Dancing With Maya: Between Reality and Illusion, Embracing the Power of Uncertainty

Totally revised edition of an earlier printed version. The E-book contains 566 full pages with table of content, glossary, bibliography, and extensive index. It has 73 high quality color photographs of Tantra-Buddhist statues and Thangkas and 13 illustrations.
DWM discusses topics of Eastern and Western cultural history including religions, Buddhism, Tantra, Tao, Hinduism, Christianity. It looks at these from a modern scientific-mathematical point of view. It proposes a new approach to understanding human thinking and behavior.
Inspired by thinkers like J. Krishnamurti, David Bohm, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Zimmer and others I explore Tantra Buddhism and Quantum Physics. I show how Western philosophers from Pericles to Kant delved into the same mysteries between that which can be known and that which will always remain a mystery.
Tantra Buddhism supplies us with many striking images of the loving embrace of 'Buddhas' through which it tries to convey the mystery of life and inspire to use our senses together with our thinking in order to get a better picture of reality and truth.
I propose to apply the same structure which governs the laws of physics to our own thinking, sensing and acting. I am aided in this attempt by many mystic aspects in Indian, Tibetan, and Western philosophies.

For time immemorial people have sought to find the ultimate truth under the name of Wisdom, fountain of youth, God, eternal bliss, happiness, nirvana, heaven, etc. There are innumerable systems, usually called religion, which pretend to be in the possession of that truth. But alas, reality is not truth, and nothing in reality is truth. This mysterious relationship between truth and reality is another theme of this book.
To hold any knowledge or system of any kind for absolute truth is one of the preferred activities of what is called maya or illusion in Indian philosophy. This concept is so powerful that it is being represented by the seductive Goddess Maya in many of her forms, the greatest, earliest and most powerful of all Gods and Goddesses, who, if taken as knowable truth, is the ultimate illusion.
My 'personal' insight that 'Reality Is Not Truth' is the foundation of this book. I will show how the most advanced theories of human insight, from the Indian Upanishads of three thousand years ago and older times, to modern quantum theory support this view. I will also show that if we assume that life has meaning for an actual individual human being, and I suppose almost everyone assumes that, then human thinking cannot ever lead to absolute knowledge about the actuality of What Is, from the smallest atoms to the beginning of the universe, from human freedom to human reality. Conversely, if there is meaning to a human being, then there is also meaning to the smallest pebble of sand, atom, and particle in the universe, particularly in all organisms.
The unknowability of the truth which underlies reality was seen in many ancient cultures, and has now been confirmed by the discoveries of quantum theory early in the twentieth century. I will show why it is impossible for human thinking to arrive at cogent knowledge about the most urgent, i.e. meaningful, questions of human societies. What is Good, what is evil? What can we know? What is meaning? What can we do?