Maya, Brahman & Karma: The True Standing of Hinduism

(I’ve written this more like a rhapsody because I got terribly confused in between!)

Amongst the various doctrines of Hinduism, the Vedas and the associated Vedantas play an extremely important role. The Vedas are classified into four volumes: Rig, Sama, Atharva, Yajur, whereas Vedanta represents the ‘end of knowledge’, rather the ‘complete knowledge’ (‘anta‘, Sanskrit for end). Now, the Vedas have to do with man’s realisation of Brahman, or the universal truth, whereas the Vedanta focus on the illusions of Maya, or the indescribable. The concept of Maya was first introduced by the great philosopher Adi Sankara, and deals with the illusions of the Universe. According to Hinduism, Brahman is the sole universal truth, thereby depriving Maya of its truisms. On the other hand, Brahman is realised only through transcendental meditation to pierce the veil of Maya, there by restoring Maya‘s truth. This is the reason she is referred to as the indescribable, since her truth contradicts itself. The concept of Maya itself is extremely difficult to comprehend. Maya is said to have been born from the dream of the Supreme Lord, and she carries forth the characteristics of the universe that make it perceptible, tangible. There is a good metaphor for godliness in this vision: when the Brahman is reflected on Maya, God is the image.

Maya

Here is a good example by Sri Sankaracharya as to the definition of Maya.

“Though the emission of ejaculate onto sleeping garments or bedclothes is yielded by the natural experience of copulation in a wet dream, the stain of the garment is perceived as real upon waking whilst the copulation and lovemaking was not true or real. Both sexual partners in the dream are unreal as they are but dream bodies, and the sexual union and conjugation was illusory, but the emission of the generative fluid was real. This is a metaphor for the resolution of duality into lucid unity.”

The meaning of duality mentioned above is twofold. Duality, in many schools of thought, is the representation of the good powers in the Universe, and the malignant powers. Some religious beliefs recognise both as Supreme Powers (bitheism), whereas some deign the evil as the altercation of the good. Maya, in her being, is born from the dream of the Supreme Lord, which in the case of Hinduism, is representative of the good. The other duality in question is a reference to the two elements of body and mind.

If Brahman were to be constituted as the soul of the self, then the mind would come to represent the knot that firmly establishes the relationship between matter and consciousness. Matter, again, is but a section of Maya herself, and therefore, the perception of the self as being real and true is derived from Maya. Does this mean the self is also illusory? If so, then the body is only a garment. If not, then the body is real and assumes the form of the Truth. But Brahman being declared the sole truth, the concept of Karma comes into action. The mortal is, now, enchained to a cycle of births and deaths until he attains Moksha from Samsara. Karma is the causality of everything and not the cause itself. Man errs. In doing so, his payment for his sins results in him assuming multiple bodies (or garments). My grandfather used to say that if I trampled an ant, I would be reborn as an ant in my next life. However, if the act is committed unknowingly or at the behest of fulfilling a higher purpose, it is not constituted as a sin. For example, there was this tale of a rich merchant who proudly harboured the thought that he had never committed a sin in his life. However, one day, he stamped a cockroach to death. Paranoid and attempting to release himself from accusations of being a sinner, he comes out of his house and hands the cockroach to Ram the sweeper on the street, and asks him to partake of the sin completely. When judgment day arrives for both the men, the sweeper is not consigned to Hell. The merchant is curious and asks the Lord why. The Lord replies that in being a sweeper, Ram’s duty was to kill little insects that troubled other people, and therefore, he was not sinning in killing those insects. Anyway, the presence of Karma Yoga is what results in rebirths. However, at the end of these cycles of life, when a person attains Moksha, the elements of the Universe are finally understood as being the various fixtures of Maya, including Karma itself.

When I, as a child, was exposed to Hinduism and its various beliefs and scriptures, I was of the impression that they were all true (like how a child thinks the story of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is true). But I never really thought Hinduism had such firm basis on the argumentative verges of philosophical thinking. I  may not know what the Brahman actually stands for other than being the Universal truth, but the reasoning behind it seems intact. The ideas of meditation (as a means to attain Brahman) have totally swept over my head other than for the sole reason of finding peace. But meditation itself has a deep inner meaning I learn. To discover the One true self within ourselves is no simple task. There are tales buried in the many thousand pages of the Hindu scriptures of great sages undertaking strict penances in order to realise Brahman. We, as humans, lay buried beneath the infinitely many layers of Maya and her imagery that, given the complexity of our supposedly illusory lives, we can’t truly recognise Brahman even if we were to stumble across it. In the metaphor I mentioned above, God is the image of Brahman on Maya. It is our belief that godliness is true, and that God as a being does exist. It is a general belief as well as a consensus amongst most believers that the concepts of Maya, Brahman and Karma are very complex and intricate. Many worship God just ask for a favour without really understanding that they are asking the True Self hidden within them for a favour! It is the understanding of these principles that delivers Hinduism its true standing.

The Magic Of Knowing Everything And Still Liking It

Not everyone takes to writing the same way. To some, writing is just an inconsequential gay inconsequential past time that should be done only if it is absolutely necessary that you do. At the other extreme where I stand, writing is everything – ‘everything’ to the point that I sometimes wonder if humans would one day evolve into beings capable of communicating only through written messages. In today’s world, in today’s commercialised scenario wherein it is mandatory that you belong to some network or the other in order to set your sights on success, connectivity is everything. A simple idea like Twitter is now being touted as the next big thing for small businesses. In such a world, how can anyone not consider journalism as an important business? I say that in the context of most of us taking it for granted. We all expect the newspaper to be splayed on our doormats at 6 in the morning, but there’s a group of people toiling all day to make that happen. And that’s always the feeling that gets to me when I read the paper: you can only truly appreciate something when you know how hard it is effect it. I always thought playing a guitar would be cakewalk – but that was before I cut my fingers on the strings trying to strum a stupid little tune.

Anyway, that’s my take on writing. And whenever I write, it feels like something so magical, you know. I guess I’m one of those people on this planet who think writing is magical; since everything is some form of an art or the other, there must be at the least a few people who think it is magical! But let me tell you, writing is more magical than you can think it will ever be. We can either speak or write, and for an inorganic form of communication to take up half of everything being communicated is a conquest of sorts. Ever since little scratches were made on stones, man has come a long way in refining language and the scripts that go with it.

Taking a little detour, I’d like to tell you how hard it is to create something. For example, suppose that you’re using a car. Any car that runs on petrol or diesel has a minimum of 40,000 nuclear parts in it. And all parts are part of a network of pipes, tubes, cooling systems, and so on and so forth. Nothing is attached freely to anything. In building such a car, what would you build first? The engine? What about the power supply? The battery? What about the power supply again? The dynamo? What about the wheels that power it? The power transfer mechanism? What about the engine? And that is where a bit of research was initially involved: in trying to figure out what went where. Once that was finalised, a manufacturing plant was set up and an assembly line was modeled after the designs that stemmed from the research. However, if you noticed, all this happened because everyone who worked with mechanical engineering knew where they were headed. They all wanted to build a machine that would work like the latched-D-gate: with a constant input, there would be a specific output.

But in languages, that is not the case. All though we might have inadvertently triggered the factors that led to evolution taking shape, we never were and never will be in a position to control and guide the pathway of evolution itself. It’s something like a Mobius strip: make on and then try drawing a line which is completely blocked from eyesight in a two dimensional frame of reference. Some part of the line will still be visible, although it is drawn only on one side of the paper. We can make a Mobius strip, but we can’t hide the line. If we made a normal strip and made the line disappear, it would become development – or making the car in other words. When we started off, we never knew where languages would end up. But we kept improvising it because that is what we thought was favourable. If we are to progress this way, we’ll never be able to get to the ideal language – but ideal languages don’t exist (the very thought of it is absurd!). And so, here we are. We didn’t know what our goal was, other than the fact that we knew we waned to simplify things; we only did what we thought was right. Therefore, there is nothing to say that languages would have ended up like this whether we wanted it or not. It only leads us to the fact that there could have been any other language in the stead of English. And that is what makes the languages we have today more beautiful! There could very many more, but it was these that took form and shape and materialised in the form of images in our heads.

And that is also what makes writing more valued, rather more worthy to be valued. Now, writing is a tool used to convey information through the simultaneous structuralisation of perspective, grammar and logic – the end result of which constitutes a sentence. With these elements, we know for a fact that we have conveyed something or the other; what I’m saying is that such realisation is also very miraculous. Just by improvising on something, we believe that we are making it simpler. However, since we know no other alternative that might exist in its absence, we don’t have any options. And dangling at the end of this feeble thread lies the future of every language.

And what lies at the other end? What lies at the end which is pulling it higher and higher? The need to communicate as well as to picturise. Speech was the first mode of communication – it was created in order to generalise some ideas and actuate conformity in order to fortify any efforts made towards a single goal. Writing had to take form in order to preserve any such communication. It delivered repeatability and timelessness. What was before dust in the wind or sand on water is now an engraving on stone. And how something as inanimate is capable of projecting so much imagery is something else altogether. And with these many uncertainties involved, don’t you think writing is a magical wand that can perform magnificent feats?

The answer to that question is what divides the readers from the writers!

The end of the world?

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(The text reads: I was watching Inconvenient truth the other day and theres this bit where it shows the sea level rising really high and flooding most of the world. Well I live near the sea, don’t want to drown, so I got to thinking. Maybe if we lower the sea level a bit, when the water level rises then it won’t rise high enough to flood. Anyway, here’s the plan. Everyone who can should take a bucket of sea water and pour it down the sink. If lots of people put the effort in, we could lower the sea level substantially and make a better world for our children to live in.)

THE END OF THE WORLD? A lot of stuff’s been going on about the end of the world as foretold in the Mayan calendar, WW3 as predicted by Nostradamus, and the LHC experiment to be conducted by CERN in 2012. Amidst all of this, the debates also rage around the recent Mumbai blasts and India’s suspected attack (either military or diplomatic :P) against Pakistan. To top it all, US Secy. of State, Condoleezza Rice, lands up in India and asks us to calm down and not go to war – look who’s talking! We’ve taken a gazillion terror strikes up our ass and we’re contemplating war, while they take in just one and wage war against two countries!

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I think we should be heard too. Here’s what’s going around my hostel here in Dubai!

Bala: We must go to war! If India can produce a list of terrorists with their contact details in Pakistan, it can’t be a fake. If Pakistan refuses to extradite them, then it’s a case of failure to show goodwill. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough politicians at the top with a backbone. But war is the best option! BrahMos it off!

Nair: I hate America! But I don’t know if I’m a communist, although I’m pro-BJP. And who the **** are those A******ns to step into our soil and ask us not to go to war! Mind your own business, *************! You know what India should do? Just walk into Pakistan! Like in civilian clothes! Give a **** not for them! I hate America!

Sawant: Going to war is not an option. Even if both countries have nukes, the use of a nuclear weapon is highly regulated, and no matter how many nukes we have – use one and we’re ******. But I’ve been wondering. What if this is a ruse by the Al Qaeda or some other clan to distract Pakistan’s attention on India? If that was it, then they’ve succeeded. I think we should stick to a diplomatic victory now.

Iyyer: Oh… I didn’t know!

MS: We shouldn’t continuously blame Pakistan. If A says we’re not involved in any of the activities of C, and don’t know where C is hidden inside A, then B should try something other than placing the blame on A, ‘cos that’s just foolish and a waste of important time. Oh, and A is Pak, B is India, and C is who ever it is.

Funny Man: I think India should use its floating tanks. They exist, I tell you! Tanks that float in water! You know how it works? I know! I’ll tell you. It’s made of metal, and it is hollow inside, so it will float. And India has 1000 nukes, and Pakistan has 4. What are we waiting for?!

Bala: THEY’RE CALLED SHIPS!

The_MJ: It’ll be sexy, no?! The end of the world as we know it in 2012! Amazing! I’m just gonna spend my money on all that I’ve ever wanted! But I do hope the world ends after that. I don’t want to come back to life in 2013 and find that I’m bankrupt!

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Anyway, the most fiery search these days on Google happens to be Nostradamus and his predictions. I myself have received some hundred visitors looking for his ideas on WW3. Along with the rumour that the Mayans thought the world was gonna end in 2012, I think 2012 ought to be one intense year of speculation and anticipation. Something has to happen then! A famed seer and an age old civilization have both earmarked these next four years for some apocalyptic event. When I believe that I am a man of science and one having faith only in scientific reasoning, I am only led to think that the Illuminati or the Priory of Sion are still active, them and their fabled secrets.

That reminds me of the CERN people. Apparently, they have this kick-ass experiment scheduled for performance in 2012 at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). I’m sure there must be one or two loons in there hurrying to build that damned thing and leave before it implodes into a black hole. Fine, I’ve conceded that I’m waiting for 2012 to happen. Now think of the scientists! If they postpone or advance the experiment, it will mean that they’ve surrendered to non-scientific reasoning. If they do hold the experiment as per schedule, then it’s gotta be with them biting their nails and stuff.

For once, science isn’t freaking me so much!