Language has numinous power, Avens (1980) informs us, and “does not belong to us, it's rather the case that we belong to the angels and gods who address us though language” (p. 89). Hillman (1992), who recognizes the soul of words, has called for an “angelology of words,” bringing into focus their message- bearing function (p. 9). With that in mind, let us look at the message behind maya. Although the derivation of the word is somewhat uncertain, maya seems to come from one of two different Indo-European roots, ma, or man. Ma means to measure, to limit, give form or dimension to:

“mark off, mete out, apportion, arrange, show, display” and thus to a number of verbs referring to the making, building fashioning, shaping or constructing of some thing by conceiving its dimensions within the mind and then—in the process of “measuring” what has thus been imagined—projecting or converting those plans into three dimensional space. (Mahony, 1998, p. 32)

Alternatively, the word maya may come from the root man- to think. If so, the allusions to the role of the imagination of the gods in forming the world are apparent. Either way, Mahony (1998) suggests the word maya in early Vedic thought shows “the wondrous and mysterious power to turn an idea into a physical reality; the power of maya is the power to realize one’s conceptions, specifically through the formative power of the imagination” (pp. 32-33). Jung (1988) in the Zarathustra seminar also discusses maya’s positive meaning:

Maya means building material; so the illusion is building power. If you have an illusion you have built something which exists which is different from yourself or different from the creator. Illusion is not negative, therefore; it is the positive appearance of the world, or really the positive existence. (p. 326)

Cosmic Hide and Seek—We’re It!

Zimmer gives an example from the teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, which speaks to the playful nature of the Goddess’s maya and why she lets so few of us realize this play:

Sri Ramakrishna: The Divine Mother is always sportive and playful. This universe is Her play. She is self-willed and must always have Her own way. She is full of bliss. She gives freedom to one out of a hundred thousand.

A Brahmo Devotee: But, sir, if She likes She can give freedom to all. Why then has She kept us bound to the world?

Sri Ramakrishna: That is Her will. She wants to continue playing with Her created beings. In a game of hide and seek the running about soon stops if in the beginning all the players touch the ‘granny.’ If all touch Her, then how can the game go on? That displeases Her. Her pleasure is in continuing the game.

It is as if the Divine Mother said to the human mind in confidence, with a sign from Her eye, ‘Go and enjoy the world.’ How can one blame the mind? The mind can disentangle itself from worldliness, if through Her grace, She makes it turn toward Herself.” (Zimmer 1989, pp. 566-567)

D. L. Miller (1970) similarly tells us, that “the world in short, is the play of god” (p. 100). What we take to be reality is maya, the divine power of illusion, the trick of god, master magician who likes to play hide and seek. D.L. Miller cites Alan Watts who, using a masculine gender further explains, giving a slightly different spin:

But because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

Now when god plays hide and pretends that he is you and I. He does it so well that it takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that’s the whole fun of it—just what he wanted to do. He doesn’t want to find himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is so difficult for you and me to find out that we are god in disguise, pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough, all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all one single self—the god who is all that there is and who lives for ever and ever. (p. 100)

This cosmic game of hide and seek is a bit like the earliest of children’s games, peek-a-boo, or the similar game that Freud’s grandson used to play, Fort-Da, in that the hiding makes the game all the more fun. This is where the veiling aspect of maya comes in. However, it is not all fun and games, and sometimes things can get extremely complex, as we will see later when we examine the eternal return and revisit the Fort-Da game there.

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