Endless are the mercies of the Mother. Her inscrutable ways, who knows? But She exists despite the protestations of erudite atheists, anti-theists and nihilists of all order. Mother is, so, we all are.
The Vedantic idea of Maya is mostly misapprehended by by lay aspirants to scriptural understanding. Even monastics are misled by Shankara's non-dual philosophy for few, alas, few are intellectually or spiritually equipped to comprehend the subtle truth. 'The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna', though, is an adequate guide to the eventual truth if one follows the directions of the Master strictly. The removal of ego is the one thing needful and submission to the will of the Mother. Else, it will be like moving about in circles at the basement of the spiritual tower, to spell it out as Sri Aurobindo had put it in somewhat altered terms.
Maya is not false as men make it out to be, having failed to apprehend the meaning of what Shankara had said when he formulated his epic principle of the absolute and the phenomenal reality thus : "In half a couplet shall I enunciate what has been thus far elaborated in tens of millions of books, and it is this -- Brahman is Truth, the world [phenomenal universe] is false and the sentient beings are none other than Brahman."
This single verse has been most misapprehended by the followers of Shankara and all that followed in the wake of this grand pronouncement, so much so that it took a series of future Acharyas, sages and divine incarnations thereafter to rescue the Indian people from its erroneous interpretations that negated the world as falsely false. Ramanujacharya, Vallabhacharya, Madhvacharya, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Kabir, Nanak, Meera Bai and a host of other spiritual luminaries have consciously or unconsciously made so many attempts to reconcile the inharmonious interpretations of the Advaita philosophy with the rest of the grand system of spiritual thinking in India but it was left to Ramakrishna-Vivekananda to eventually set the scales straight and bring home to one and all the core content of the text on Maya.
End of Part 1
To be serialised
Written by Sugata Bose
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