The World of Māyā
Seeing the real through the illusion
Sometimes I imagine I’m already dead. But before I disappear completely, I revive one last time and run away to my mother.
The Indian term for illusion is “Māyā”, which comes from the verbal root “mã” meaning — to form, to create, or to display. Māyā refers both to the power that creates the illusion and the illusion(the false display) itself. For example, the art of a magician is māyā; so too the illusions he creates.
Māyā is not a bad thing in itself, but it depends on how we perceive it. Let’s say we have somewhere the perfect non-dual world: the Garden of Eden, the transcendent mystery. Now, in order to experience that perfect world, we need māyā. Māyā is the power that reflects transcendence into our world.
As finite beings with a low consciousness, we were never programmed to experience non-duality. So māyā splits the transcendent world into the world of things: the world of duality and multiplicity.
Māyā is experienced as fascination, charm; specifically, feminine charm. And to this point, there is a Buddhist saying:
“Of all the forms of māyā, that of woman is supreme.”
Three Powers of Māyā
As a cosmogenic principle — and also as a feminine, personal principle, māyā is said to possess three powers:
- A veiling power that hides or conceals the real world, the inward essential characters of things. It veils the Garden of Eden from our sight. This is what is called the māyā veil. You don’t see the white color but only its components. The prism of māyā breaks the white light into its components and we can only see those components. But that doesn’t mean the white color is not there anymore. It is there. It has always been there. It’s only we and our ignorance, who are blind to it. This prism is the Goddess. With the veiling power, the obscuring power, she stops the white light from getting through. You might ask why would she do it? It’s because as finite beings, it’s unfathomable for us to gaze into the infinite.
- The second is the projecting power which sends forth illusory impressions and ideas. For example, in dark, we might mistake a rope for a snake and experience fright. In ignorance (the Veiling Power), having concealed the real, we fall prey to the projecting power of māyā. Amid these projections, we create all kinds of appearances to satisfy ourselves, whether it be of gods or of the cosmos. Lost in this projecting power of māyā, we create illusions for ourselves and live them as if our life depends on them. But with the projecting power, the forms of the world come through. The prism is the veil, but it is also the projector. It veils the white light, but it also projects its components. Without the projecting power, we would have lived in a blind world.
- The final power of māyā is its revealing power. The first two powers, concealing and projecting, can be compared to those properties of a prism by which sunlight is transformed into the colors of the rainbow. Arrange these seven colors on a disk, spin it, and they will be seen as white. So too, when we view the world in a certain way, māyā reveals to us the very things it veils.
This reveling power of māyā can be experienced through art, scripture, ritual, and meditation. These connect us directly with the transcendent and bypasses all the veils and projections of māyā. We bath in its revealing power. We finally see the white light. We see the world as it is and we step for the second time into the Garden of Eden and meet our mother, the goddess, in her true form.
