One often wonders why our ancestors called the world an illusion when in fact it seems so real! Watching a close relative with her newly acquired daughter suddenly provided me with an answer. The mind keeps on flitting when actually we want it to be fixed as expressed in a Beatles song “To keep my mind from wandering”… This is an extremely difficult task and even after many years of medita¬tion, great people have failed in this endeavor.
Hence nature has worked out many little illusions that we can easily focus upon and thereby temporarily be in a state of bliss. When people get married, their immediate focus is on physical pleasures; when the newness of that dies down, nature brings in a child who takes up the attention of the parents.
As it grows up and requires less looking after, another one arrives and the process starts all over again. When we cannot get our minds hooked onto the real, nature makes sure that we latch on to one thing after another, which is unreal in the sense that it cannot give us sustained happiness. As a Buddhist text says, “The only meaningful life is a life which strives for individual realization absolute and unconditional of its own particular law to the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being”. A true state of bliss is only possible when the mind has been stilled through deep meditation. In such a state one can realize why our great saints called the world ‘maya’.