The ancient Indian concept of Maya provides a deep insight into the nature of reality. Because what we perceive often betrays its real origination, we tend to confuse cause and effect, image and object.

This is precisely how and why a magician can so easily cast her spell over us. Using only sleight of hand, the conjurer misdirects our attention so that we don’t see the simple physics behind the deception. Instead, we get mesmerized by the performance, falsely believing that something superluminal has transpired.

Nature, likewise, is the great conniver. We only access the tiniest sliver of what is possible, blinded from the hierarchical simulacra of awareness that is our heritage. It is for this reason that mystics from both East and West speak of “consciously waking up” from the illusion of our current state where we are trapped into believing that nothing higher than the waking state exists.

We are prisoners in a fragmentary illusion and haven’t realized that a vast horizon of possibilities awaits our arrival. Although the idea that the world is ultimately a beguiling phantasm has a long history, modern science, via ever-sophisticated computational technologies, has ushered in a radically new way of understanding the cosmos at large. Our conception of matter has evolved from uncuttable bits of material—Democritus’ original atoms—to subtler mathematical fields of information: “it from bits”.

As John Wheeler, the distinguished physicist opined, “all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe”. But how do we transcend our present boundary, our “digital” Maya? The sages from the Sant and Radhasoami traditions argue that the secret technique is a simple one: trace your consciousness to its terminal source. That is, focus one’s attention within by witnessing how self-awareness arises. The technique is natural and is part and parcel of human neuroanatomy.