In this post, we give our understanding of an aspect of the Advaita Vedanta, i.e., of understanding the force of Maya. We clarify that our understanding is from intuition, and not study. We take the Neti-Neti approach to understand the force of Maya and describe a state that is without that force, so that we can understand it instead of experience it. Maya is defined as:
In the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, māyā, "appearance", is "the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real".
We believe that Maya is the force that makes us experience Time, i.e., if we don't experience Time in addition to any inputs from other senses, we don't experience Maya. We believe that Advaita Vedanta understands the world with only the mind, and not experience, so in that regard, we propose the following experiment in order to understand Maya. We understand it using our interpretation of the Neti-Neti approach, which is also a part of Advaita Vedanta:
We assume the mind to be a sense like the other senses. Now, we assume a comfortable meditative pose with minimum input to all five senses. We now have only the thoughts in our mind, which can have any sort of order, thus related with time, i.e., we can say thought A came before B. Now, if we are careful enough, we can lose all the thoughts; thus, there is no sense of Time. This is the state where the mind is without any experience of the phenomenal world. It's easy to experience this intermittently but very difficult to experience it continuously. And this is the state that Advaita Vedanta describes as free of Maya.
When all one wants to do is understand this cosmic force, and not experience it, they go in a state of samadhi.