Now, here is the thing - I am suffering from 'Maya' again. And so are many others - if this sounds like a confessional, then it is most likely yours as much as mine.

Three things happened to bring this into sharp focus recently:

'The Nosebag' is closing, I was informed. This was one of our favourite haunts during my university days - when I visited friends in Oxford in the late '70s - this is where we went to discover who is supervising whom, to discuss whether Spinoza believed in God, to demolish roughly hewn potato salad with sandwiches filled to bursting, as we drank our coffees. We settled in happily for long involved discussions, in carefree times without mortgages and responsibilities.

Add to this, the pleasurable memory of seeing my son (currently finishing a masters at Oxford) for lunch at the Nosebag. It has felt for the last year as if the level of comfort in my old 'comfort zone' had somehow deepened - here I was in the same place as I had been some 40 years before, eating similar lunches, talking about things which are broadly along the same lines : history, politics, social policy, philosophy.

This is the stuff of Maya.

I have also perpetuated this attachment, by having a last breakfast with my son at this establishment this week - and discussed why it is closing with the owner. The bottom line has collapsed, because the volumes are no longer there, after a very big change in working patterns, post-Covid. No answer to that, really - a business is either viable or it isn't. Isn't it a perverse thing that we should rush to the place which we had mistakenly thought would last for ever, and have a 'last meal'? Why create another memory? Or was this a part of letting go?

Has to be Maya either way, right?

The second thing which happened was the surrealist exhibition at the Tate Gallery. Now, you would have thought that this was an opportunity to revisit Paris in the 1920s. Not so, entirely. Surrealism as a philosophy crept into the collective consciousness and many people thought that through Art, they could put up a protest at the status quo - it entered the vocabulary, and pervaded world consciousness. Its core aims have been to subvert reality, challenge authority and imagine new worlds - that is the first step to any change. There is a democratising spirit in this movement, as well as a spirit of opening up new possibilities - it's not just art, it is a state of mind. Here is more information, in case you are interested - Dawn Ades writes a fine description of what the exhibition is trying to say. It has travelled to the UK from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Maya. We are attached to our own theories of why the world is not working well, fuelled by our own experiences, and interpreted on the canvas of our individual consciousness. We say these things loudly in the hope of being heard and being seen as a catalyst for change.

So we have collectivley spoken since the 1920s - in art, in jazz, showing weird juxtapositions, in an effort to see the bizarre in the ordinary, with the hope that it might change something, for progressing towards the freedom of the individual soul. Look at the paradoxes - see if something good tumbles out of the mess we seem to have achieved; if some good insight helps us to retrieve the position in society or within ourselves.

This isn't new. Yudhishthir spots an old paradox and points it out in the Mahabharata - His four brothers lie supine beside the lake, and the questioner says that they will live again, if he can answer some eternal questions - the last question he asks is : what is the most surprising of all things? Yudhishthir answers - 'every day people die, and yet those who remain think that they will live for ever, that death will not come to them - is there anything more surprising than that?' His brothers get up and finish their days of exile in the forest; I recall reading this in the fat Kashi Ram Das Mahabharat of my childhood, in comforting rhyming couplets. In the everyday experience of humankind lies the weirdest pieces of self-deception. The astonishing in the day to day. Quite as weird as a telephone receiver morphing into a lobster.

The third thing which happened was that Swami Sarvasthananda's voice recovered, and he gave another of his talks. He is talking among a host of other things, about the account of Vivekananda's life given by Margaret Noble, one of his main disciples, whose given name in India (Sister Nivedita) graces many good educational establishments. As head of the Vedanta Society of the UK, Swami Sarvasthananda has an established group of listeners, who log in to his talks every week.

He said that Margaret Noble in her book 'The Master as I Saw Him' talks about the speeches during his second visit to London in the late 1890s- Vivekananda tries to define Maya thus : 'With every breath, every impulse of our heart asks us to be selfish. Still we know that the only good is to be obtained by controlling and checking it. At the same time, there is some power beyond us which says that it is unselfishness alone, which is good . . . ' he describes the optimism of youth and the pessimism of old age as yesterday's dreams vanish in the oppression of a deteriorating body, which turns a young optimist into an old pessimist - and finishes 'Thus we go from one extreme to another, buffeted by nature, without knowing where we are going. This is Maya.'

Ms Noble was aware that Vivekananda was a well read, erudite experienced practitioner of yoga, who was finding it hard to express in ordinary language concepts which are beyond its scope.

Seeing the absurd in the day to day. Not getting attached to specific things, just observing what we do, and see how much of this turns out to be transitory. Events interpreted on the canvas of our individual awareness - transitory in nature, and 'ever changing, subject to space time and causation'.

Maya. You would only choose to look into it, if you are already convinced that there is something beyond what the senses alone can perceive. To notice extreme instances of Maya is a lifelong task, I would contend, and a core life skill we should all cultivate.

Result? Well, hopefully, fewer instances of Maya-inducing activity, and more time spent in trying to look for what may lie beyond it. I am fortunate to be surrounded by fellow-travellers on that road.

That is the true comfort zone we should cultivate. Letting go of the Nosebag may have been worth it, if by visiting it for a last time, I was able to identify it as another transitory place, full of old memories - a part of the package of Maya. Our noses are firmly in that feeding bag, we find it hard to detach ourselves from it - just like in the illustration. Going to the Surrealist exhibition is yet another circuitous route to the same conclusion.