Cosmic Game Magic Maya 2

"Oy Veil"—Help I’ve fallen and I Can’t Get Up!

Later Indian philosophers, however, had a different view of maya, and they often used the term maya to convey “the mind’s pernicious and misleading tendency to fabricate unreal worlds; for them, maya was equivalent to what we might call illusion or even delusion” (Mahony, 1998, p. 32). The word "illusion" comes from the Latin in + ludere, to play. Illusion is part of the divine play, and has been likened to a veil, which keeps things hidden from view. The “separate” pieces of god are able to forget and are trapped due to the perfection of this fundamental cosmic illusion, or maya’s veiling and projecting effects. Rumi, who can always be depended upon to give great insight into the Divine, writes about these veils:

All the hopes, desires, loves, and affections that people have for different things . . . are desires for God and all those things are veils. When men leave this world and see the King without these veils, then they will know that they were veils and coverings, that the object of their desire was in reality that One Thing. (Grof, 1998, p. 210).

The Yogavasista, is a Hindu book about maya that mythologist Wendy Doniger (1981) describes extensively. The Yogavasista is the story of Rama as told by the sage, Vasistha, which contains numerous other stories that illustrate the illusory nature of the apparently real phenomenal world. Different characters in the different stories are lead by different means to realize that what they believe to be phenomenal reality is nothing but a projection of the mind. The book is very confusing, deliberately so, being a teaching device designed to give the experience of how it feels to come to this realization—that everything is unreal.

An easier to understand example can be found in the beloved children’s story, Harold and the Purple Crayon (C. Johnson, 1955), because this story, too, is about maya. Harold gets a purple crayon as a present and begins to draw many things, getting very involved in the process. After a while, Harold forgets that he actually drew all of these things and he gets “sucked in” to the whole thing. He starts to get a bit anxious and scared after drawing a monster and his crayon starts wobbling and all of a sudden, he falls for his own creation, and finds himself submerged in his own crayon-created ocean, which he drew from the wobbles. Illusions are only a problem when you begin to take them too seriously, and no longer realize that it is a game, then the veil becomes too thick, and you get stuck and begin to take things too literally, becoming deluded, which means “out of play.” Once Harold realizes that he created these drawings and the reality that they became, then Harold can continue to have fun and enjoy the illusions he has created instead of being deluded.

Speaking of the illusory nature of reality, modern science has come to this conclusion as well. In 2005, I received an advertisement from Scientific American which include a sample cover asking the question: “Are you a hologram? (Quantum physics says the entire universe might be).” We already know that solid matter, all of the stuff of the universe, is essentially non-stuff, consisting of more than 99% empty space (Swimme, 1995). So modern physics agrees with ancient Hindu sages: “that our perception of the world as made of dense material objects is an illusion, (maya)” (Grof, 1998a, p. 74).

Niels Bohr, in his penchant for “spaghetti westerns” figured out why the good guy always wins. The good guy wins due lag time and the difference in time between conscious action and reaction or response time. Tor Norrentranders (1999) in his book The User Illusion discusses these ideas at length, concluding that what we experience as occurring now, actually occurred a half a second before. Conscious action requires .5 seconds while reaction time is only .3 seconds. This works out well for the good guy, who would never shoot first, he thus has a .2 second advantage, since they actually both start unconsciously at the same time. A bit mind-blowing to realize that ego consciousness is not really driving the bus after all!

If this weren’t bad enough, that "things" are mostly empty, and that what we think we are experiencing now has actually already happened, everything we visually see, too, is partly made up, due to the blind spot in our retinas, which makes the brain construct the missing pieces, not to mention the fact that memories are constructed anew each time as well. Just as author Tom Robbins said "we are just making it up," (Payton, 1995, online), or at least some of our reality, after all. Nothing is at it appears, and science has actually proved it!

Since we live in this illusion of separateness and have forgotten that the true nature of reality is oneness, we are in play all the time. Sometimes this goes too far, such as when we cling too strongly to something and become one-sided; when we are unable to see the other side, then we are essentially deluded—away from play. Jung felt that this one-sidedness was the cause of neurosis. Like mythological Trickster, much of the time, we end up tricking ourselves and believe in our own fictions. Fred Alan Wolf, echoing some basic notions of quantum physics reminds us that “we make our own reality” (Grof, 1998). At some level we do, and by being able to change perspectives or even levels, we can sometimes drastically change our realities.

Artful Universe?

The gods, as previously mentioned, are seen as artists and the universe is the creation of their imagination, so in addition to being a divine game, the universe can also be viewed as a work of art, with everything existing in an interconnected seamless totality. Mahony (1998) relates that the Indo-European root *ar, meaning “fit together, unite,” from which the word art comes, is also the root of the rich multivalent Sanskrit word rta, which means “universal law” or “cosmic order,” and is the Vedic term for the absolute. Rta is the hidden structure on which everything is founded and that holds everything together. This “integral principle and ground of being on which that universe rests and from which all things arise” has been metaphorically described as a “cosmic wheel on which all things in the universe turn” (p. 3).

Vedic poets also associated Rta with tapas, the powerfully transformative “universal ‘heat’ or creative ‘fervor,’ the energy of which was understood to bring the world into being and which renewed life” (Mahony, 1998, p. 51). Jung recognized correspondences between tapas with his process of active imagination, although he advised against acquisitively going East (Coward, 1985). Einstein said that “imagination is more important than knowledge,” and the Vedic seers would agree, since they felt that imaginative humans—artists, priests and meditating sages included—also shared in this same imaginative power. The seers placed ultimate importance on divine and human imagination in the formation, transformation and reformation of the meaningful world (Mahony, 1998, p. vii). Rta, art, and the divine imagination are intimately connected. We can hear strains of Bohm’s implicate order, in Mahony’s elegant summary of the artful magic of maya:

We may say this of the creative process: the sublime, formless and unified artfulness of the universe first gives rise to the personalities of the various gods, and then the many gods formative actions create the diverse components of the objective world. According to this view, ultimate reality is a unified and sublime whole, the plethoral nature of which emanates or flows outward, forming the world as it does so . . . . such an emanation of the one creates the many… all things find their hidden model and from which all things emerge. (p. 53)

Maya At The Movies

As participators in the creative, transformative power of the imagination, we make our own illusory reality, "mini-maya" through visual arts media such as such as television, film, and theatre. We are extremely skilled at creating these illusory realities. When we are involved with these, either as spectators or as performers, we can sometimes get very engaged and forget that these illusions are not real.

Just as we are able to have different experiences that seem real at the time when we are involved with these media, imagining ourselves to be having the experiences we see on the stage or screen, so too, the Divine is able, by devolving and becoming involved to experience itself as us, in a multitude of different individual roles, intrigues, adventures, dramas, comedies, and tragedies. And it does not stop there, for the Divine is not only limited to the human realm andcan experience all of creation. Consciousness evolves through getting to experience itself as everything. This is the true Cosmic Game, as we have seen. Goswami (2001a, lecture) compares our experience in relation to the experience of the Divine, by saying “we are all little eyes in the big I of Consciousness.”

Rilke’s poem “Just as the Winged Energy of Delight” captures the idea of the Divine learning through us.

Just as the winged energy of delight
carried you over many chasms early on,
now raise the daringly imagined arch
holding up the astounding bridges.

Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing
living through and defeat of danger;
miracles become miracles in the clear
achievement that is earned.

To work with things is not hubris
when building the association between words:
denser and denser the pattern becomes—
being carried along is not enough.

Take your well-disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two
opposing poles. Because inside human beings
is where God learns. (Rilke, 1924/1992b, p. 236)

Screen-play

Grof (1998a) explains that “theater, film and television are artificially created illusory representations of reality.” They are a ". . . frequent source of metaphoric images that people who have experienced holotropic states use in describing the process of creation” (p. 66). This has been my experience as well, and I have frequently experienced movie parallels or flashes from movies in my holotropic sessions. The ancient Hindus also used theatrical analogies. The Sivasutras of India, contain a series of Sutras that use the simile of the actor/dancer (which are the same in Indian theatre). All of the terms have a double meaning, with both a yogic and a technical theatrical significance (Baümer, 1995). For example:

O Siva, you have produced the drama of the three worlds containing the real seed of all creation and the germ within it. Having performed its prelude, is there any other artist but you who is capable of bringing it to its conclusion?” (p. 39)

Baümer tells us that Siva, a.k.a. Shiva, is the artist, both the author and stage director of the universal drama in which he is also the actor. The senses are seen as the spectators and the individual soul is the stage. The jivamukta is the liberated one who is able to realize his identity with the Divine and sees the multiplicity of the universe as a divine play, thus experiencing the revealing effect of maya. The liberated one “views the entire world as the play of the Self, identical with Siva” (Baümer, 1995, p. 40).

Grof (1998a), like the Hindu sages, uses analogies to movies and virtual reality on several occasions to explicate the “Cosmic Game.” I see no reason no break with tradition, so I will do the same, not only in this chapter, but also in the “Kaleidoscope of Culture” section, using movies and other virtual realities as ways of seeing through to cosmic play. So, to begin and give a Hollywood face to the whole project we will turn to the movie Zoolander, starring Ben Stiller, which Stiller (2001) also co-wrote, directed, and produced. All of the characters in the movie originated in one creative mind—Stiller’s, and even though Stiller wrote the screenplay, when he is an actor he goes by the script as he temporarily identifies with the character he is playing, Derek Zoolander, an idiotic male model. Grof (1998a) reminds us that similarly in the divine play, we are both creator and actor. “A full and realistic enactment of our role in the cosmic drama requires the suspension of our true identity. We have to forget our authorship and follow the script” (p. 67)

Behind the Scenes

Now let us go behind the scenes and see how this divine play works. As previously discussed, the Divine projects itself through the magic of maya to create the world. In the movies and depth psychology, both born at the turn of the Twentieth Century, projection plays an important role. The concept of projection in psychology refers to seeing something outside of oneself that is in actuality also within oneself, which one does not recognize. Projection can be either positive or negative. With negative projection, disowned qualities in oneself, that are seen in another person tend to make the projecting person angry, irritated or judgmental—this quality about other person bothers the person who is projecting. Whereas in positive projection, unrecognized positive qualities are displaced onto another person and that other person is seen to possess something that the person doing the projecting does not see in him or herself, in other words, we think it is them, but it is really us, too.

In the movies, projection comes into play in two ways, technically, which we will discuss in a moment, but also in our experience of the movie, where, through our imaginations, we project ourselves into the experience. Grof (1998a) explicates:

The intention of the moviemakers is to create a reasonable facsimile a “make-believe” version, of material reality. They use all the available means necessary to achieve this goal. It is usually very easy for spectators to imagine that the scenes unfolding on the screen represent real events in the material world. In some instances, the impact of a movie on some spectators can be so strong that they respond to it emotionally as if it were real. This happens in spite of the fact that they know intellectually that what they are watching is nothing but a play of electromagnetic waves of different frequencies within a single undivided field of light. (pp. 73-74)

But this is just the process of watching the movie. We need to look further behind the scenes to actually find out what is going on, as the process is much more involved, and what we see up on the screen is an illusion in many different ways.

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