Gautama the Buddha's understanding of maya

Nothing is as it appears (6)

To understand the illusory nature of the finite world is to grasp the kernel of all mystical teaching, but if it is misunderstood, it can act as a deterrent to progress as it has in India, which has one of the noblest spiritual heritages of any nation on earth.

Perhaps the greatest of all the Indian seers was Gautama the Buddha whose revelation of absolute truth was so profound that while there are other revelations equal to it, there are none which have surpassed it. Gautama had the full realization of the one Ego, the one I which constitutes the Consciousness of the universe, and he himself understood and proved that the appearance-world is maya, or illusion. Because of its fruitage, his message spread like wildfire across all of India, but his teaching of maya was misinterpreted. The belief that the world is an illusion led to a do-nothing attitude, a passive acceptance of the evil conditions in the world. His followers failed to see that it is not the world that is illusory. The world is real: the illusion is in the misperception of the eternal, divine, spiritual universe which is the only universe there is, and which is here and now.

Because of an illusory sense of the universe, however, the mortal scene appears as mortality with all its errors, whereas it is in reality a divine universe. This world is God’s world; it is the temple of the living God; but when we see it with finite eyes and ears, what we see and hear is but the illusory picture of the reality that is there. The illusion is in the mind that is falsely seeing the world: the illusion is never out in the world. An illusion cannot be externalized. An illusion is a deceptive state of thought, and it can take place only within a person’s mind, not outside it.

In the Orient, the only spiritual healing, of which we have any knowledge, is that of Gautama the Buddha and his immediate disciples, and they all had this principle. He first known revelator of the spiritual principle of life, which includes the healing work, you will understand, of course, that that doesn’t mean that he was the first one who knew it. And, he may not have been the first one who practiced it. But, he is the first one who gave it to the world in a form that could be understood and taught. He is the first one in literature, religious literature, to reveal the principle of spiritual living and the principle of spiritual healing.It was revealed – that was the secret that was revealed to Gautama under the Bodhi tree – the same secret that was revealed to Jesus the Christ.

Why was Gautama seeking illumination or wisdom? He had discovered late in his life that, and I say “late in his life,” he was in the twenties before he discovered that there was such a thing in the world as disease, or sin, or poverty or death. Those things had been kept hidden from him in his sheltered life as the son of a great king, ruler, in India. But for the first time, he becomes aware of poverty, beggars.

He becomes aware of sin; he becomes aware of disease and then finally, of death. And he’s horror stricken at the idea that such things should be on the Earth because, there were no such things in his kingdom; no such things in his awareness; no such thing in his consciousness. They had never touched his consciousness and so he had never known that they existed in the world.

Now he knows it and the great question that comes to his mind is this: “how are these things eliminated from the world? How do we overcome sin, disease, death and poverty?” Now at no time is there any evidence that he wanted to be a healer or a missionary or a preacher. He wanted to find the principle that would eliminate sin, disease, death from off of this world.

And so he sets out. Well, we won’t take up the 21 years of his struggle, except to say that at the end of 21 years he was faced with failure. As a matter of fact, he was faced with the…a condition of health that made it evident to him that he was dying. And it was in that state that he decided to drop this asceticism and begin to feed his body normally and to bathe it and clean it and rest with it until he had a better sense of health. And it was then, and then only, that he was enabled to enter a meditation that revealed the secret to him.

The secret that was revealed to him was this: There is no sin, disease, death, lack or limitation. These things have no existence any more on Earth than they have in heaven. They are states of a universal human belief. As mentioned previously, he used the Hindu word for it, “maya,” meaning illusion.

Now, when an individual catches this principle, that there is no actual discord anywhere at all, in heaven or on Earth; that it exists only as a state of mental delusion, that is the moment that these errors begin to fade out of his existence. As long as you can be made to think of them as actual sins, or diseases or conditions, you will be fighting one after another and healing one after another and then finding, perhaps, that every time you heal one, seven more comes in to take its place.

Every time you overcome one problem in your life, be assured you’re going to have another one come right on top of it, unless you have gotten past the stage of manipulating the outer scene or, handling the specific error, and gotten back to the original realization that there really is only one mind, one life, one power, one God; and therefore, all that really exists is the emanation of that.

Then you can get back and begin to realize that there is a mesmeric sense, so intense that we all come under it to some extent. As a matter of fact, we all come under it to its nth degree. We’re born into it and ultimately, we die out of it, all in this state of hypnotism, because after it’s all over, we find out it never was true; we haven’t even died. There is no death and all those who have gone through this experience know it.

Now, that word ‘maya’, which meant illusion, became distorted and instead of an individual who was taught this, coming to the realization, “Oh, this is a state of illusion” and dropping it, they next called up the practitioner and said, “Can you help me to get rid of the illusion?” In other words, they made the illusion something instead of the condition. And so, instead of having a cancer, we had an illusion. But it was just as real as the cancer, or consumption, or broken bone.

Now, it only took about one generation after Buddha for that to pass out of the picture and India became just as much of an orthodox religious world as any other, with just as illusion. That principle was lost, and it was lost because of the mistranslation of a word. The mistranslation of that one word has meant the difference between the complete spiritual revelation of life in the Orient and the losing of it.

Now, that word ‘maya’, which meant illusion, became distorted and instead of an individual who was taught this, coming to the realization, “Oh, this is a state of illusion” and dropping it, they next called up the practitioner and said, “Can you help me to get rid of the illusion?” In other words, they made the illusion something instead of the condition. And so, instead of having a cancer, we had an illusion. But it was just as real as the cancer, or consumption, or broken bone.

His teachings then became a religion. Gautama the Buddha did not receive his enlightenment, to be set apart on a mountain top, to be bowed down to and worshiped, but that he may walk the length and breadth of India, establishing healing Ashramas, teaching disciples.

The teachings of Joel Goldsmith