Spiritual Reality: Illusion Born of the Mind

"Vanity of vanities; all is vanity," says the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

The Hebrew word hebel, here translated "vanity," corresponds roughly to the Sanskrit concept of maya (illusion, the deceptive world of appearances). The same word is also the name of one of Adam's "sons," Abel, the "brother" of Cain. This shows that the doctrine of illusion does not belong to Hindu wisdom alone but is part of the common philosophical and religious heritage of humanity.

As H. P. Blavatsky said in one of her letters: "We are all a Maya in one sense; but we are real so long as we exist in our own view, in space and time, and on our own plane." (The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett, p. 253) This is a profound truth. Seen from within maya, maya looks real enough. In our innermost essence we are inseparable parts of the divine and therefore of cosmic Reality; but in our manifested personalities, because we are imperfect, even if only temporarily, we plainly belong to maya.

Here lies not only the key to understanding rightly how maya affects us, but also the key to freeing ourselves from maya, and so to becoming one with the Real and finding the way to "see" the Real for ourselves.

The god within us, the immortal Monadic spark that is a fragment of the cosmic flame of absolute Reality, is the source of all our truth and reality. The closer we come to it, and the more we manifest its transcendent wisdom and power in our lives, the closer we come to its Reality. So we gradually free ourselves from the spell of the illusion in which we live and which affects us because of the imperfections of our sheaths of consciousness, our various "personalities."

The Secret Doctrine (Vol. I, pp. 145–146) says exactly this:

"…According to our teachings, which regard this phenomenal Universe as a great Illusion, the nearer a thing is to the unknown, the more it approaches reality. Reality is grasped the farther one is removed from the world of Maya."

So the cause of human suffering is not maya itself. The cause is our own imperfections and the wrongs we commit knowingly, which often plunge us still deeper into the swirling waves of the deceptive ocean of manifested existence. What keeps us from rising out of these waves of illusion and reaching the clear and endless sunlight of the god within is our mental and emotional attachments, our appetite-driven instincts, our clinging to the things of the senses, and our not yet fully developed intelligence.

We are under the influence of various mayas. As Sir Edwin Arnold's beautiful poem The Light of Asia puts it: "Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels." On the intellectual and psychological plane we are under the influence of maya and have forgotten our divine origin. Immersed in the illusions of embodied existence, we dream the dreams of gross matter. The brain-mind is perhaps the greatest instance of maya in man, and therefore the greatest sinner within us.

By constantly striving to develop the Atmic, Buddhic and higher Manasic faculties within us (man's principles of divine will, spiritual intuition and higher mind), slowly rising to these higher planes of our being and living in them, we can free ourselves from all the wide fields of maya. And we can do this even while embodied. The first step is to become convinced that every part of our being, the heart or essence of each one of us, is a ray of boundless Reality. HPB wrote on this subject:

"…The miner knows what gold will look like when extracted from the quartz, whereas the common mortal can form no conception of the reality of things separated from the Maya which veils them, and in which they are hidden. Alone the Initiate, rich with the lore acquired by numberless generations of his predecessors, directs the 'Eye of Dangma'¹ toward the essence of things in which no Maya can have any influence." (The Secret Doctrine, Vol. I, p. 45)

This Eye of Dangma, which the Tibetans call the "Eye of Shiva," is another term for the organ of spiritual vision of the Buddha within us, or, in the phrase of the mystical Christians, the inner Christos. Indeed, a lofty human being who has lived many lives consciously turned toward the god within becomes the embodiment of the Buddha or the Christos when he is wholly one with the Christos or Buddha within.

The only difference between a Buddha and an ordinary man, though it is the most important and most sublime difference, is that the Buddha has consciously united with the Dhyani-Buddha within himself, with the Buddhi-Manas in the totality of his own being, and is in fact its embodiment. When the Initiate's union with Atma-Buddhi-Manas, the spiritual Monad, is more or less complete, the Eye of Dangma works with relatively full power and splendor. The Initiate is then truly an embodiment of the Buddha or of the Christ; with regard to all beings and things in the hierarchy to which he belongs, he has in effect the attributes of omniscience and omnipotence.

In the far ages of the future, at the end of the seventh Round of our present planetary chain (in Theosophy, each of the great cycles of the life-wave through the globes of the planetary chain), all who have reached the goal by that time will become Dhyani-Chohans (divine beings who have attained superhuman evolution). Of course, this summit that humanity will reach at the end of the seventh Round is not the end of the possible evolution of the human Monads; in ages to come the evolving Monads will attain still higher levels of spiritual and intellectual achievement. Even then maya will exist, but it will be the maya of a far more spiritual plane. As the Monads rise on their endless pilgrimage, this maya too will be transcended and left behind. Thus the different oceans of maya, each made up of a series of cosmic planes, will be crossed one after another on the endless journey toward the never-attained Reality we call Parabrahman.

To quote once more from The Secret Doctrine (Vol. I, pp. 638–639):

"It is always the Sun (the Spiritual, not the visible Sun) that is to send forth Saviours and Avatars in ancient Symbolism. Hence the connecting link between the Buddhas, the Avatars, and so many other incarnations of the highest Seven. The closer the approach to one's Prototype, 'in Heaven,' the better for the mortal whose personality was chosen, by his own personal deity (the seventh principle), as its terrestrial abode. For, with every effort of will toward purification and unity with that 'Self-god,' one of the lower rays breaks and the spiritual entity of man is drawn to the ray that supersedes the broken one, from ray to ray, until it is drawn into the one and highest beam of the inner man's Parent-Sun. This drawing continues ever higher… The human units are one, and all issue from the same source."

The world-illusion in which we live is indeed an extremely complex and wonderfully wrought web of natural magic. This web is woven by the countless beings that surround us and are constantly evolving. We remain within the illusion because our imperfectly developed minds misinterpret the pictures and images this web presents. There is maya outside, and this maya creates maya in our perception, within us as well. Nature, in its differentiated and manifested aspects, is, so to speak, a boundless fata morgana made up of countless small but similar mirages. Yet at the heart of this ceaselessly working web of illusion is Reality, which continually weaves it and so brings forth ever new aspects of illusion. Just as Reality lies at the core of every single unit of the countless hosts of Monads that gather and cooperate in inconceivably vast masses to create this enchanting illusion, so the true Real lies at the heart of each one of us. It is therefore both our duty and our first step on the path to Reality to hold our wandering, illusion-producing minds constantly in the Light within, and slowly, as the ages pass, to make this Light the guiding star of our lives.