"Unbound consciousness, by its own free will decides to bind itself in creation, and becomes contracted from its unfathomable expansiveness to become you, and me, and everything else in creation.
In becoming you and me, unbound consciousness becomes associated with our limited stories and identities.
You ask me who I am, and I tell you my story – my history, culture, occupation, the roles I play – these traits are who I think I am. But in reality, I am (as you are) unbound consciousness.
And even when I have no idea about unbound consciousness, I have a gnawing sense of being incomplete – because my stories don’t seem to be the “full story” of who I am.
No matter what I do to fulfill this fundamental sense of lack, it continues to be an issue. I try to fill that gaping hole with money, fame, achievements, success, relationships, spiritual teachings… And yet, it remains unfilled, like an ulcer that just won’t heal.
Not only does the anava mala drive our entire life, but it gives rise to two other malas (yeah, I know, like one isn’t enough!) – the mayiya mala and the karma mala.
Mayiya mala is the sense of being separate from everyone else. It’s easy to see how this occurs. If I start to take my story of me to be me, then the story of you is you, and the story of each person is that person.
This sense of separation keeps us on the defensive – my main concern is “me” and the world becomes “not me.” When we band together in our shared stories, our concern expands to “us” versus “not us.”
The anava and mayiya malas crystallize to give us the sense of the third mala – karma. We have a deep-rooted sense of being the one restricted to limited activity in our day-to-day life and the one experiencing the good or bad results of our action.
This mala, remember, comes from the fundamental mala of contraction of limitless consciousness into limitation. And thus, the karma mala gives us a sense of limited action, where our patterns of thinking and conditioning from our stories (the anava and mayiya malas) drive our actions almost spontaneously.
We react in the same way to the same stimuli because we’ve lost the freedom to choose.
Thus, unbound consciousness's unlimited power of action becomes contracted in this loss of freedom."
