In the final chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna, “O Arjuna, the Lord dwells in the heart of all beings, while revolving them all on the wheel of transmigration by His mysterious power of Maya.”

This word, Maya, is one, which we hear quite often in discussions of the Hindu Vedanta, and, because it is a word that is so often misinterpreted, let us consider it carefully.

Maya is just another name for God’s power of manifestation, His power of form projection. However, the word, Maya, is also used to signify the form-projection itself. Maya, in other words, is both the cause and effect, both the creator, or creatrix, and the creation.

Maya is synonymous with all the other words used to represent the manifesting ‘Power of God’, such as Shakti, Prakriti, Logos, et cetera. So many words exist because every seer of every time and place has found it necessary to give a name to the creative power of God in order to distinguish the temporal from the eternal,  the phenomenal appearance from the constant and unchanging Ground.

Maya, like so many of the other names for this ‘power’, is a noun of the feminine gender. Just as the absolute Godhead is referred to as the figurative ‘Father’, His Power of manifestation is commonly referred to as ‘Mother’, as in ‘Mother Nature’. Maya is the Creatrix, the Womb, the Holy Grail, from which all are born, sometimes called the Will, or the effulgent Glory, of God.

Maya (Sanskrit: ‘Consisting of; made of,’ as in manomaya, ‘made of mind’.

From the verb root ma, ‘to measure, to limit, give form’) is the principle of appearance or manifestation of God’s power or ‘miraculous energy, that which measures’. It is the substance that emanate from Shiva and through which the world of form (substance, matter-energy) is manifested. Hence, all (physical) creation is also termed Maya. It is the cosmic creative force, the principle of manifestation, ever in the process of creation, preservation, and dissolution.

The Upanishads underscore Maya’s captivating nature, which blinds souls to the transcendent truth – exactly like Daath in the Hebrew Kabbalah. In Shankara’s Vedantic interpretation, Maya is taken as pure illusion or unreality.

In Saivism, it is one of the three bonds (Sanskrit: ‘pasha’) that limit the soul and thereby facilitate its evolution. For Saivites and most other non-dualists (monists), it is understood not as illusion but as ‘relative reality’, in contrast to the unchanging ‘Absolute Reality’. Therefore, Maya is the power that deludes.

From where does this power (that deludes) come? According to the Vedanta it comes from Prakriti or Nature. Prakriti is the creation of God. First He creates Prakriti and then enters into it. And when He enters into it, He becomes enveloped with his own Maya leading to his own delusion and bondage.

How is the delusion caused? It is caused through the senses. The Bhagavad-Gita explains the process: “By constantly thinking of the sense objects, a mortal being becomes attached to them. However, God is not a mortal being and has no qualities.” [The Revealed is mortal, but the Concealed is immortal.]

“Attached thus he develops various desires, from which in turn ensues anger. From anger comes delusion, and from delusion arises ‘confusion of memory’. From ‘confusion of memory’ arises loss of intelligence and when intelligence is lost the breath of life is lost.”

From delusion and ignorance evolve evil.

Maya causes delusion in many ways. Under the influence of Maya, an individual loses his intelligence and power of discretion. He forgets his true nature. He loses contact with the self with in and believes that he is the ego with a body and a name. In that delusion, he assumes that he is doer of his actions, whereas in truth he is just an instrument of God, who is the real doer.

He develops attachment with worldly objects and wants to possess them. He strives for wrong objectives in the world, having lost his connection with the real self and having forgotten the true purpose of his existence. 

He accepts as true, what his senses confirm and ignores the truth that is hidden in everything. Driven by passions and emotions, instincts and desires, he suffers from the distinctions of heat and cold, happiness and sorrow, success and failure, and union and separation. He becomes restless due to the unstable nature of his mind. Deluded thus, he pursues wrong aims; indulges in wrong actions; suffers from the consequences of his own actions, and gets caught in the cycle of births and deaths (Reincarnation or transmigration. Sanskrit: metempsychosis. Hebrew: Gilgolem).

These are ancient concepts in Western and Eastern traditions where human development is concerned with working out inwardly our experiences of the external world and thereby developing the inner qualities that makes us human and sets us free, the ability to know ourselves.

While the external world provides the initial experiences, it is within our inner nature that the work that carries us forward has to be done.

We have to wrestle with our problems inwardly, as in the dreams and active imaginings that have been described. When these inner activities emerge into consciousness, a person experiences not only his outward path through life, but also ‘an inner journey of the soul’. We never see the world as it is, but rather as we are!

We make this ‘journey’ not only as individuals; it is also the path that humanity as a whole has to follow. Some of the world’s great literature portrays this inner evolution of humankind.

We are but forever searching, learning, and falling. Life will test us until we have learned our lessons and are finally equipped to move on!

Mephistopheles (‘He who hates the Light’, ‘Prince of Darkness’, ‘Lord of the Underworld’) is the evil spirit of medieval literature. Embittered and sarcastic, his irony hides the pain and despair of the being of a higher nature which is separated from the God for which it was created, and is now totally imprisoned in Hell – not a place, but a state of being.

This evil spirit is recognisable by its cold-blooded malignity, his bitter laugh, which mocks at sorrow, and his ferocious pleasure at the sight of pain. He is the one whose mockery undermines the virtuous, who debases the talented by his scorn and tarnishes the brightness of glory with his lies.... next to Satan he is the power of Hell most to be feared.

Goethe (1749-1832) transformed the figure of the medieval Mephistopheles into a metaphysical symbol. To prevent mankind from slumbering in deceitful and slothful peace, God gave Mephistopheles the freedom to act in the world as creative and fruitful anxiety. He thus has his place in progressive evolution as an essential factor, albeit negative, in the destiny of the universe. “I am part of those forces”, he tells Faust, “…which ceaselessly plot evil and eternally create good”.

However, his limited intelligence is unable to grasp the vision of this harmonious evolution. Mephistopheles believes he is leading mankind to damnation, when at the end of the toils in which he has entangled them, they eventually find salvation. It is a case of the biter bitten.

Mephistopheles also symbolises the challenge of life, with all the ambiguities which this implies. As Carl Jung (1875-1961) points out, Faust had failed to ‘live’ a substantial proportion of his youth. Consequently he remained an incomplete personality, absorbed in the empty and unrealisable quest of metaphysical goals. He is unable to face the challenge of life and it was precisely this aspect of his unconscious which Mephistopheles was to arouse and lay bare. Such a challenge is one of the essentials in preparing the soul (the hero) for the battles of life.

Therefore, one can overcome the power of Maya (illusion), by developing detachment, by withdrawing the senses from sense objects, by surrendering to God and by performing desire-less actions, accepting God as the doer.

Hinduism considers the world in which we live as a projection of God and unreal (an illusion). It is unreal not because it does not exist, but because it is unstable, impermanent, unreliable and illusory. It is unreal because it hides the Truth and shows us things that lead to our ignorance (Sanskrit: Avidya or Ajnana). It is unreal because it changes its colours every moment. What is now is not what is next.

In one moment, so many things happen here. Many new souls enter. Many depart also. Friends become enemies and enemies become friends. The sun and the earth change their positions continuously in space and time, while the wind moves, the rivers flow, and the oceans shift their currents. 

The people who live on earth are also very fickle. Their minds are never stable (as opposed to that of ‘idealistic’ mystics). Their thoughts never cease. They seem to live today and disappear tomorrow.

While all this is going on in the whole wide world, at the microscopic level, millions of atoms, cells and molecules in the bodies shift and change their positions or get destroyed. 

The world in which we live gives us an apparent illusion of stability, whereas in truth it is not. It is an illusion to believe that this world is the same always, or that the people we deal with are the same all the time. The world is therefore an illusion, not because it does not exist in the physical sense, but because it is unstable, ever changing, impermanent, unreliable, and most important of all never the same. Ask yourself this question: Are you the same person you were a minute ago? 

The Hindu scriptures say that it would be unwise on our part to centre our lives around such an unstable world, because if you spend your precious life for the sake of impermanent and unreliable things, you are bound to regret in the end your having wasted your life in the pursuit of emptiness. The real world lies beyond our ordinary senses where our existence would be eternal and where things would not change the way they do in this plane.

The Hindu philosophy is very simple, but enormously difficult to pursue. After all, what is illusion? It is something like a mirage, which misleads you into wrong thinking and wrong actions, and eventually into wickedness.  This world precisely does that. It offers you happiness, but leads you into the darkness of suffering. It tempts you with many things and when you run after them, you find them to be unreal and incapable of quenching your thirst for stability, permanence, and peace.

Willie Maartens