The word “Maya” is common in yogic philosophy. Though often translated as illusion, Maya is also the agency that brings about illusion.

The Bhagavad-gita (07.14) refers to Maya as an agency when declaring it to be Krishna’s energy. It is energy in the sense that it executes the supreme energetic person’s will. Its purpose is not to keep us in illusion, but to teach us the futility of the illusion of living separate from Krishna. Once this futility sinks in, we re-position ourselves as his loving servants, for that is our constitutional position as his eternal parts.

The illusions we face during our life-journey serve a positive educational purpose. They are like the wrong options in a multiple-choice test. The presence of such options impels students to internalize their lessons, thereby becoming intelligent enough to choose the right option.

As long as we equate Maya with just illusion, we tend to underestimate the power of those illusions and overestimate the power of our intelligence to see through them. But human intelligence pitted against the divine illusory energy is eminently a battle of unequals – we will, sooner or later, end up deluded. The verse conveys this mismatch by deeming Maya formidable, even insurmountable.

When we see Maya as Krishna’s illusory energy, we realize the necessity, indeed the indispensability, of internalizing the lesson that we can become safe only by absorbing ourselves in Krishna’s loving service.

Of course, we can and should use our intelligence for understanding the nature of illusion. But this understanding is essentially a matter of the heart, not the head – it centers on redirecting our heart’s love from the world towards Krishna by voluntary surrender to him, as the verse recommends. Only by such surrender can we go beyond the illusory energy’s illusions.

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