The Experiential Basis of Maya: How God Uses Experience to Both Conceal and Reveal Itself (Part I)

Abstract

Maya, as the phenomenon that conceals from the Individual both its own Nature as well as the Nature of the universe as being composed of Consciousness-Existence, is a result of the unavoidable and inviolable functioning of two experiential limitations. One experiential limitation is negatively restrictive while the other is positively restrictive, making impossible the creation of some experiences while making only possible the creation of other experiences, with the experiences that an Individual both cannot and can only create in any one moment limited by the relations in which the Individual must already be involved in order to create what they are already, in that moment, from their Individual perspective, apprehending as experience. As part of the functioning of maya, owing to the positively restrictive experiential limitation, experiential inversions can occur, wherein a thing is perceived or conceived in a way that is the exact opposite of its actual nature owing to a previously established misperception or misconception.

It is one of the great experiential inversions produced as a result of the functioning of maya that God is so often conceived as some sort of controlling entity, when the Nature of any Individuality that corresponds to what we conceive as God is the exact opposite, since God, being God, understands the Nature of its own Being, understands the Nature of Existence as well as the nature of experience, and so understands the complete and utter futility and counterproductivity of trying to control either any already created experience or any other Individual's exercise of free will, i.e., what any other Individual is choosing as their mode of being. To an Individual that is under the spell of maya it seems that it should be possible to control already created experience as well as other Individuals, but God, being God, is not under the spell of maya and so knows that it is not actually possible to control either, and so does not try. And by not trying to control that which cannot be controlled, the Individuality we call God is able to fully control the only thing that it can control, which is its own mode of being, thereby fully controlling what it is, in that moment, creating and apprehending as experience.

Part I of this two-part article contains: 1. Introduction; 2. Maya as Process and Illusion; 3. The Actual Nature and Limitations of Experience; and 4. The Seeming Nature of Experience.