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August 18, 2011

Is Everything Just Maya? A Video Exploration. ~ Ketna and Raj Shah

The world that we see around us and the reality that we experience is much different from what is actually out there. There have been a few movies related to this idea and some prominent scientists have actually called the universe too weird to understand or make sense of. This weirdness of reality sometimes threatens us and challenges our notion of a comfortable and familiar world rooted in space-time that we wake up to every morning

Some of us take comfort in the notion that the weirdness that scientist find in nature is something that is happening at the margins. “It is not something that concerns me, and my life,” we tell ourselves and continue with our daily chores. The facts are however contrary to this notion that somehow we can sweep away the notion of a weird universe under the carpet and continue on with our lives. The more scientist dig deeper the more they find that the universe is really not what it seems and that this is not just at the margins but the very essential nature of everything around us.

The first thing that pops out when the bubble of space-time reality is burst is the notion that we can logically understand and talk about reality. Why is this? The problem is not with reality but with us. Evolution has fashioned for us a filter that takes in only that aspect of reality that is relevant for our immediate survival. This filter projects into us the familiar space-time aspects of reality. Since this is the only reality that we see and experience, our thoughts and our language make the assumption that space-time is all that is. It now becomes impossible to get our head around a reality that is not in space-time using thought and language. This is also at the heart of the concept of “belief” that saints and prophets used. They did not mean that you have to “accept blindly a dubious proposition” when they asked us to become “believers” but instead meant that we have to grow our understanding of reality outside the context of language and thought through direct spiritual experience that we steadily awaken to. This happens not as part of an intellectual exercise but as we change our actions and thoughts to think in terms of others instead of ourselves.

Ancient seers devised the idea of “maya” for this reason. Maya was a technical term describing the limits of language in understanding reality. The purpose of coining this term was not done as an academic exercise or a philosophical argument. This was in fact seen as something that was central and potentially transformative to the way we live our lives. The video “Is everything just maya?” hence could be a start of new journey in your life or somebody’s life who you pass this on to. The idea of maya may also be potentially transformative to society if enough of us embrace it.

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“Is Everything Just Maya?” is the creation of Ketna and Raj Shah. Ketna is a yoga teacher, a yoga therapist, and a gourmet cook. Raj works for a fortune 500 firm in the IT department. To learn more about their yoga story visit MyLifeYoga.com or this Facebook page.



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