Beneath the changing scenes of experience, a single movement is taking place. Consciousness is imagining a world within itself and knowing that world from within its own creation.
At times, this activity seems to conceal the reality from which it is made. At other times, it reveals it with striking clarity. What appears as a world of separate things is, in fact, a seamless expression of one indivisible being.
In this essay, we explore how this apparent veiling is also a revealing, how the sense of separation gives rise to a subtle wound in the heart, and how that very wound is the movement by which consciousness returns to the recognition of its own infinite nature.
This week we’re exploring pages 133–135, in which the relationship between awareness and its own creative self-veiling is named, and the wound at the heart of all apparently separate experience is traced to its source.*
*(The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Veiling That Reveals
The word maya is used in the non-dual traditions to describe consciousness’s ability to assume a form with which it seems to limit itself. It is the power that a screen possesses to appear as a landscape and, as such, seem to veil itself with its own creativity.
The word maya is used in the non-dual traditions to describe consciousness’s ability to imagine a world within itself and simultaneously localise itself in that world as an apparently separate subject of experience.
This is exactly what happens in a dream. The dreamer’s mind imagines an entire world within itself, a beach, a city, a mountain path, a room full of people, and at the same time localises itself as one of the figures in that world. From the point of view of that figure, the activity of the dreamer’s own mind appears as an outside world.
Maya is the same power at the universal level. Consciousness imagines a world within itself and simultaneously localises itself as innumerable finite minds, each of which seems to perceive that world from its own separate point of view. From the perspective of each finite mind, the inside of consciousness appears as an outside world.
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