“We don’t see reality as it is. We see reality as we are.”

—Daniel J. Siegel

Introduction

There is a veil that entraps us more than any prison or cage. This veil exists throughout our lives and closes our eyes to the broader spiritual fabric and reality.

This is the illusion that we adorn whenever the One incarnates into different finite forms and limited universes to rediscover and know itself.

The ancients called it ‘Maya’ or illusion. It is the veil that the infinite One puts on to experience finiteness and therefore, manifest free will.

Without this veil of ignorance and limited understanding and perception, the soul that incarnates will be all-knowing and all-present.

As covered earlier, this would defeat the purpose of physical incarnation, which creates the finite limitations that allow growth from ignorance.

This concept is not confined to Hinduism. It has been covered many times across many religious traditions.

Christian Gnosticism has often embraced the idea of a veil that blocks one’s perception of the celestial perspective, called the pleroma.

Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckhart, have often talked of maintaining silence to peer into the incomprehensible and infinite reality beyond.

Lao Tzu, the purported author of the Tao Te Ching, wrote that the Tao that can be spoken of is not the actual reality. In contrast, the Tao that cannot be spoken of is the actual reality beyond.

Theosophical teachings often speak of the Mayavic veil that prevents us from directly perceiving the divine reality, as this veil is necessary for spiritual growth and individual experience.

Modern neuroscience’s views parallel those of Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason. It is the idea that the mind, with its billions of neurons, creates an imperfect internal model of the world for the person to understand and operate by.

In quantum physics, what we perceive is a collapsed probabilistic wave function once a consciousness perceives an original quantum state.

The true, actual, absolute reality is always hidden from finite beings. It can only be experienced by souls who have united with the all-that-there-is.

What does Maya comprise, in everyday language and actions?

One who is embedded in Maya would perceive only the outward, external manifestations of reality and identify with them.

Consider who you are right now: most people would define themselves by their careers, salaries, social groups, jobs, religious beliefs, political affiliations, nationality, caste, wealth, status, rank, or prestige.

A person who lives strictly by this narrow perspective can be overly identified with such external traits.

They would often require a lot of external and social validation and approval to feel good about themselves.

However, when such needs are not met, many bodily, mental, and spiritual afflictions can arise.

Hundreds of teenage girls have committed suicide over the excessive social comparisons on Instagram or TikTok when they cannot reach a particular social image or bodily figure and weight.

Millions of people get mentally depressed each year because they are conditioned into believing that their career and prestige are all that there is. If they cannot reach these, they consider themselves failures.

However, the person who can see past Maya and identify with the actual nature of reality can transcend many of these issues, or at least make their lives far easier.

So what is the true nature of reality that we can view from within?

It is the spirit and our consciousness.

I will show you what I mean in the application sections later.

Tetris as an Analogy

When I was playing Tetris far earlier in my career, I always wanted to maximize certain statistics in my Tetris 99 account or achieve a high ultra score in Puyo Puyo Tetris.

I was “grinding” my ultra score in that game during my first year of playing, and by the end, I reached 70,000.

However, it came at the severe cost of a tragic state of mental health. It led to many self-esteem issues because I was comparing myself to others.

After stopping competitive Puyo Puyo Tetris, I moved on to Tetris 99, which is far more chill.

Despite this, I would work towards maximizing my T-spin per line clear ratio as shown below:

Magnified and AI-upscaled for clarity:

This number became an obsession until I realized that it was not worth anything.

Many players have climbed the ladder to level 99 double star, but it soon meant nothing to me at all.

Just like my ultra scores and the number of T-spins done in Tetris 99, they were simply Maya or illusion.

They were like the external vestments of diamonds and rubies one adorns. Still, I have grown so attached that I have forgotten I am the person inside, not the clothing.

Hence, I ceased identifying with Maya in Tetris and simply played the game for its own sake. I played in a manner that I found entertaining, not merely to win.

That was how I moved from a competitive to a casual Tetris player.

Personal Applications

The veil of Maya makes us see the world not as it is, but as our brains and socio-cultural upbringing make us see it.

Your thoughts and beliefs are not the world as it is. They are mere imperfect and sometimes inaccurate representations.

Imagine if you had some kind of mental illness that makes you paranoid and distrustful of all people, even saints.

In such a case, you may avoid people or even pre-emptively attack them to defend yourself from an imagined threat.

A person may also suffer from severe depression. This is so terrible that it completely masks the person’s worldview.

They see everything as negative, even if it is not true, and are just figments of one’s imagination. Then, the person takes their own life.

Another situation is where, in my undergraduate days, a person was jealous of my intellectual accomplishments.

She badmouthed me and accused me of having hostile, selfish intentions. However, it was proven wrong when I helped her group do something, dispelling that imagination.

Likewise, this lens of Maya can mask our ability to develop our inner spiritual gifts and freedom.

We can be so clouded by it that we think that the world is purely matter. Then we work 50 to 60 hours per week just to make money to live like Jeff Bezos. We then get ill and lose all our money for treatment.

It is this imaginative lens that is responsible for so many misunderstandings and problems in the world.

When we dispel this lens of Maya, we can perceive reality more accurately, closer to the truth.

Even though we cannot read other people’s minds, we can change our inner perspective. Our inner world can become real through our actions.

When we fixate on negativity, the external world becomes a living hell.

But when we fixate on love and trust, the external world becomes a living heaven.

Only consciousness and our spiritual natures are real, such as our virtues, beliefs, and thoughts.

Social and Global Applications

The veil of Maya makes us see the world in vastly negative and imprecise ways.

I am often so exhausted and frustrated when I see people quarrel over politics, ideology, and sometimes religion.

Some people think their faith is always right above everyone else’s. Then, they do not tolerate differences. Then they try to impose their will on others. And if that fails, it leads to violence or armed conflicts.

One of the greatest veils of Maya lies in the concept of nationhood.

As historians like Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson have shown, nationalism is not innate but learned — a socially constructed identity produced through schools, media, and state narratives.

The Rwandan genocide is one example of this. For centuries, the Hutu and Tutsi lived together harmoniously and saw themselves as one community.

However, under German and Belgian rules, rigid ethnic categories were imposed, and the Tutsi became an artificially created elite. This led to constructed divisions that led to the 1994 genocide.

It is ridiculous how people identify so much with nations or any finite groups. When this happens, divisions are imagined and manufactured.

What was once whole had now fragmented.

This is similar to Cixin Liu’s sci-fi trilogy, The Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which explored how the cosmos used to be 13-dimensional. Everyone was one.

However, it fractured, and all civilizations used dimensional collapsing weaponry to reduce the universe’s dimensions to three.

Now, every civilization feared it would be targeted. Hence, they remained hidden, striking first when they hear the signals of other civilizations. Is this not how human civilization works now?

However, when we dispel the Mayavic veil, we dispel the false boundaries between us all.

When we see all as one, the One will no longer hurt itself.