Maya is a word often used in spiritual traditions to refer to the illusionary nature of what we think of as real.

In essence, it means that what we commonly understand as the real world is, in fact, an illusion, a trick of the mind and not the fundamental nature of how things really are.

A useful analogy is watching television. From a comfortable viewing position the images on the screen seem perfectly real to us—the people, scenery and movement are accurate representations of how people, scenery and movement occur in our everyday experience.

But as we move closer the image starts to blur.

If we get sufficiently close we no longer recognize people, scenery or action but instead realize the image consists of nothing more than an orchestrated pattern of individual dots we call pixels.

So it is with our everyday experience; as we go about our lives we are familiar with the sky overhead, the ground beneath our feet, and the air moving in and out of our lungs. However, as real as this may seem to us—just as with watching television—there is a more fundamental reality that lies behind the image; the world we commonly perceive is maya.

Although such an assertion is commonly associated with spiritual traditions, particularly eastern traditions, modern quantum physics is also bearing it out. It is now accepted that the universe consists of 75 percent so-called dark energy, 24 percent dark matter, and only 0.01 percent matter—the stuff we’re familiar with.

In essence, the material world barely exists, and physicists talk of potentiality waves to encapsulate this notion. The new sciences—that is, the sciences we’re familiar with but with the added twist of incorporating the influential role of the observer—have recognized that consciousness cannot be conveniently dismissed in our observation and understanding of the universe and our world.

Indeed, consciousness should be considered as a fundamental force, ranking as highly as gravity or electromagnetism.

The world we perceive, our day to day experience, is filtered through the ego. Rather than simply having an experience, we attempt to rationalize it based on our pre-programmed responses or conditioning. This conditioning, the software of our brains, has been imparted on us from a variety of sources—from our parents, siblings, teachers, society and even through our genes. Thus, our experiences are often pieced together in a way that makes sense to our conditioned mind and within the limits of our past experiences or cultural norms.

This is in contrast to the way our essential self operates. The essential self is free from such limiting parameters and will interpret experiences and the world as they genuinely are. If we could somehow rediscover this fundamental quality of ourselves, it may contribute to living richer and more empowered lives.

The conscious mind linked to the ego and the subconscious mind linked to the essential self are in competition for our attention. Living from the level of ego-consciousness is like being in a waking dream. However, the subconscious mind is supraconscious—it never sleeps and has no agenda to fulfill in colouring our perception of the world. It behaves like the blending of an innocent child passionately engaging with experience, and a wise counsellor offering spacious and kind suggestions about how to be in any given situation.

We are all star-dust beings with self-awareness, literally consisting of elements that were at one time stars and at another time the Earth itself.

How, then, can we consider ourselves to be in any way truly individual or separate? We are not—we are connected through the regular exchange of matter and through our universal oneness; consciousness is the software of the universe, giving rise to how we perceive our life experience.

By recognizing that our consciousness moulds our reality, we take back some control from the mind’s conditioning. As Deepak Chopra so elegantly puts it, there are no nouns in the universe, only verbs, only waves of potential.

So how can we reframe the world around us to benefit from understanding the role of consciousness in our life experience?

The key is qualia, the quality of our consciousness.

By improving the quality of our consciousness, we are empowered to see the world around us differently, to view life as fluid; not predetermined or simply the result of fate. We can give attention to our consciousness moment by moment and thus moment by moment create our reality. We can formally give attention to our consciousness in meditation or mindfulness practices which are powerful gateways in connecting to our higher selves and thus our collective consciousness.

The assets of our higher selves that emerge through qualia include infinite possibilities: the field of infinite collation, where everything is in harmony; the path to creativity, infinite creativity, which is detached from fixed outcomes; and intention, which allows the orchestration of synchronicity to play out in our lives.

These are the means through which we can dramatically alter both our own life experience and our collective experience, even collective human destiny. Modern science confirms this through the study of neuroplasticity, the literal rewiring of the brain. Our brains are more malleable, more river-like than we may imagine, with the neural connections ready to be altered to write a new story of how we perceive the world, a new set of unconditioned parameters. In the language of modern psychology this may be called being in the flow; open to constantly reinventing ourselves, not reduced to living a stagnant existence. A key trait of being in this state is a lightness of being and we all experience glimpses of this.

This is our true identity, our true natural state and it is worth consciously cultivating.

“What’s the world’s greatest lie? It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.” ~ Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

We all feel subject to Coelho’s greatest lie sometimes. But by using the power of our own consciousness we can see through the illusion, the maya, and re-empower ourselves while reconnecting with one another.

 

Relephant Read:

What it Means to Be Cosmically Conscious.

 

Author: Gary Thomson

Editor: Emily Bartran

Photo: Georgina Goodlander/Flickr