What is Maya ?

Every one of us in our life might have come across with the word Maya at least sometime. What it is actually, what does it imply, all this starved us a lot and we sometime spend our entire life with just wondering here and there in search of the exact answer. Maya is a concept in Hinduism which implies to the illusion in Vedic philosophy most specific to the Advait ( Non Dualist ).

According to Vedic scriptures, Almighty God create the universe with his Maya including human beings and make human believe in what is not real and turns out to be illusion. For God in his absolute form, the only way he can appear as separate, is by the virtue of Maya or illusion. However God has empowered human with wisdom so that we can let ourselves free from this illusion. But unfortunately most of us starve towards the illusion and never give a thought towards the ultimate goal , self realization.

The concept of Maya is not only limited to Vedic scriptures but also several Western people got influenced with the concept. One of them is famous poet Ralph Emerson, who got mesmerized with the concept and quoted the Vedic philosophy in many of his journals and literature. In one of his papers he quoted from Veda “The world is born of Maya”.

The path for freeing ourselves from the Maya is explained in details in Vedic scriptures. Actually this is the essence of the spiritual journey irrespective of the religion, region, caste and cult. There are several techniques explained in Sanatan scriptures including prayers, meditation, non attachment and others. We can follow any of the them to let ourselves free from Maya as per one’s choice.

Giving and non attachment is among the simplest techniques one can practice in daily life doing simultaneously with what we do. In modern days we focus on accumulation of the physical materials and never understand the fact that this is going to lead us no where, except to the world of in-satisfaction, sorrow, misery and darkness. On the other hand shifting our focus to the non attachment is the one that can lead us to the world of joy, bliss and self realization.

Though this will not happen in a day or two but at least one can try to shift his focus from accumulation to the non attachment ( Giving ) and you can feel the difference with the time.