Beware of Maya: A Delayed Epiphany

Mop-haired and buoyant, I bobbed in the ocean of thirty thousand supporters that drowned Madison’s capitol grounds and engulfed the surrounding streets, all the way down MLK. The day was beautiful. It was October 2, 1992; sunlight illuminated the capitol building’s facade, as well as the falling yellow and orange leaves; and soon-to-be-elected President Bill Clinton proclaimed his stump speech, “How We Can Change the Future,” from the capitol steps.

I was nineteen, and the words of the soon-to-be-elected President rang true for me, sending chills of uncanny, prophetic wisdom down my spine. I could somehow feel these same words vibrating in the spines of the people who surrounded him, formed the ocean with him, so that Clinton himself wasn’t an ark, the house of salvation on this sea. Rather, it was the words - their sound, their rhythm, their flow - of the youthful Governor of Arkansas themselves that simultaneously provided a sense of hope, security, and a point of departure. For the others, it was the words were vehicular. They conveyed a message of political change with which they agreed.

But, for me, it's always been the words themselves - their tangibility, tactility, beauty - that rang true. Just like the poetry of Spenser, which I was studying in my English course, what Clinton said didn't really matter. I was immersed, young aesthete that I was, in the way he said it. Rightly or wrongly, it was the way that he said it that made the knights, legends, and dragons of The Fairie Queen more real than my roommate.  

This line of Clinton's struck me as poetry: “I got into this race for president a year ago because I did not want my daughter to grow up to be of the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents."

What mattered to me the most was that the spoken word - or the word in general - brought on a sense of oneness with the people around me. Clinton’s speech and its wisps of hope implanted not only Spenser but also the visionary lyricism of St. Francis’ “Canticle of the Sun” in my being. It made me aware that Francis, Joyce, Keats, Blake, and all the other writers I loved were magicians who dissolved the mind-body dichotomy. Forget Descartes and his silly theory, my being was stirred.

I arrived at my first truth on that October day: that language was prayer and that sentences could sparkle with the same electricity of the lightening bolts that were Zeus's weapons and that animated Frankenstein's creature. For good or for ill, language could inspire, travel though time (how else had I spent lifetimes in Dostoevsky's Petersburg, Bellow's Chicago, Joyce's Dublin, Proust's Paris?), give me the god-like power to create characters in my own image, feel what it's like to be someone else...

Sheer magic...

Clinton said: “I did not want my daughter to grow up to be of the first generation of Americans to do worse than their parents.” 

Magic aside, I hadn’t lived through enough of what was in store for me to comprehend what it really meant “to do worse” than my parents. "To do worse" can have so many meanings: how could I predict that for me, "to do worse," meant heart failure, divorce, hospitalizations, loss of employment?

I did understand that Clinton’s gist was economical. But the thought that the people of my generation wouldn't benefit from the job security, health care, and all the other (false) indicators of existential security seemed at the time to be blatantly false. How could we not have the same opportunities as the Baby Boomers? How could the meaning of Clinton's words apply to me? 

The painful thing to realize after all these years is that what he said was actually poetic and true. But I was drowning in the aesthetic phase. Ethics were hints in my conscience, and spirituality was beyond my pale. 

So I couldn't possibly acknowledge the fact that I was a student at an elite university, that my knowledge of (indeed, my ability to inhabit the worlds of Dostoevsky, Bellow, Joyce, Proust, and all the other members of what Burroughs called the "Shakespeare Squad") literature, that my very being were all so much air. I was buoyant, floating along in blissful unawareness of suffering.

Suffering: the greatest gift (from whom?) and the only true teacher. 

George Harrison knew something when he sang, "Beware of Maya," in "Beware of Darkness" on All Things Must Pass.  In Indian philosophy, Maya is that which exists, but is constantly changing and spiritually unreal and the power or principle that conceals the true nature of spiritual reality.

True art, which extends itself into eternity from the artist's being (mind, body, and spirit), gives the individual a glimpse into immortal and peaceful oneness that lies, as Shelley says, "beyond the painted veil that those who live call life." Remember how it felt to experience for the first time the climax of Coltrane's Love Supreme, the harmonized sighs of Wilson's "God Only Knows," the slow build of the first movement of Mahler's 9th, the last page of Joyce's Ulysses, the first page of Bellow's Augie March, the entirety of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"?

These experience are, of course, mine. But you've had your own. What are they?

But notice: these experiences were all offered to you free of charge. Now think of the NFL, the car you drive, the fancy food you ingest, the vacations you take...the stuff of Maya that tempts you to forget that the world surrounding you, the stuff that you have to own, your devices, your social media accounts, and almost everything else are temporal, fleeting, and tempting you to trick yourself into thinking that you - and only you - will escape suffering: that your body will not whither and die. And that the often poor people - at the behest of the money-hungry authoritarians under whose yoke they fear and labor - who fill this world of capitalism's amnesia-producing selfishness will not whither and die. And that we'll all not whither and die. 

There's more truth in Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" than in any video game, TV show, or mainstream US movie. Read it.

And, when you've finished this short story, listen to George's "The Art of Dying," "All Things Must Pass," and "Within You Without You." 

Meditate on what you've read and heard. 

Then watch Malick, watch Tarkovsky - surrender yourself to the nonlinearity of the eternal. Realize the falseness of time. Read Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole." 

Mediate on what you've seen and read.

Read Robinson's Gilead.

Meditate on what you've read.

See Mondrian, Cézanne, Rothko, Bernini...

Meditate on what you've seen.

You'll realize that suffering is grace. You'll think about your inherent hypocrisy (and mine: I type these words on a computer whose builder I do not know; I'm using the very social media I find so disdainful). You'll think about how your very existence causes (even if indirectly) the suffering of people you don't know. And that maybe your willful ignorance (and mine!) is a part of a universal existential plan of which we'll never be aware.

Believe me: you are suffering and will continue to suffer. But there is a respite, a way - as the Buddha would say - to wake up from the amnesia, to (at least temporarily) see through the painted veil of Maya.

Have compassion for yourself and accept the gift of compassion that all visionaries - artists, friends, family - have granted you.

A rambunctious and scrappy player from Elizabethan London who wrote about disloyal daughters, ghosts, and ancient Rome loved you more than you will ever know. Even I, without his abilities, love you just as much. Love him just as much; love me just as much; love your friends and families just as much; but, above all, love yourself just as much.