I was cutting out images from several magazines for a marketing project and I found this snippet that grabbed my attention. I loved it so much I cut it out and kept it. I thought I would share it with you all.
“I have a Hindu friend who says that life is maya – illusion – but if life is maya, then nothing matters. Am I misunderstanding him?
A Hindu swami explained maya to me this way: Imagine that you wake up in the middle of the night to find a deadly snake coiled next to you on your bed. Filled with terror at the thought of being bitten, you spend the night frozen in fear. But as sunlight floods your room the next morning, you discover that the “snake” is really a belt you forgot to put away the night before. Maya is mistaking the belt for a snake and living in fear of your own illusion. Does the snake matter? No. Does the belt? Yes. It is your perception of life, not life itself, that is illusory.”
Much Love,
Mike Walzman
3 Comments
December 2, 2008 at 10:08 pm
that’s interesting. I wrote a report for my humanities class on maya, and i summed it up saying how I thought it was would be hard to enjoy life if you constantly had to tell yourself it’s not real, but the example your friend gave makes more sense than what i initially took it for.Life is about how you perceive it; you can live in fear of a belt-snake, or muster up the courage to punch it in the face…or something to that affect…
December 2, 2008 at 10:14 pm
ha, yea basically
December 4, 2008 at 9:04 am
This is how I try to live my life. When things get rough, I gently remind myself that it’s not as important as it seems when I’m in that moment, and it will pass. Nothing is as important as the ego makes it out to be. The reactionary way that we live our lives is simply the ego demanding to be fed, like a child throwing tantrum.
I think the key here is not devaluing the experience of our daily lives by thinking that it doesn’t matter, but to realize that what you may or may not be feeling at any given moment will change and is not permanent, and therefore you should not attach value to the fleeting experience of the moment.
or something like that