Spicy Spiritual Curry 1: Mahamaya and Time in Sanskrit

Another one of the topics about which I love to endlessly ramble is spirituality. Although I'm no cleric (or other religious, as the survey forms say), it's a subject to which I dedicate a lot of thought. My favorite fields inside this broad discipline are Hinduism, Buddhism, the more esoteric forms of Christianity and Judaism and epistemological ontology, or, how we know what we know (or what we think we know) about reality.

A topic which has sat heavily on my mind, lately, is the notion of alternative universes, movement between them, and how the way we apprehend time time determines the sort of cosmos that we'll live in. The Hopi language, for example, only talks about subjective and objective verbs, with no tense settings at all. Sanskrit, the language of the great Hindu theological works, doesn't use actions verbs very much. "Manu spoke with great wisdom," for example, would become, "Manu is speaking with great wisdom." Instead of the linear progression of time which Western languages, very action oriented, enforce on our patterns of thought, Sanskrit and it's associated derivatives promote a sense of unending "now"-ness and presence, an indelible and undeniable but equally untouchable solid "is-ness," as a teacher of mine once described it.

Hindu thought maintains that everything, from the lowliest atom to the greatest gods (and there's more commonality there than you'd think) is nothing but maya, commonly translated as "illusion," and that the universe is mahamaya, the Great Illusion, which flows out from, into and through the ineffable Brahman. A little story from the Vaishnavite tradition illustrates this principle perfectly.

"Once, long ago, a holy man, a seeker of truth, wanted to understand the meaning of maya. He traveled far and wide, trying to find the secret understanding that only study, meditation and deep awareness of the stillness of the universe can bring. Finally, frustrated that maya was eluding him, the holy man went to ask Vishnu, the great god himself. He found Vishnu asleep, and perched on the outer shell of the giant being's ear, shouting for him to wake up so that he could put him to the question.

After he had shouted for a little while, maybe two or three years, Krishna walked up alongside him and asked what on earth he was carrying on for. The holy man turned to Krishna and said, "I am seeking to know the meaning of maya. Can you tell me?"

Krishna thought about for a moment, maybe two or three years, and asked him, "Do you really want to know?"

"Yes," he said.

Krishna tapped the man's forehead, and he fell into a deep reverie. When he awoke, he found that he was a woman, about sixteen years old, with big brown eyes and a pretty smile. He loved life and his sisters and mother and father. A year or two later, his marriage was arranged to a handsome young man, the son of a wealthy merchant, and they fell deeply in love with each other.

Over the next fifty years they shared a good life. He had many children with this man he loved and they experienced all the pleasures and pains that families do. In some years business was good, and in others it was bad. When one of his children died shortly after being born, the holy man thought that he would die, and tore out his long, soft black hair in grief.

Finally, when he was an old man, the merchant's son, now a powerful merchant in charge of his later father's concern, died. It was not a painful death and he, as a good man who had always carried out his dharma, would have a good place on his next turn around life's wheel. The holy man was distraught when his husband died, unable to eat, sleep, drink or think of anything else but his agony, and performed the act of sutti by throwing himself upon the merchant's son's funeral pyre.

Suddenly, as the flames began to eat him and the smoke began to choke him, the holy man felt a bucket of water splash him in the face. Krishna was standing beside him, smiling inscrutably, the same smile that played on the great god Vishnu's face slumbering stories above them. "Ah," Krishna said, "good. I thought I might have tapped you on the head too hard; you were knocked out for nearly ten minutes!" The holy man was speechless. "Do you have any more questions of me?" He still could not form his thoughts, which now ranged the depths and breadth of the cosmos, into words, the mysteries were too great. Krisha laughed, unable to contain his mirth any longer. "It is good," he said, "that we had this discussion. Now you will go from this holy place and understand maya!"

I have always particularly liked that story, for whatever reason. For more on the subject of time and perception, look into http://www.amazon.com/There-Life-After-Death-Afterlife/dp/184837299X/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1278700251&sr=1-17

For more information on the Hindu myths, check out http://www.amazon.com/Ganesha-Goes-Lunch-Classics-Mandala/dp/1601091028/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278700358&sr=1-2