The Experiential Basis of Maya: How the Limitations Inherent in the Individual's Creation of Experience Function to Conceal the Nature of Reality (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. These two experiential limitations are themselves an unavoidable result of the way experience is always created as the product of some relation of Existence to Itself, in which relation the Individual point of Existence that is apprehending the experience must always be involved, and in which relation the Individual point of Existence that is apprehending the experience must also always occupy a particular perspective. 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.

What will be shown is that the two experiential limitations that, operating individually, produce the phenomena of wave-particle duality, quantum uncertainty, and quantum non-locality, are the same two experiential limitations that, operating in concert, produce the phenomenon referred to as maya, whereby Existence, at the level of the Individual, as a result of how the Individual is choosing to conceive of reality, becomes locked into a mode of experiential creation that serves to both hide and disguise Existence from Itself, thereby preventing the Individual from apprehending its own Nature as well as the Nature of the universe as being composed of Consciousness-Existence, while at the same time perpetuating the misconception necessary for maya to function, which misconception is the idea that what we apprehend as physical reality is what is actually there.

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.