Relay: Beware Of Maya
“Watch out now, take care, beware of soft shoe shufflers / Dancing down the sidewalks, as each unconscious sufferer wanders aimlessly / Beware of Maya.”
These lyrics looped in my consciousness as I sat frozen on the third floor of State Supreme Court in Riverhead. There was no escaping them — not the lyrics, nor the proceedings.
Last week saw me on the long road to Riverhead and back, and then again to Riverhead the next day, and then back again. Monday saw a repeat performance, followed — no rest for the weary traveler — by another interminable nighttime meeting in East Hampton.
In between, the nation’s customary and routine carnage was atypically brutal, if that is possible, and uncharacteristically concentrated in Orlando, Fla., but let’s be honest: With some 30,000 killed in gun violence annually, is anyone surprised? And if 20 murdered little children couldn’t change anything, what could possibly?
I digress. Sitting in that courtroom, Maya was on the brain. Though the name has several meanings in Indian philosophies, George Harrison, in the song “Beware of Darkness” from his first post-Beatles release, was apparently referring to Maya as illusion, a false reality that stands between us and our realization of the oneness of all and everything. (“And the time will come when you’ll see we’re all one,” he had predicted in an earlier song.)
In that climate-controlled third-floor courtroom, a few dozen miles and a trillion light-years from a sandy ocean beach on Napeague, the ownership of parts of said beach was considered, with carefully constructed arguments and legal precedents and frequent quips from the judge, instructing a particular participant to proceed at a pace that would allow a conclusion before his scheduled retirement, now just 15 months away.
One hundred and nineteen months ago, in an exposition on the ego and its perils presented at the Mahabodhi International Meditation Center in Ladakh, in India’s Jammu and Kashmir state, an instructor explained that the notions of “I” and “mine” inevitably give rise to those of “you” and “yours.”
The players on the confining, climate-controlled stage in Riverhead may have simplified things: “I” and “mine” front and center, duality all the way, dialogue or conciliation tantamount to defeat. But I’m no lawyer, nor even university material.
On Sunday evening, Gypsy jazz emanating from the speakers in my tiny home office/music and contemplation room, I gazed out the south window. In the expansive backyard, rabbits hopped this way and that, and squirrels scampered in and out and up and down and to and fro, and birds landed and stayed awhile and then took flight again, all going about their own business and blissfully unaware that this was private property, in the hyper-exclusive Hamptons, no less, and south of the highway at that.
Unlike the meticulously landscaped adjacent property, a model of rigorous planning bordered by a tall fence the landlady likens to that of a concentration camp, here the verdant trees hew to no grid, as though the tiny seeds had found their mark in the fertile soil wholly by the whims of chance, within them all of the unseen intelligence needed to create what I now beheld, swaying in the cooling breeze as they reached heavenward.
“Watch out now, take care, beware of greedy leaders / They take you where you should not go / While weeping atlas cedars / They just want to grow / Grow and grow / Beware of darkness.”
Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star.