What is Real? What is this idea called Progress?

1. If everything, is in essence, Divine, then what is Maya?
   
2. Folks have said, through the centuries, that the physical is unreal, because it is ephemeral, changing!
   
3. It has created the unending quest for the Real, for the Eternal!
   
4. An unending conflict between “What is” and “What is possible” ( Actually “What is desired”)
   
5. Tied to this, naturally is this whole notion of Progress!
   
6. Thus progress involves (requires?) the notion of the Ideal, and of course of the Striving towards it!
   
7. The whole of thought and society born of it is, driven by the centrality of this notion of progress, of improvement.
   
8. The west – searched outwards
   The east – searched inwards
   But
   Both at some fundamental level, rejected the Now, the What is, the Present!
   
9. Both searches ran their full course, to pay homage to the “Ultimate reality” as they perceived it. But never reconciled this and the other baby dualities in any meaningful way.
   
10. West looked for better Science, and the East for better Religion
    
11. So I wonder what is real? What is progress?
    And therefore
    Do we really Learn?
    
12. There are theories and philosophies-a-plenty.
    There are even more methods and a still larger set of tools.
    All with a claim to fame – large or small, of “Liberating” us only if we adopt it as the “key”!
    
13. Big time Contradiction!
    How can any model hold a dynamic, living, infinity called Reality?
    
14. How can there be a journey in time and in space to a place called Now and here?!
    
15. Every thing and non-thing is real. The body is real, so is this whole mechanism of thought called mind and the alleged source called the Spirit
    
16. Why create divides and spend life-times healing them?
    
17. Is this what Adi Sankara had seen in Advaita?
    
18. How can those born of a sexual relationship between man and woman, reject the reality of Sex?
    Why do they engage in this schism?
    Why do they declare “all things bodily” are unreal?
    
19. Transcendence, is different, radically different than negation!
    
20. Not, “Neti, Neti!” but “Ehiwa, Ehiwa” is the mantra! Not “not this, not this” but “here only, here only”
    
21. It is about becoming aware (of ignorance) and not about gaining any new knowledge!
    
22. It is the fundamental Unlearning that produces any useful Learning!
    
23. How can there be a directional Journey, in a cyclical universe?
    A cycle of birth --> growth ---> death ---> reform ---> birth…
    
24. Ending of form is visible, so that is real too.
    
25. But the “IS” continues and therefore that is real too!