The Screen of Maya – Our World of Illusion
As we have seen from previous instalments, astounding feats have been performed by young and old alike. They have been happening for thousands of years. They continue to happen to this day. We call these amazing feats “miracles”, because they defy the accepted laws of nature, and because they cannot be explained by our men and women of science. But whether or not they can be explained, they continue to occur.
These “miracles” stand as an enduring reminder that things can happen in our world of common understanding that defy conventional explanation. The fact that they do happen is undeniable. If science is to be true to its founding principles, then these events demand recognition by leading scientific minds. Yet the sad fact today is that these “miraculous” events are rejected by science. They remain outcast.
The reason why these events do not garner the attention they deserve is because they lie outside the borders of “scientific fact”. Because these events are not repeatable, and because they cannot be conducted within laboratories according to the accepted protocols of science, they are considered to be “unscientific”. They are treated as anecdotal evidence – uncorroborated stories – that are not worthy of true scientific investigation.
When Galileo first gazed into his telescope and saw the motions of the planets, he began an intellectual revolution that transformed his world, and has continued to do so to this day. His planetary observations brought him into direct conflict with the Catholic Church. The theology of his day believed that earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun and stars revolved around the earth. Furthermore, since man was believed to be the center of divine concern, it was clear to the Church that the universe was created to serve the needs of man.
The Church taught that man derived his knowledge of the universe from two sources. The first was human reason, and the second was divine revelation. The highest attainments of the human mind up to that time were considered to have been recorded in the works of Aristotle, while the Holy Scriptures contained revelations of all those things that could not be understood by human reason.
Through this synthesis of human reason and divine revelation, everything in the universe could ultimately be known. To the captains of the Church, the implications of Galileo’s work were profound. For if it were now possible to prove via Galileo’s telescope that it was the earth that moved, rather than the stars around it, man’s very place at the center of God’s plan would be called into question. Could there be any greater heresy, or one more worthy of the flame?
When Galileo invited his accusers to look through his telescope and see the motions of the planets for themselves, the cardinals were incensed! “We will not look through your telescope”, they cried. “because we already know how the universe is ordered. Aristotle, scripture and tradition have pointed the way for centuries. If your telescope were to show us anything different, it would be an instrument of the devil.”
Galileo was ordered to make a public recantation, and forced to read a statement that he was ready to “curse, abjure and detest” his theory that the earth moved around the sun. In doing so, he was spared the rack and the fire. But his fate was to be cut off from the world at his villa at Arcetri, and forbidden to receive any visitors. When he died in 1642, the Pope forbade the erection of any monument on his tomb.
Yet by a strange twist of fortune, the very scientific revolution begun by Galileo was to lead those investigators who followed on a quixotic quest. For it served utimately to lead science to the recognition that the teachings of the ancient Rishis were correct. The world that we see around us, and that impinges so realistically upon our senses, is not real. It is in fact an illusion.
According to the teachings of the Rishis, the outer world that appears so real to us is not an objective reality. It is in fact a subjective illusion, projected by the mind on the screen of consciousness. The ancients referred to this illusory manifestation of the mind as Maya. It is characterised by two unique features. The first feature of Maya is its “projecting” aspect. The second is its “veiling” aspect.
In its projecting aspect, the mind creates a flow of images that appear to exist outside of ourselves in the form of an outward universe. In its veiling aspect, the mind disguises its projecting character, so that it never occurs to the observer that these images are not in fact real. The universe that appears so real to all of us is exactly like a dream. It rises and falls with consciousness. When we lose consciousness, our awareness of the universe disappears as well.
The contents of our minds determine the character of our experiences in life. Our lives are guided by what we think. And since what we think is determined by our thoughts, our thoughts are the foundation of the universe. As we think so we experience, and as we experience so we become. So our universe is not bound by some outward set of laws, or the so-called “laws” of science. It is in fact the expression of a principle that is eternally free. And “miracles” are daily reminders of this fact.
As we shall see in subsequent instalments, those early scientists who took up the quest begun by Galileo were led on an amazing journey. Their search for the meaning of reality was to lead away from physical matter, and into the province of the mind. The pronouncements of the greatest scientific thinkers of our modern era have begun to sound exactly like the teachings of the ancient Rishis. For as Fritjof Capra wrote in The Tao of Physics:
“Modern physics has confirmed most dramatically one of the basic ideas of Eastern mysticism; that all the concepts we use to describe nature are limited, that they are not features of reality, as we tend to believe, but creations of the mind.”
Henry Margenau, a leading American physicist and scientific philosopher, observed in his book Science and ESP that everything that makes up our physical universe has its origins in consciousness:
“Consciousness is the primary medium of all reality. Even the external world is initially a posit, a projection of consciousness.”
