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Maya brought me happiness through a dream

It's going to be a short post... I think.

If you're an Indian, who grew up in my time in India, chances are that the word Maya would be part of your primary articulation.  But that does not imply it was discussed, debated or shared seriously at any community forum-family gatherings, school, neighbourhood, religious community or amongst friends. People around me understood Maya in the western and materialistic sense as an illusion. Like others my introduction to Maya were through the Indrajal comics, where you had plenty of mythologies and stories of magic among others. For example, a king cobra's hood appears above the head of a sleeping man and he is declared a king. Now comes the magnificent trick of the Indian mind. It wasn't real but it happened in the story. So did it happen or not? For me, it both existed. I suspect the West doesn't struggle or deal with such paradoxes. Santa Claus either exists or he doesn't. 

Maya, I believe, isn't a word that can be equally understood.  Maya is a constant Work In Progress. The word continues to engage me from my childhood to my youth and to my adult life in different ways. It's a peculiar relationship; one that does not stop evolving.  It seeks meaning between ideas and between living.

It's been a while since I began writing this article. I can only vaguely recall what led me to write it.

I remembering waking up happy from a dream because in my dream I was in an incredibly beautiful place. And unlike usual, the feeling of happiness did not leave me for a while. But as minutes passed, I started questioning whether it made sense to be happy about something I only saw in a dream. There was no way to go back to it. But isn't that also the nature of time? Yet it doesn't cross our minds to question the reality of time. Then, I began to wonder about Maya.

What is the real or unreal realm of our consciousness? Our daily lives are built on a fragile castle of the future. We accumulate assets and wealth to strengthen an illusory view of what we need to progress in life. We construct our lives around Maya, which have little or no grounding in reality. So if a dream makes you laugh or cry for a while, it's alright. After all Maya is all around.

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