By Gurudevi Nirmalananda 

Your mind lives in multiple realities simultaneously. In the midst of life, you are often reviewing the past or comparing the present with how you wanted it to be.  You might even write a script in your head, but feel bamboozled when the others don’t follow it.  Your inner experience and outer experience can be wildly incompatible.  This is not duality.  This is delusion.  

Some yogic philosophies say that your whole life is delusion.  Worse, they say the whole world is maayaa, meaning it’s all illusion, like you think you’re seeing water but it is a desert mirage.  Your mind spins out webs that entangle you, causing endless suffering.

Yes, your mind can cause great suffering.  But I recognize your suffering as real.  So is your bliss, once you turn your efforts in that direction. Our yogic tradition honors everything as real, even all the stuff in your mind.  Here is how it works:

Everything that exists does exist.

Everything that doesn’t exist also exists.

Kashmiri Shaivism honors the world as being the formless in form.  Every object and every being is a physical form of the Ultimate Reality, Shiva.  His Divine power of creativity is so amazing that everything he brings to mind actually becomes real.  This universe existed first in Shiva’s mind.  Then he brought it into reality…