“Although mental and spiritual sovereignty are our true nature, humanity has tragically forgotten its inner spiritual core. Therefore, we need wisdom reminders.
“All beings are afflicted with a spiritual forgetfulness that keeps our minds from grasping the amazingly boundless and bountiful nature of our Self. Our minds become identified with and then engaged and entangled with whatever they encounter through the senses. This clutters the mind and leads to sorrow. Rather than unbounded expansive awareness of our potential to be or become what we want, we think bounded thoughts and are proscribed by our thinking.
“My spiritual teacher, Baba, who was also my paternal grandfather, explained this to me once in poetic terms:
“ 'This world is an enchanted show, Shunya. A spell has spread from mind to mind throughout this world, so that the One appears as many. This spell is called maya.
“ 'For the duration of the phantasmal life we lead through the maya-filled mind, we believe adamantly in the roles we play, the relations we have, and the goals we hold dear. None of this is true — just like the cities we visit and the people we meet in our nightly dreams who appear real enough within the dream but disappear upon waking up in the morning.
“ 'One more final waking up is pending, the awakening from the dreams of maya that occur to us even when we are apparently awake and engaged, with alert senses, in the world of experiences. Even then, we are asleep, cosmically asleep to the Ultimate Reality.'
“Our forgetfulness of our inner truth has other consequences too. It induces a confused consciousness that does not permit us to discern between appearances and reality. When I asked Baba why we forget that we are always sovereign in matters of fullness, fulfillment, and joy, he responded that no one knows. The Vedic tradition does not claim to know either. It is not a know-it-all tradition that makes up stories to justify what it does not know. It simply sticks with what it observes to be universally true.”
