We don’t notice this very much if we live in towns and if we live in ordinary houses, because we build our streets and our homes so as to seem to be non-wiggly. And so I want to start, then, by telling you the many, many things that the word māyā actually means.īecause, you see, the physical world is fundamentally wiggly. And the extremely low standard of living makes life intolerable, and so they would just as soon believe that it isn’t real, that it all has a dreamlike quality, and that the highest ideal to which man can aspire is to escape altogether from this sort of physical existence (which they call saṃsāra: the round of birth and death), and to disappear into a state of rather diffuse consciousness wherein the individuality vanishes and one is simply suspended forever, or in a kind of timeless time, in an infinite ocean of faintly luminous, mauve jello. The heat makes the world seem like a mirage, makes it seem rather unreal. Because a general impression has circulated in the West that the Hindus live in a very, very hot country, have very little to eat, and live an absolutely miserable life, and therefore this affects the brain in a certain way. When Hinduism is reported in little textbooks on comparative religion and encyclopedia articles, this is one point on which almost all the scholars are either completely misleading or very incomplete. This is one of the most rich ideas that has ever been thought by the mind of man, because it has such a great multiplicity of meanings. I’m going to start by talking to you about the foundation idea underlying the whole of this seminar, which is the Hindu Buddhist-that is to say, Indian-idea of the world as illusion, which they call māyā.
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