maya

the world is maya ... everything in this world is a maya ...

for my lone south american reader i'll need to clarify here that i am not talking of the mayan civilization ... maya is a term that means illusion ... in my mother tongue it also means attachment and fondness ... in addition to illusion

as a hindu, initially by birth and later by choice, despite not being devout in the fundamental sense ... neither liberal in the "sitting on the fence" sense, the concept of the world and everything in it being an illusion is something that i concur with. one of the reasons perhaps, why i love richard bach's writing so much and cannot go beyond some 10 posts or so without talking about matrix.

so why talk of maya?

not to convince anyone else into looking at the world i do. but more to remind myself.

it hits you at weird times ... like the other day for instance, while i was watching the news regarding the stock markets ... the sub prime mess in the US and how it was impacting the markets world wide ... and how the various agents were playing out ....

isn't it amazing ... we began with a barter system ... i grow potatoes you grow meat ... i give you some potatoes ... you give me some meat and we both have a bit of both ... but what if you want wool and i want meat? no deal? but then the guy who has wool already has meat so he doesn't want meat ... duh?

so we settle on a thing that is valuable for everyone ... gold ... so i buy meat in exchange for gold ... you take that gold and use it to buy wool .. fur ... whatever ...

and then gold becomes a little cumbersome to lug around ... and it isn't all that safe to carry ... so then comes the replacement ... right from the time of Templar ... who were the first perhaps to start giving paper notes in lieu of money ... not really sure about the history but something along those lines ...

and then we have paper money ... and like that isn't enough, we now have credit cards and electronic money transfers and what not ... all make believe ... a system that we have created ...
and how often do we really look at it for what it is? an illusion that we can choose to change the way we want to? a concept born of our imagination and limited only by it...

and imagine how it has changed our world .. our definition of what constitutes "useful" work ... probably at least 80% of the work in the world ... if not more is absolutely unrelated to the things that we basically need ... food ... clothes ... shelter ... and yet we don't really need to worry about any of these things ...

farmer: so what do you do for a living?
writer: i write.
farmer: oh! but i have potatoes ... can i exchange it for something with you?
writer: sure i'll give you 3 poems for 10 potatoes ...
farmer: but i can't read ... and i don't like poetry ... sorry ... i'll go to someone who has meat ... or perhaps if you could water my fields ...
writer: no i'd rather stay hungry than water the fields ... i do a white collar job you know :)

the point of this post is not about hungry writers or money or even maya by itself.

as autumn turns to winter and the air gets colder, you feel the air as you breathe it in ... making you more aware of the fact that you are breathing ... more aware of the fact that you are alive ... and it helps you realize things that you don't always realize in warmer climes ...

like the fact that of all the illusions, one of the biggest perhaps is the one of not being alone. it does not matter how many friends you have ... how much family ... how much love ... how many enemies ... how much hate ... they are all just illusions ...

you are never ever anything but alone.