Māyā is existence: both the world of which we are aware, and ourselves who are contained in the growing and dissolving environment, growing and dissolving in our turn. At the same time, Māyā is the supreme power that generates and animates the display: the dynamic aspect of the universal Substance. Thus it is at once, effect (the cosmic flux), and cause (the creative Power). In the latter regard it is known as Shakti, “Cosmic Energy”…..

Having mothered the Universe and the individual (macro- and microcosm) as correlative manifestations of the Divine, Māyā then immediately muffles consciousness within the wrappings of her perishable production. The ego is entrapped in a web, a queer cocoon. “All this around me,” and “my own existence”– experience without and experience within– are the warp and woof of the subtle fabric. Enthralled by ourselves and the effects of our environment, regarding the bafflements of Māyā as utterly real, we endure an endless ordeal of blandishment, desire and death; whereas, from a standpoint just beyond our ken Māyā – the world, the life, the ego, to which we cling– is as fugitive and evanescent as cloud and mist [6]……

• In S. Radhakrishnan’s [7] thought māyā has great preponderance. In the Introduction to his Principal Upanishads he says :-

The actual fabric of the world, with its loves and hates, with its wars and battles, with its jealousies and competitions as well as its unasked helpfulness, sustained intellectual effort, intense moral struggle seems to be no more than an unsubstantive dream, a phantasmagoria dancing on the fabric of pure being… Indifference to the world is not, however, the main features of spiritual consciousness…The withdrawal from the world is not the conclusive end of the spiritual quest, There is a return to the world accompanied by a persistent refusal to take the world as it confronts us as final…

In the Maitrī Upanishad, the Absolute is compared to a spark, which, made to revolve, creates apparently a fiery circle,….The Aitareya Upanishad asserts that the universe is founded in consciousness and guided by it, it assumes the reality of the universe and not merely its apparent existence. To seek the one is not to deny the many…. māyā in this view states the fact that Brahman without losing his integrity is the basis of the world. Questions of temporal beginning and growth are subordinate to this relation of ground and consequent. The world does not carry its own meaning. To regard it as final and ultimate is an act of ignorance…In the Chāndogya Upanishad (III.14), Brahman is defined as tajjalān as that (tat) which gives rise to (ja), absorbs (li) and sustains (an) the world. The Brhad-āranyaka Upanishad (V.5.1) argues that satyam consists of three syllables, sa , ti , yam , the first and the last being real and the second unreal, madhyato anrtam. The fleeting is enclosed on both sides by an eternity which is real….

            The different metaphors are used to indicate how the universe rises from its central root, how the emanation takes place with the Brahman remains ever-complete, undiminished. ’As a spider sends forth and draws in (its thread), as herbs grow on the earth, as the hair (grows) on the head and the body of a living person, so from the Imperishable arises the universe. Again, ‘As from a blazing fire sparks of like form issue forth by the thousands even so, many kinds of beings issue forth from the Immutable and they return thither too.’ The many are parts of the Brahman even as the waves are parts of the sea…

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