Maya or Reality

The Vedanta Master at yesterday's evening class spoke about our existence and reality. He compared the waking world to the dream world. To the awaker, the dream was not real. And to the dreamer, the awake world is not real. Both of these realms are the same and are only different in terms of the degree. The awake world is more precise but that does not make it any more real than a dream. The subject in the dream will reject the existence of the real world as much as the subject in the awake world will reject all that has happened in a dream. So how should we view the awake world? Is it real? We must first try to define what is real. What is real is unchanging through the course of time. So is our life real? Is our body the same and unchanging? Are we still a son or daugther when our parents are no longer with us? What about our emotions? Are they real? All events come and leave and us. The experience of an Olympic champion in winning the 100metres race in front of a crowd of thousands cannot be relived the next day except in memory. So life is not real as far as the objects we are experiencing. And if life is not real, is it unreal? Are we not feeling or experiencing glorious moments in our life? How can these events or experiences be unreal? Life, the Vedanta asserts, is both not real and not unreal. Life is maya or an illusion. Life is the greatest reality show on earth except that we are all participants. We are both the actors and the audiences. Look at the first reality show - Survivor. It took one imaginative guy to dream up an idea of having groups of people competing against each other. To the members of each group, this competition was real. The prize was real. Getting in and kicked out of the race was real to the participants. But is it really real? We watch each episode of the show with excitement because the emotions of each participant seemed real to us while at the end it is still a show. Little do we realise that we are all actors in this great drama of life, as what Shakespeare had known when he said: '"All the world is a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages."