Affection is a treacherous thing. Once you fall into someone's affection, you're undone—stripped down to the marrow. Affection is like quicksand's snare... step into it once, and the more you struggle, the deeper you sink. The harder you try to pull away, the more you drown. Everything seemed right, but do you know where the reckoning first goes wrong? The one whose affection has trapped you—perhaps they're trapped in someone else's affection. The one drowning in your affection, another drowns in theirs. This arithmetic of mismatch, this discrepancy in accounts—is there any solution to it? I doubt it. We all want only the one in whose affection we're lost; but do we ever ask after those drowning in ours? Do we ever care to know how much, in every moment without us, someone's heart burns to ash? How much, without us, someone's home crumbles to dust? We discard those who cherish us. We are discarded by those we cherish. Perhaps nature exacts its due. Because I never asked for the one who wanted me, they ask nothing of me either. In the end, life remains an unfinished tragic novel, a story that never finds its wholeness. At story's end: just as the one who wants me never has me, so too I never have the one I want. Like a river that winds and bends, life still flows on, carrying small tales and untales and non-tales, until the river of a human life merges into an ocean of stories. From there, no one ever returns. There, drifting on and on, no one ever settles accounts... how much was gained and how much was lost!
# The Snare of Maya We are all caught in Maya's net, yet we seldom pause to ask: what is this force that binds us? The ancient philosophers spoke of it in riddles, wrapped their wisdom in metaphors of illusion and dream. But Maya is not mere falsehood—it is far more cunning than that. Maya does not deceive by showing us what is not. Rather, it deceives by showing us what *is*, but in such a way that we mistake the part for the whole, the shadow for the substance, the ripple for the ocean. We see the wave and forget the water. We behold the dancer and lose sight of the dance itself. Consider how we live our days. We rise, we strive, we accumulate. We build monuments to ourselves—in possessions, in names, in the memory of others. Each achievement feels like a solid thing, a permanent gain. Yet nothing holds. The body ages. The fortune shifts like sand. The name, once forgotten, is as if it never was. We know this—we have always known it—yet we act as though it were not true. This is the peculiar genius of Maya: she does not blind us to reality so much as make us *indifferent* to it. The sages say: look deeper. Beneath the surface of things runs a current of being that does not change. It is not diminished by loss, not increased by gain. It is not young when the body is young, not old when the body decays. It is the witness of all becoming, itself untouched by time. The Self, they call it. Or Brahman. Or simply: That which *is*. To see this is liberation. Not to escape the world, but to see through the world's disguise—to understand that the seeming multiplicity of things is the dance of one eternal reality, playing all the parts. Maya is not evil; she is the creative power of the divine, the artist's hand. But so long as we do not see her for what she is, so long as we believe her performance to be the final truth, we remain her prisoners. The question then becomes: how does one break free? Not by rejecting the world—the world is real in its own way. But by ceasing to be fascinated by its surface, by learning to look at the play without losing oneself in it. A child watches a shadow puppet show with complete absorption; an adult may enjoy it, yet knows the truth behind the curtain. This shift in vision is what the wise call awakening. In that awakening lies a strange peace. For in recognizing that what we truly are cannot be harmed, cannot be lost, cannot decay—we are freed from the deepest fear that drives all our grasping and striving. We may still act in the world, still play our part. But we do so lightly, knowing that the actor is not the role, knowing that the self which acts is eternal and untouched. This is the promise whispered at the heart of all wisdom traditions: you are not as small, as fragile, as temporary as you believe. You are caught in Maya's snare, yes—but the snare cannot touch what you truly are. To know this is to be free, even while the world spins on, even while the dance continues.
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