Part III
TRANSCENDING THE FALSEHOODS
OF MAYA

COUNTLESS are the falsehoods which a Maya-ridden man embraces in the stupor of ignorance, but from the very beginning, falsehoods carry within themselves their own insufficiency and bankruptcy. Discerning falsehood Sooner or later they are known to be falsehoods. This brings us to the question, “How do we discern the falsehood as falsehood?” There is no way out of falsehood except by knowing it as falsehood, but this knowledge of falsehood as falsehood would never come unless it were in some way latent in falsehood from the very beginning.
The acceptance of falsehood is always a bedridden compromise. Even in the very depths of ignorance the soul gives some kind of challenge to falsehood. In falsehood there is suspicion and fear However feeble and inarticulate it might seem to be in its initial stages, it is the beginning of that search for the Truth which ultimately annihilates all falsehood and all ignorance. In the acceptance of a falsehood there is an ever-growing restlessness—a deep suspicion and a vague fear. For example, when a man considers him-
self and others to be identical with the gross body, he cannot completely reconcile himself to this belief. In embracing this false belief there is fear of death and fear of losing others. If a man depends for his happiness only upon the possession of forms, he knows in his heart that he is building his castles on shifting sands, that this surely is not the way to abiding happiness, that the support to which he so desperately clings may give way any day. So, he is deeply suspicious of his grounds.
Man is restlessly aware of his own insecurity. He knows that something is wrong somewhere and that he is counting upon false hopes. Falsehood is treacherously unreliable. Falsehood betrays itself Man simply cannot afford to embrace it forever. He might as well garland himself with a poisonous snake or go to sleep on the top of a volcano which is only temporarily inactive. A falsehood bears the hall-mark of being incomplete and unsatisfactory, temporary and provisional. It points to something else. It appears to the person to be hiding something which is greater and truer than what it seems to be. Falsehood betrays itself, and in doing so leads man on to know the truth.
Falsehoods are of two types: (1) those which arise due to irregular and loose thinking, and (2) those which arise due to vitiated thinking. Two types of falsehood Falsehoods which arise due to irregular thinking are less harmful than falsehoods which arise from vitiated thinking. The untruths of a purely intellectual nature arise because of some mistake in the application of the intellect, but falsehoods which count from the spiritual point of view arise because of the vitiation of the intellect through the operation of blinding and unarguing desires.
The difference between these two types of falsehood may be brought out by a physiological analogy. Some