The Veil of Illusion

It is said that Vishnumaya dwells in every living being. We bow to it, we bow to it, every single time we bow to it.

Vishnumaya is a beautiful word. Maya creates within us a boundary called duality: a bond, a snare, the woven net of illusion.

Wherever the word maya appears, it points to duality. A tension begins about what lies beyond the boundary, and that tension creates the urge to break through it. When we accept these dualities as challenges and press forward with courage, we set out on the journey of evolution.

If there were no challenges, no dualities in your life, how would your life ever evolve?

To evolve, you must wrestle with your dualities, accept challenges boldly, struggle and fight. Only then does growth happen. In our Indian philosophy this power is called Vishnumaya. Maya means delusion, or illusion. If a person is caught in the illusion that the Divine Mother’s maya creates, caught in the net of this maya, liberation becomes impossible.

Indian philosophy describes several kinds of maya.

1. Anu Maya: maya at the level of the single individual, the individual flame. Limited dualities, through challenge, create human illusions and feed them. Having fed them, maya makes us struggle, toss and fight, and so it builds a whole world. It also shows the way out of that world. This is Anu Maya.

2. Mahamaya: the maya that brings forth and creates all living beings. It fills creation with differences. Without understanding them, without breaking open their secrets, without knowing them personally, beings are caught in confusion. Unable to understand the Mahamaya that runs this world, humans, animals, insects and everything moving and unmoving are filled with their own dualities and left to struggle. Mahamaya has created for each of them their own problems, their own family, their own rules and boundaries, their own ups and downs.

3. Vishwa Maya: maya at the level of the whole universe. It fills the inert and the conscious, the living and the non-living. Even in what you think of as lifeless there is duality, and that duality too keeps moving forward through its disappointments.

4. Vishnu Maya: Vishnumaya is the secret of the supreme principle. In India it is believed that, through the power of Vishnumaya, a protecting power fills everything and everywhere. Vishnumaya is merged, continuously, into the human being as the supreme principle. This is the meaning of the image of Mahavishnu reclining in splendour on the ocean of milk. Vishnu holds maya, illusion, duality, challenges and events, merging them all within, and floats, drawing everything along.

First it builds a life, then the process of moving on to further lives, and then life evolves in a natural way. But for some, through an inner conscious impulse, a state arises in which they come out of confusion, delusion and maya.

When such inner promptings happen, we understand the Devi through Vishnumaya and Vishwamaya, and call Her Vishnumaya.

By the grace of that prompting, the power that keeps consciousness, the supreme form, floating on the ocean instead of drowning, is Vishnumaya.