You have, all over your body, millions of nerve ends: each one of those nerve ends is, as it were, a little eye—because all the senses are, fundamentally, one sense; they are various forms of touch. And the most delicate of the forms of touch is, of course, the human eye. Then the ear, and so on, down the list of the senses. Now imagine, then, every little nerve end is a little eye. And it gets its impression of the world, but it sends it all back into the central brain. Well, in a somewhat similar way, every person, every animal, every (what the Hindus call) sentient being—and even rocks are regarded as sentient beings in a very, very primitive form, right down to the lowest—so all those forms that we see may be looked upon as the eyes that look out of one central Self.
Your apparent disconnection—the fact that you are not tied to other people with umbilical cords, or some kind of wiring that gives you one mind—nevertheless, we do have one mind.
This experience is the real substance of Indian philosophy as a whole, both Hindu and Buddhist. It is called mokṣa, which roughly means ‘liberation.’ Liberation from the hallucination that you are just “poor little me.” To wake up from that kind of hypnosis and discover that you are simply something—your organism, your physical body, your conscious attention (which is your ego)—that you are something being done by this vast, indescribable Self.
You can become aware of this tremendous interconnectedness of everything, and that is what somebody who is mokṣa—who is liberated—sees. He sees, shall we say, that everything goes together.
The knowledge of Brahman—the Self—never does anybody any good if they’re trying to make it do them some good.
Just consider what we do every day. What’s it all about? Does it really mean anything? Does it go anywhere? It’s just because we want to keep on doing this kind of a hoop-dee-dah.
We are all the Brahman, acting our own parts, being human, playing the human game—so beautifully that he is enchanted! You see what enchanted means? Under the influence of a chant. Hypnotized. Spellbound. Fascinated. And that fascination is māyā.
Let’s take playing chess. If you get an opponent who can always defeat you, you stop playing with him. If you get an opponent whom you can always defeat, you stop playing with him. But so long as there is a certain uncertainty of outcome and you win some of the time, then it’s a good game.
So the secret of waking up from the drama, the endless cycles, is the realization that the only time that there is is the present.
