In the quiet town of Lalgudi, where the world presented itself each morning as a collection of separate and solid things—houses, trees, schoolbooks, friends, and the flowing river—young Krishnan had begun to wonder whether everything was truly as divided as it appeared. He saw himself as one person and others as distinct from him. Objects seemed to stand apart with clear names and forms. Time moved forward in a straight line, and causes produced effects in an orderly chain. Yet something in him sensed that this picture might not be complete.
One evening on the terrace he spoke of this feeling to Uncle Venkatesh.
“Uncle, the world looks full of separate things. I am here, you are there, the tree is different from the river. Is this the whole truth?”
Uncle Venkatesh opened his copy of the Bhagavad Gita as explained by Eknath Easwaran and read thoughtfully.
“There are three ordinary states of consciousness—waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. Each has its own order of reality. Beyond them lies a fourth state called Turiya, the unitive state. In ordinary waking life we live in what may be called the dream of the separate—the sense of merely physical existence. This is the work of Maya.
Maya is a kind of magic: the creative power that makes the underlying Unity appear as a world of innumerable separate things, each with its own name and form. The mind observes what it calls the outside world and reports a multiplicity of objects set in time, space, and causality. These are simply the conditions of its perception. Because of Maya, the mind looks at Unity and reports diversity; it looks at the timeless and reports transience. The mistake is to take this report as the ultimate reality—just as a dreamer believes that nothing is real except the dream.
When the mind is transcended and one rests in Turiya, the duality disappears. Even modern physics hints at something similar: the world of name and form exists only under certain conditions of perception. At the deeper level, separate phenomena dissolve into a single flux of energy. So the effect of Maya is this: what we see as many is only the One appearing as multiplicity.”
Krishnan sat in silence, watching the neem leaves move in the evening breeze.
In the days that followed he began a quiet experiment. While walking to school he looked at the trees, the road, the other walkers, and himself, and gently reminded his mind: “These appear separate, yet perhaps they are waves of one river.” When a quarrel arose between classmates he noticed how quickly the mind created strong divisions of “I” and “they.” He did not force the divisions to vanish; he only watched how Maya painted them so vividly. In moments of quiet he sat by the river and tried to sense the single life moving through water, birds, and his own breath.
He did not expect to enter Turiya at once. He only practised seeing the play of name and form without immediately believing it to be the final truth. Slowly the sharp edges of separation softened. The world remained the same—school bells still rang, cricket matches were still won or lost—yet it felt less rigidly divided.
Weeks later he sat again with Uncle Venkatesh as the sky turned deep blue.
“Uncle,” Krishnan said, “I still see many things with names and forms. But I am beginning to understand that this is the mind’s report under the conditions of Maya. When I remember the underlying unity, the diversity loses some of its hardness. It feels more like one life appearing in many ways.”
Uncle Venkatesh smiled. “That is the beginning of true seeing. We do not reject the world of name and form; we simply stop taking it as the whole of reality. Continue to look carefully. As the hold of Maya loosens, the unitive state reveals itself in its own time.”
In the soft dusk of Lalgudi, while the ordinary world of separate houses, separate people, and separate tasks continued around him, young Krishnan walked home with a quieter understanding. He had begun to recognise Maya’s gentle magic—the power that makes the One appear as many. And in that patient daily seeing, he took his first steps toward the fourth state, where duality softens and the Unity of life is no longer merely an idea but a living presence.