It chiefly implied a mysterious will-power, whereby Brahman wills, and as maya, form is realized. Professor Shastri has shown, in his scholarly examination of the Doctrine of Maya,1 that the germs of the doctrine already existed in the later stage of Vedic civilization and that, in the course of its long evolutionary history, the word maya itself, in different grammatical forms, has connoted various but fundamentally interrelated concepts. Primitively, maya denoted a form of intelligence, energy, power (shakti), and deception. Ultimate Truth is illusorily ever associated with Error but, like an alchemist of things spiritual, the master of yoga separates the dross, which is Ignorance, from the gold, which is Right Knowledge. Thus, by dominating Nature, he is liberated from enslavement to Appearances. It is by yoga alone that the Veil can be rent asunder and man led to self-knowledge and self-conquest, whereby Illusion is transcended. Maya is the Magic Veil, ever worn by Nature, the Great Mother Isis, which veils Reality. Colour and sound, and all things seen by the eyes or perceived by the sensory organs, as well as space and dimension, are equally fallacious phenomena. Though men of science classify and give fanciful Latin and Greek names to the various forms of matter, organic and inorganic, matter itself has no true existence. The objects of our senses, our bodily apparatus, our mental cognitions, inferences, generalizations, and deductions are but phantasmagoria. The Doctrine of Maya asserts that the whole world and cosmic creation, subjective and objective, is illusory, and that mind is the sole reality.
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