Even though the power of mayic shadows is very strong, the power to transcend them is even stronger when we understand their value in educating and entertaining us.
Power of Delusion Very Strong
According to Paramahansa Yogananda, the power of delusion is very strong. A human being is a soul who has a body, but the power of delusion makes us think that we are just minds and bodies, and many people tend to think that perhaps the soul is a fiction.
The deluded mind coupled with the solid body convinces us that our main reality exists in them. We are deluded by maya, “the principle of relativity, inversion, contrast, duality, oppositional states.” Maya is called “Satan” in the Old Testament and “the devil” in Christianity. Jesus Christ described the devil as a murderer and a liar, because “there is no truth in him.”
Diversion from Reality to Unreality
Paramahansa Yogananda explains that maya is a Sanskrit word meaning “the measurer,” a “magical power in creation” which divides and manipulates the Unity of God into “limitations and divisions.” He says, “Maya is Nature herself—the phenomenal worlds, ever in transitional flux as antithesis to Divine Immutability.”
The great yogi/poet further defines the mayic force by explaining that the purpose of maya is “to attempt to divert man from Spirit to matter, from Reality to unreality.” He further explains, “Maya is the veil of transitoriness of Nature, the ceaseless becoming of creation; the veil that each man must lift in order to see behind it the Creator, the changeless Immutable, eternal Reality.”
Maya Similar to Shadows
The great spiritual leader has explained in detail the workings of the delusive concept of maya, often employing metaphors and colorful imagery. A beautiful and useful example of the yogi’s portrayals of maya can be experienced in his poem from Songs of the Soul simply titled “Shadows.”
The poem’s first fifteen lines offer a catalogue of pairs of opposites: “bed of flowers,” the first image we encounter is a positive one that we can visualize as colorful beauty and possibly fragrant smells wafting from the flowers, while “vale of tears” denotes a negative tone, of sadness and sorrow.
Then “Dewdrops on buds of roses, / Or miser souls, as dry as desert sands” offer again two oppositional pairs, the beauty and life of rosebuds with dew on them contrasts with the aridity of selfishness.
“The little running joys of childhood, / Or the stampede of wild passions” contrasts innocence with violent emotions.
“The ebbing and rising of laughter, / Or the haunting melancholy of sorrow” contrasts happiness and sadness.
Desire is Will-o’-the Wisp
There is an important, interesting break in this pattern with the following lines:
- The will-o’-the wisp of our desire,
- Leading only from mire to mire;
- The octopus grip of self-complacency
- And the time-beaten habits
While our “desire” sometimes leads us astray “from mire to mire,” we also suffer from our self-inflicted inertia that prevents us from changing our error strewn path as our “self-complacency” and “habits” hold us in an octopus-like grip. Both of these pairs are negative. One could speculate about why the poet let these negatives remain with countering them with positives as he did in the other catalogued pairs. Do they cause the poem to be imbalanced? Or do they perhaps hint at the extremely strong power of maya that causes us to feel that there is more evil and negative in the world than good and positive?
The next two pairs, however, return to the positive/negative pattern: “The first cry of the newborn babe, / And the last groan of death; / The bursting joy of health, / Or the ravages of cruel disease.”
Shadows Only for Entertainment and Education
Then the last six lines are offered to explain that all of these experiences of the senses, mind, and emotion are but “Shadows.” They are merely the forces of maya—“Seen by us on the cosmic mental screen.” But instead of allowing us to take from all this that the unreality of maya amounts to airy nothingness, the great teacher enlightens us to the fact that those shadows contain many shades from dark to light, and they are not meant to hurt us but to entertain us as they educate us.
