Maya and the Ship of Theseus
and my grandma's garden wall
unMind, my new book, is a graphical retelling of some of the most powerful spiritual teachings that have emerged from India in the last century. This journal is another such attempt at bringing Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Ramesh Balsekar’s advaita teachings to a wider audience.
Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever
~ Strawberry Fields Forever, The Beatles
The new wall caved in. The plants under it got crushed. Grandma hollered for grandpa. He arrived a few minutes later. He had been mixing cow fodder, his hands were wet and straw stuck to his fingers.
“Look at the dead plants.” my grandma pointed to the rubble.
He inspected the scene and said “Don’t bother. It’s all maya.”
“Maya? There he goes again. When wild animals enter the house tonight, will that be maya too?” my granny retorted.
Grandpa smiled “We’ll build a makeshift hedge with wires and sticks and I’ll get the repairs done tomorrow. Don’t worry.” And before she could say more, he had rushed off to feed the cows.
Maya is the Hindi word for illusion. In advaita philosophy, the perceived world is an illusion, its maya.
But how does one relate to that? Isn’t there a pandemic running rampant? Didn’t your grandma’s wall cave in? What do you mean this is all an illusion?
It is not simple to understand. This 2 minute read may not cut it. But it can attempt to plant a seed that’ll one day lead to this understanding.
One way to analyse maya is to understand what it’s not. In other words, if we understand what is real then we know what’s an illusion.
Greek philosophers like Heraclitus and Plato explored the nature of reality with some intriguing thought experiments, one such experiment is The Ship of Theseus.
Ship of TheseusIf it is supposed that the famous ship sailed by the hero Theseus in a great battle has been kept in a harbour as a museum piece, and as the years went by some of the wooden parts began to rot and were replaced by new ones then, after a century or so, all of the parts had been replaced. The question then is if the "restored" ship is still the same object as the original.
This theory states that two ships, while identical in all other ways, are not identical if they exist at two different times. Each ship-at-time is a unique "event". So even without replacement of parts, the ships in the harbour are different at each time. This theory is extreme in its denial of the everyday concept of identity, which is relied on by most people in everyday use.
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Plutarch thus questions whether the ship would remain the same if it were entirely replaced, piece by piece. Centuries later, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes introduced a further puzzle, wondering what would happen if the original planks were gathered up after they were replaced, and then used to build a second ship. Hobbes asked which ship, if either, would be the original ship of Theseus.
~ from Wikipedia’s page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
Let’s take the individual i.e., the mind-body organism that we identify with (by saying this is me, the “I”). Every cell of this mind-body is changing every instant, its ageing, decaying, growing, dying, and spawning. So is the mind-body that was there a second ago the same as the one now, in this instant — when every cell in it has changed?
We consider ourselves and this world to be real but what’s truly real?
If we define reality as an absolute truth — as something that is, was, and will always be unchanged, unaffected — then is there something that’s absolutely real?
No.
Because everything is like the Ship of Theseus, always changing, mutating, decaying, taking birth — always in flux.
Change is the only constant. A huge mountain was once a pebble, will one day turn to dust, then to a pebble and then to a mountain again.
When my grandpa looked at the collapsed wall and said that it’s all maya, he was referring to the impermanence of a world that’s always changing. So he shrugged and moved on, accepting the collapsed wall to be another part of this constant change.
So the world isn’t real because there is nothing in it that isn’t constantly changing.
How about you? Are you real?
You were a baby, then a toddler, then a kid, a teenager, an adult. Like the Ship of Theseus, every cell in your body has undergone a change. So are you the same “I” that you were as a child?
The answer is “Yes” and “No”.
Everything material has changed (every cell of the body); but there is one thing that hasn’t.
What is that?
Hint: To find it, you’ll need to turn inward. Nothing in the world outside is real.