maya

Hello and welcome to Word of the Week! I’m your host, Liz. This podcast is dedicated to words and phrases that are untranslatable into English. Let’s discover the nuance of the world’s languages, shall we?

This week’s word is maya. A Sanskrit word meaning ‘the mistaken belief that a symbol is the same as the reality it represents’. Because Sanskrit and English are part of the same language family, the word maya is related to the word measure. The root of ma means to lay out, like the plan of a building. It can be defined as ‘the creation of forms’.

Here’s where our episode today wades into the world of semantics, theology, and philosophy. Hinduism maintains a goal of achieving liberation from the bonds of illusion. This word maya can be mistaken for being a negative label denoting the illusions that cause suffering. But the deeper meaning is existence itself. Maya is related to not only the endless play of forms and the void they sprang from, but to the dangerous attachments people tend to develop in relation to their conceptual maps of the world. 

It gets even more meta. The founder of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski, called this tendency to believe that your personal measurements are the things being measured. Where the map becomes the territory, which is an illusion. Reality, by its nature, is never what it seems, simply because it is unknowable in full. 

A map is not the territory it describes or represents. It is just a map. A man-made map. Full of man-made measurements. We cannot lose sight of the void when we try to perceive the world as a form. However, when we see the world as the void, we lose attachment to the world of forms. Forms are you and me and forests and oceans and geckos and crows. The void is the ever-expanding unknowable universe, ripe with mystery and intangibles. Perhaps the next time you see someone in despair because of a breakup or a termination or even the state of the world, you can remind them of maya.

Here’s to this week… May you all endeavor to adopt this Word of the Week and see the world a little bit differently. I’ll be back next week with a new word. Thank you for listening!