NOEMAYA

Spiritual practices and rituals are not meant to really invoke the deity or bring the Divinity closer to the aspirant as if these were entities exterior to the being of an individual. The separation between man and God appears only to man and insofar as he/she is a human person. From God’s point of view, all is God and God is all; even the apparent separation is nothing but God, God interpreted as separation. Though we may seem far away from God, God is eternally with us, for It is the eternity within us.

The separation between us and our Truth is of the nature of time, but we must first see that eternity is not something in time, but rather it is time that is a moment of eternity. As a result of spiritual ignorance, i.e. intellectual/spiritual impurities, or more precisely because of poor sight, we cannot perceive this truth. Spiritual practices are meant to remove these impurities as a result of which the Face of Truth is instantly recognized.

Truth shines in the heart. Spiritual practices make the heart receptive to natural light, as opposed to artificial, i.e. lunar light. This is only a matter of spiritual/intellectual reorientation of the soul. Thus, spiritual practices in fact reorient the Intellect toward its origin.

There are two types of perceptions, i.e. two eyes: One is perception in cognition, and the other is cognition in perception. One eye perceives only diversity which is a product of cognition, and the other eye perceives the unity of all cognitions qua cognitions.  

Since truth is transcendental, and hence atemporal, its perception too cannot be an experience in the natural sense of the word, as a temporal and dual stream of consciousness, dual in the sense that all experience is based on a knower-known, or subject-object, duality. The experience of the eternal is itself an eternal, uninterrupted experience (as the experience of the temporal is itself a temporal experience.) The object of knowledge always conforms to the mode of knower, for knowledge is nothing but the wings of the knower. It is in this sense that Brahmanubhava, the experience of enlightenment, is said to be an uncaused and beginningless experience, i.e. without natural origination.   

Truth is always known by all. It is only an apparent lapse in memory that make us oblivious to Its existence and nearness to us.