Seeing Through Maya

Maya is the most honest con artist you’ll ever meet. She doesn’t even hide. She just makes you not want to see.

The Gita’s concept of Maya isn’t some mystical force floating in the ether. It’s the filter through which you see everything — the assumptions you never question, the social norms you follow without thinking, the stories about success and failure and worth that were installed in you before you could evaluate them.

Maya is believing that your net worth reflects your self-worth. Maya is the dopamine hit from a notification that makes you feel connected while you sit alone. Maya is the promotion that was supposed to make you happy and didn’t.

Krishna doesn’t sugarcoat it: this illusion is duratyaya — extremely hard to overcome. That’s not discouraging, it’s realistic. If it were easy, everyone would see through it. The fact that most people don’t tells you something about how powerful the illusion is.

But here’s the escape hatch: surrender. Not surrender as defeat. Surrender as letting go of the need to control the narrative. Stop insisting that the world is what you want it to be and start seeing it as it is. That takes courage. It means admitting that some of your deepest beliefs about life might be wrong.

The first step to seeing through Maya isn’t some grand spiritual practice. It’s a simple, terrifying question: What if what I believe about this is not true?

Reflect

What is one belief you hold about success, happiness, or self-worth that you’ve never seriously questioned? What would happen if you did?