The other side of the veil

In the Middle East women have sometimes worn veils. In the West there is the same tradition of women at weddings or when mourning a loved one. These traditions are mostly in the past. But from them we get an analogy often used in mysticism. This is the analogy of not seeing reality as it really is due to a veil that separates us from it. 

But this analogy is unfortunate, for it has led to many misunderstandings about the nature of reality, and even led to superstition. It is from this analogy that we get the notion of crossing over to "the other side," "portals," and "other dimensions." The Doors sang a song that people mistook as being mystical where the title and chorus was "break on through to the other side." People took drugs thinking they were lifting their consciousness and seeing through the veil. They weren't. They were simply mucking up their neural sense apparatus and having hallucinations with no meaning whatsoever. 

It is not that a veil prevents you from seeing higher aspects of reality and finally reality itself, but that distortions caused by your own perceptual schemas do. Perceptual schemas refers to your conditioning or sanskaras. So it is the removing of your own conditioning that reveals reality. That reality is all around you and you are not separated from it by any veil.

This concept is captured in a quote by William Blake that I continually quote. 

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

LSD promoters changed this meaning. Blake meant that spiritual and artistic clarity allows humans to see the divine truth already present in the ordinary world. Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, and others shifted the meaning from a metaphor for spiritual purification into a literal description of drug-induced experiences. Obviously no drug in your brain can cleans your conditioning. It can only cloud it further. It becomes the veil.

Hippies "tripping" on acid in the 1960s

In Meher Baba's teaching there are not two worlds with a barrier standing between them. This is shear superstition. Reality is not that kind of thing. It is eternally present. You veil yourself from it by your own thinking. The veil in real mysticism means the veil of ignorance.

"You yourself are your own veil, Hafez. Remove yourself!" – Hafez