The Bhagavad Gita by Eknath Easwaran

╭ introduction
by a tiger. His pulse will race, his fists will clench, his forehead
will be wet with the dew of fear – all just as if the attack
were real. He will be able to describe the look of his tiger, the
way he smelled, the sound of his roar. For him the tiger is
real, and in a sense he is not wrong: the evidence he has is
not qualitatively different from the kind of evidence we trust
when we are awake. People have even died from the physiological
effects of a potent dream. Only when we wake up
can we realize that our dream-sensations, though real to our
nervous system, are a lower level of reality than the waking
state.
The Upanishads delineate three ordinary states of consciousness:
waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. Each is
real, but each has a higher order of reality. For beyond these
three, the Upanishads say, is the unitive state, called simply
“the fourth”: turiya . Entering this state is similar to waking up
out of dream sleep: the individual passes from a lower level of
reality to a higher one.
The sages called the dream of waking life – the dream of
separate, merely physical existence – by a suggestive name,
maya . In general use the word meant a kind of magic, the
power of a god or sorcerer to make a thing appear to be something
else. In the Gita, maya becomes the creative power of the
Godhead, the primal creative energy that makes unity appear
as the world of innumerable separate things with “name and
form.”
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