It is a dark path at twilight

and you see a deadly snake lying before you.

Suddenly someone comes from the other direction

and, as they walk by the snake,

they ask you what you are frightened of.

You tell them all about the poisonous snake

that they just stepped over.

Then they tell you and show you that it is just a rope.

The snake does not exist and yet it manages,

by the power of illusion and superimposition,

to conceal the reality, the rope.

As the concept of a snake conceals the rope

so Maya, illusion, conceals the Atman.

Atman is Everything: Pure Consciousness,

Eternally Free and Blissful.

But imaginations conceals this

with non-existent name and form,

with superimposed subject and object.