Is life a theatre, a show, a game? The longer I live, the more this question appears relevant to me. The more I look at what seems to be the reality of life, the more I see the role ancient myths and biblical stories have in shaping our views, the ethics we abide to. I also see manipulation, a deceiving media, exaggerated narratives, a lot of Edward Bernays style trickery.
Maya is a fundamental concept in Yogic philosophy. Maya originally denoted “the magic power with which a god can make human beings believe in what turns out to be an illusion”. Sounds like CNN to me.
Maya is real, the illusion is real, the mystifications, the matrix. The concept of Maya implies there is a deeper meaning behind the obvious, something we can only attempt to discover.
As relatively wealthy people we could dedicate ourselves to art, literature, play and meaningful projects. We could work towards deepening our relationships with each other, the understanding of ourselves. These are values I treasure but most don’t think this way. They prioritise owning the aspirations portrayed in shining advertising, the elusive security of all consuming, boring or stressful corporate work, the limitations of material considerations, the serving of the system.
Even getting enraged and protesting in favour of someone they have no relation to, some idealised, newswordy “other” in need, while their own interests, even their own personal freedoms are stepped on, curtailed, sacrificed. This for a moral cause, an ethical stance, to fit within a manufactured narrative, or even more naively, for hatred towards an ideological opponent.
I see a bigger picture demand for organisation and structure in society. Understanding the weights and balances of this structure is part of understanding some of the game itself. Laws and ethics allow many people, not just the more deserving elites, to have material abundance these days.
But much of it seems like a waste of time, lifeforce, energy or vitality. Why would anyone with enough money to be free, continue to work in a tedious job they don’t enjoy? Maybe because they don’t see a viable alternative, they are frightened by change, they are victims of Maya.
Maya manifests with different layers of illusion, at a deeper level it also implies reality is unknowable to the mind and cannot be put into words. It can only be sensed through meditation. The first attempt of making sense of society and its drives, leads to a similarly big uncertanty, the mystery of our own-selves.
I try to zoom out and elude my sceptical mind through Vipassana or TM. I reach some peace, some wholeness, it works for a while. If I am in the flow of things, I am in the moment, I feel fine. So this is an important realisation: flow helps me live well. But on a difficult day I occasionally have, the same doubts surface again.
A mild form of existential malaise comes back, it makes me drop whatever task I am doing and run to the waterfall. And thank god for the waterfall, and meditation indeed.
I attempt to rationalise, it must make sense, there must be something bigger at play here, some logic. This fleeting 80+ years of life we seem to be destined to go through, does carry some significance, some absolute meaning we can’t comprehend.
I remember from my studies in history at school and university, the state of the world has always been confused and manipulated. Conspiracies, philosophical and religious shelgames, caste systems, state led propaganda, famine, war, pain and suffering were always part of human existence.
The same existential questions that bothered Kierkegaard, bother me too, they are totally relevant, very fundamental and the answers mysterious, elusive, Maya like.
I was watching the tourists on the beach the other day, young people in their 20s and 30s, baking in tropical sunshine, surrounded by gorgeous jungle on a white sandy beach. And glued to their phones, bored, alienated, scrolling.
I also have my own psychological blind spots, personal realities I don’t want to acknowledge, illogical or self-boycotting behaviours, waste of time and energy. I probably have a large unconscious-self full of god-knows-what.
I don’t think this is a mere adaptation to the outer game, the effect of stick-and-carrot socialisation, although there’s a lot of it. Maya is part of my deeper psychological self, embedded as a feature of my mind.
When I look at a friend, do I see the reality of her being or do I project an already prepared, culturally and personally rehearsed and ready to consume model of identification?
Some people think a great limitation to having a fuller life is the frightening knowledge of our own mortality. The precarierty of our known existence brings precariety to the whole construct of life. This concept of mortality is too big to fully realise and it’s usually relegated to the unconscious. This way we can act as if we were immortal. The obvious but unrealised looming of my own death makes anything, even the most valued of my pursuits, frankly unimportant.
Thoughts come and go on their own accord and this is also a big realisation. I have comparatively little influence on the larger world, but is it possible that I have no real control, no sovereignty, within the contained space of my own head? It seems that way.
Maybe the price to pay for authenticity, or what it appears as authenticity, is too high to pay, too inconvenient, disapproved, embarrassing or prohibited that my own psyche doesn’t want to admit it, own it, let alone manifest it.
Because the game needs to be played. Maya, the illusion, is what everyone sees and you gotta find a way to relate to this, if you want to live a barely connected social life.
Maya later came to mean the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real. It also connotes that which “is constantly changing and thus is spiritually unreal”.
Does it mean only the spiritual is real, the sensation of being an aware being, an energetic entity, a vital individual, is this vitality the only real part of existence? This implies the mind, thoughts and identifications are all Maya, all illusion.
I am fully convinced of the relativist nature of perception. Everyone is getting an incomplete or distorted view of the world, not the world as it is but rather only one side of it. Some people know this more clearly, have certain instruments that allow them to better see the game and fare better at it.
Very powerful people, Bill Gates like, win at the game. But they still operate in the material plane of day to day perception, which the concept of Maya deems as unreal.
Probably noone knows the whole picture, no human is a full winner, not in the complete sense of the word. Noone even knows why they see the unwritten rules of the game more clearly than others, why they are so well predisposed to win at the game, to have a front seat at the circus.
What’s changing is spiritually unreal. Hangon a second, this needs to properly sink into my psyche. Is there anything that stays the same in this existence we seem to inhabit? The patterns of night and day, the seasons, the beat of the heart, the breath in and out. The fact that people are born and, necessarily, people die seem to be a constant, some sort of personal beginning and ending of the game itself. What else is absolutely fixed?
My biggest realisation is that Ignorance is a default, knowledge fleeting and provisional. “I know that I know nothing”, Socrates once said.
Even the purity of a well developed philosophical theory, when rendered for the masses, is manipulated by those who know how to win the game. The priestly class of the Middle Ages, the modern corporate controlled media narratives. If winning the game of Maya is the ultimate goal of life, keeping the actual rules hidden rather than explaining them to everyone seems valuable, I see as much.
Ultimately the choice is limited but clear. I either continue this blind pursuit of arbitrary goals in life, or I end it now. Life itself. It’s an extreme choice and a honest realisation.
If I choose the former, I draw another breath, I have yet another thought, feeling or emotion. Then it might be worth playing the game as best as I can.
Continue to pretend there are scientific certainties, moral certainties, ideological or spiritual certainties and act in life the best I can. Hopefully I’ll get more awe than disgust, meaning in moments of connections with others, in sensations of unity and love, in flow states of presence.
If the choice at this point is to define myself as a victim of the world, doubting, rejecting and complaining, or walking down the pitch with new soccer shoes, playing with the ball, maybe scoring a goal, I might choose the latter.
Everyone struggles sometimes, no one is perfect. Even those who appear very successful, celebrities and billionaires, superstar spiritual guides and intellectuals struggle, have self destructive habits, moments of self doubts, insecurities and imposter syndromes.
Everyone is near blind in Plato’s Cave. If we choose to continue with it, knowing and accepting that life has an element of pain and suffering, that it is by nature mysterious, imperfect and arbitrary, then all we have to do is to get good at the game. Have some fun, go with the flow or leave it all behind, go to a monastery, take up drinking, ask for medication.
Victimhood, self boycott and partial withdrawal are common strategies and in an absolute sense, everything is OK. Given the extremes of choice we logically seem to have, most people can only do their best, having a crutch mellows down the negative emotions of not being so good at the game, or winning but still feeling the void, the existential emptiness. Temporarely escaping Maya through spirituality or maybe psychedelics, might bring forth more useful realisations.
A hero’s journey through the high and the lows, the pain and the awe seem the logical choice so far. I am therefore accepting of this life, whether comedy or tragedy, this is what it is. I am that I am.
I attempt to love myself, play the game on my own terms, create my original manifestation in the fleeting Maya-world I inhabit.
“You must understand the whole of life, not just one part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, why you must sing, dance and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.” – Krishnamurti