Everything is an illusion” (सब माया है). We all must have heard this phrase umpteen times from the people with religious bent of mind and, of course, from our spiritual leaders. We often nod in agreement too without having believed a word of it. How could this world be just an illusion when we could perceive it through our senses? We could see things, feel and even touch them; how could they be just an illusion then. Things do exist and so does this physical world.
However, in my early 30s, when I turned to spiritual practices and started to meditate, I began to sense a deeper truth in the idea of this world being an illusion. During the moment of stillness, my mind wandered beyond this world into the space and I started to visualize the universe. Its vastness and infinite nature scared me to the point where I couldn’t delve any further into my thoughts and had to retreat. Having experienced this, the first thing that came to my mind was – no, this is not possible; there can’t be any such thing like ‘infinity’. Why its existence seemed impossible to me, I’m still not sure, but I do feel the same way, even today.
In order to rationalize my views, I often said – “Everything needs to be in something but then everything can’t be in something. The very ‘fact’ that the universe has no beginning and has no ending itself proves that it is ‘nothing’ and thus, there can’t be anything in it. How could there be ‘something’ in ‘nothing’? Everything is illusion then. It’s so perplexing. I have never been able to find the right words to truly express how I felt. The harder I tried to make myself understood, the more muddled everything became.
The idea that “you are not in this world, the world is in you” also points to something similar. The story in Bhagawat Purana, where Mata Yashodha beholds the entire universe in the mouth of the young lord Krishna, also indicates the philosophy that our reality is a reality of our perception. It’s all about the observer and his point of view.
What’s it all then? Perhaps it’s all in our minds, like a dream — so ‘real’ while it lasts, yet so ‘unreal’ when it ends eventually. Some day we too may wake up and find it gone.
– Ranjeet Chowdhury