Maya (religion)

Maya (Sanskrit: f., माया māyā "illusion, sorcery"; literally the great non-being, from mahat "great", a "not, negation" and ya "to be") is an Indian goddess who represents in Hinduism several ideas. She is a creative energy (Prakriti), a status of mental delusion and a personified deity. The goddess is also called Mahamaya ("great Maya") and is also considered a form of Devi (Sanskrit: देवी "goddess"). In an abstracted form, Maya also plays a major role in Indian philosophy, especially in Vedanta.

From a spiritual-scientific point of view, maya is the great deception that arises from the fact that, on the one hand, the veil of the sensual world obscures the view of its spiritual background.

„Not the world as such, which affects our senses, which we grasp with our intellect, is a maya; this world is true reality in its innermost being. But the way man looks at it, the way it appears to man, that makes the world a maya, that makes it a great deception. And when, through our inner soul work, we come to find the deeper foundations of what our senses show us, of what our intellect tells us, then we will soon see how the outer world can be understood as a deception. For then it appears to us in its true light, it appears to us in truth, if we know how to supplement it everywhere, to penetrate it with that which must be hidden from us in comparison with the first contemplation we turn to the world.“ (Lit.:GA 161, p. 65f)

On the other hand, our soul life covers the spiritual world inwardly as a second veil.

„We have a twofold maya: the outer maya of the sense world and the inner maya of the soul life.“ (Lit.:GA 113, p. 66f)

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Der Orient im Lichte des Okzidents, GA 113 (1982) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
• Rudolf Steiner: Wege der geistigen Erkenntnis und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung, GA 161 (1999) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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