best of all Possible Welcomes to the Outer Circle of the Elementorship !
Here on the Outer Circle of our Platform, you can find daily Inspiration for your Journey of individuation directly transmitted from the Norwegian Woods, The oslofjord, the Mountains, The meditterean or whereever Life may find us.
Happy birdwings,
Ingvild & Olaf
Daily Musings
Below, you can find the latest and the greatest (they may not actually be the greatest, but I like the rhyme. Apart from that, as all creatives know: the latest always feels like the greatest. Of course, there is no greatest, really—all have their specific and equal value) musings, right Here & Now, on the Outer Circle.
And FYI: all earlier posts are progressively moved to the OmniArchives in the Inner Circle to make place for new ones.
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One of the oldest spiritual concepts found in the Vedic tradition—and, in one form or another, in virtually every great wisdom tradition—is the notion of the Veils of Maya.
Maya refers to the veils of appearance: the layers of perception that cause us to mistake the visible drama of life for reality itself. We become captivated by what unfolds before us on the screen of life and assume that what we see is the real—indeed, the realistic—truth.
But it is not.
It is a projection upon the veil.
One of the golden keys of life is therefore to learn how to recognise the veil—and the dance upon the veil—for what it ulitmately is: an illusion. Yet it is not a random illusion. The specific "dance" or drama projected onto the veil is intimately related to the potentials of our own journey of individuation. It emerges in the tension between where we come from (our past entanglements) and where we are called to go (our future potentials). It unfolds in the dynamic field between entanglement and disentanglement, between problem and potential, between the outdated identities and the Future Self.
These mayatic dramas can -and do- play out in every area of life: relationships, financial worries, illness, success, failure, political turmoil, and countless other phenomena that seem overwhelmingly real. We become emotionally involved, attached to the stories, enmeshed in the narratives, and easily identify with them and thus become our dramas (and thus believe in its “reality”)
But what if these dramas are ultimately a mayatic illusion ?
Imagine watching a movie. You laugh, cry, rejoice, and suffer with the characters on the screen. Throughout the entire film, however, the screen itself remains untouched. The movie feels completely real as an experience—otherwise the entire film and television industry would be dead as a doornail. Yet no matter how deeply the story draws us in, we know that it is "only a movie": actors, a script, scenography, costumes, make-up, lighting, cameras, editing, music, and a director all come together to create the illusion.
The concept of the Veils of Maya points to something very similar. We become absorbed in the projections on the screens of life and forget that what we are experiencing is itself a mayatic film, unfolding according to a deeper script.
Apropos, Western philosophy offers a strikingly similar image in Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. Plato paints the setting of prisoners who have spent their entire lives chained inside a cave, facing a wall. Behind them burns a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners people carry various objects that cast shadows onto the wall. Having never seen anything else, the prisoners naturally assume that these dancing shadows constitute reality itself.
Only when one prisoner is freed and leaves the cave does he discover that the shadows were merely projections of a far richer reality existing beyond the cave. At first the light blinds him. Gradually, however, his eyes adjust, and he begins to perceive reality as it actually is.
The path of individuation is, in many ways, the gradual lifting of the Veils of Maya. It is about learning to:
a) recognise the veils for what they are: veils, projections, shadows, symptoms;
b) consciously avoid becoming hypnotised by the seductive dance of the drama;
c) learn to see through them;
d) gradually lift—or perhaps even pull down—each Veil of Maya that presents itself, not randomly, but precisely as part of our individuation journey; and
e) discover what has been hidden behind the veil all along: a theme, a lesson, a potential, or an aspect of the future Self waiting to be realised.
Even though behind each veil, there is a new veil. every veil that falls reveals another layer of understanding. Every illusion we recognise brings us a little closer to the core—the core of our own lives and the core of life itself.
Join Ingvild & Olaf’s conversation in our little cottage by the Oslofjord, on the nature & variety of Deep Nutrition.