Maya

Art Gallary:-

First painting - showing a woman with a huge pair of melons.

Second painting - showing a headless woman with three melons, the third one is seen in place of the missing head.

Third painting - showing a man with a cannon between his thighs, and other men looking at him with awe.

Fourth painting - showing a woman with a globe rolling inside the dark hollow between her outstretched thighs.

STOP IT. STOP IT. IT'S GROSS. GROSS. GROSS.

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Plato had said that art imitates nature. I am not sure about that, or the reverse of that, but art does attempt to capture the elusive, the mysterious, the indescribable, and the unspeakable.

It is often politically incorrect to speak the unspeakable. It is often indiscreet to hold mirror to an ugly face, especially when the face is pally with a pair of punch-happy hands. In the mentioned case, with or without vulgarity, our artist is accused of depicting human bodies in a distorted fashion. But he was not depicting human bodies as they are made, but as they are seen, and as they exist in our collective consciousness. Can you dare to differ? Is human attention evenly distributed over a human body? Don't we make a fetish of female breasts, and don't we worship male members? The truth is that the distortion happens in our mind first, and only then in an artist's works.

When we convict him of 'sickness', we should remember that out-of-proportion involvement with anything is a sickness, which distorts our vision, our understanding, and our judgment. And this holds true for anything and everything.

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That - distortion of vision, understanding, and judgment - is called Maya - one of the million ordinary words of our colloquial language which contains extraordinary depths of philosophy within. There are other connotations of this word, but those are beyond the scope of present discussion.

In my limited understanding, Maya is caused by the following -

1. Ignorance -- Watch Matrix to understand this.

Our mind is narrowed by the immediate and the instant. A holds the tail of an elephant and gets convinced that it is a rope. B claims that it is a pillar. C believes that it is a wall. They don't listen to one another. And they conclude wrongly.

Even listening to other doesn't help. In a Panchatantra tale, a farmer listens to thugs and gets persuaded that the goat that he is carrying on his shoulder is a dog. In the end, he loses his goat to the thugs.

We are ignorant, and we pay for our ignorance throughout our life. But we hardly think. We defend our sloth and attend to the most immediate practicality. Few 'impractical' daredevils told us that earth was not flat, and they told us that it was earth that revolved around the sun and not the other way round.

See! What we see is still the same, but our sight is lighted by knowledge. We grope in darkness and make ourselves miserable. And suddenly a flash of light shows us the truth - that it is an elephant and not a rope, a pillar, or a wall.

2. Attachment -- In Geeta, Krishna warns us of two things - A. Ego (sense of agency), and B. Attachment. It is attachment which is source of anxiety and fear and then anger, which clouds our judgment.

How ironical it is - we place value in things, and then the same things start to control and dominate us!

I'd read the line written above once again - we place value in things, and then the same things start to control and dominate us!

Most of the things we think we need are the things we don't need. We run after those things that are wanted by people around us - gadgets etc. Similarly, we don't give up something that we don't want because we fear that someone else might pick that up and run away, making us stand like a fool. But we make a fool of ourselves by running after things we hardly care for, and holding something we would rather be dispensed of. Without being unselfish, we live for others. Well not for others, just keeping others in mind. How many things we do are things that we would do without letting others know?

Our crowd mentality is further aggravated by comparisons and competitiveness. The award system and myth of something called success further confuse, and control, our already scattered thoughts.

It is important to realize that success is not a condition for happiness. From pure happiness point of view, success is not always better than failure. Sometimes, it is worse than failure. The pursuit of success leaves the senses paralyzed. No wonder a successful man is a miserable man, because the ambition needed for success is nothing but a deep-seated feeling of inadequacy.

This feeling of inadequacy makes up one's ego, which needs to achieve a goal to feel adequate - therefore attachment - therefore Maya, and misery.