MAYA

The Indian term for “illusion,” māyā from the verbal root ma, “to measure, to measure out, to form, to create, construct, exhibit or display”-refers to both the power that creates an illusion and the false display itself. The art of a magician, for example, is maya; so too the illusion he creates. The arts of the military strategist, the merchant, actor, and thief: these also are maya. Maya is experienced as fascination, charm; specifically, feminine charm. And to this point there is a Buddhist saying: “Of all the forms of maya that of woman is supreme.’

Let’s say we have the world of that which is no world: the Garden of Eden before the world of duality, the transcendent mystery. Then we have the world of things: the world of duality and multiplicity, of māyā, where we’ve lost connection with the transcendence.

Maya is that power which converts transcendence into the world.

As a cosmogenic principle-and as a feminine, personal principle, also maya is said to possess three powers:

1. A Veiling Power that hides or conceals the “real,” the inward essential character of things; so that, as we read in a sacred Sanskrit text: “Though it is hidden in all things, the Self shines not forth.

The first stage, the veil, manifests from the fact that you don’t see the white light. This is what is called the Maya veil. The image that’s given is of white light bro- ken into the colors of the rainbow by a prism. This prism is the Goddess. With the veiling power, the ob- scuring power, the white light can’t get through.

2. A Projecting Power, which then sends forth illusion- ary impressions and ideas, together with associated desires and aversions as might happen, for example if at night one should mistake a rope for a snake and experience fright. Igno- rance (the Veiling Power), having concealed the real, imagi nation (the Projecting Power) evolves phenomena. And so we read: “This power of projection creates all appearances, whether of gods or of the cosmos.

With the projecting power, the forms of the world come through. The prism is the veil, but it is also the projector: what stops the white light and what projects the colors of the rainbow. In this second stage, the white light shows through the forms of the world. If you put a number of colors on a disk and spin it, you’ll get a white spinning disk-that’s the revealing power.

These first two powers, concealing and projecting, can be compared to those properties of a prism by which sunlight is transformed into the colors of the rainbow. Arrange these seven colors on a disk, spin it, and they will be seen as white. So too, when viewed a certain way, the phenomena themselves may reveal what normally they veil; which demonstrates:

3. The Revealing Power of maya, which it is the function of art and scripture, ritual and meditation, to make known.

The principle ritual in most puberty and initiation rites is a death and resurrection ritual in which your name is changed. You die to the name you had and are resurrected with a new identity.

I once saw a film of the consecration of a group of young men who were becoming monks. They were standing in the aisle of a church, and then they all prostrated themselves, and a great canvas emblazoned with the cross was laid over them. When the canvas was removed, they were monks.

The experience of boys being initiated in Australia and New Guinea is of death. Their eyes are covered, and they hear the bullroarer coming, and they are told that the dragon is coming to consume them. When it is right over their heads and they’re about to be eaten, their eyes are uncovered, and now initiated, they see that it’s Uncle Charlie with the bullroarer.

In another such rite, described in a book about the Ona of Tierra del Fuego, the boy is in the men’s house, where there are these masked forms that he believes to be deities and punishing powers. One of them comes forward, and the boy has to wrestle with him. The man whom he’s fighting almost puts the boy down, but then he yields. He lets the boy defeat him and pull off his mask. Then the mask is not simply regarded as a fake. It is both conquered and worshiped, because it represents both the bounding and the bonding power of the Society. The boy puts the mask on himself, and he is now that power.

THE notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. The picture opposite is a classic Hindu representation of the ultimate dreamer as Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is “Unending.” In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers. heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses. They are those whom the dream is dreaming. Eyes open, ready and willing to fight, the youths address themselves to this world of light in which we stand regarding them, where objects appear to be distinct from each other, an Aristotelian logic prevails, and A is not not-A. Behind them a dream-door has opened, however, to an inward, backward dimension where a vision emerges against darkness. Are these youths, we might ask, a dream of that luminous god,