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of reality to his journalist-adventurers in Highways to a War, the ‘Soldiers Three’, who find
themselves swept across the border between one world and the other.
12.4.1. Maya, the Illusion which is Reality
To understand maya, one must first understand the Brahmanic concept of the Self, which
is basically that underneath all of the layers of masks of personality lies a formless, timeless
substratum which functions as the ‘paramount controller’ and also as the ‘unconcerned
witness’ of all phenomenal activity (Zimmer, 1969, 412). This enigmatic Self is formed of a
particle of Brahman, the changeless divine being who evolved the perishable universe and its
creatures out of his own boundless transcendent essence. Like Brahman, the Self engages in
actions while remaining aloof to processes and consequences. Such concerns belong to the
various masks which envelop, conceal and obscure the Self to make up an individual
personality. Brahman, the supreme creator, maintainer and destroyer of the cosmos is, as the
Lord of Maya, the unconcerned source of ‘all the transfigurations in the sphere of changes’
(Zimmer, 1969, 412-13).
Maya might be described as the medium in which that ultra-cosmic, ‘profoundly hidden,
essential yet forgotten, transcendental Self’ (atman) is transfigured into the phenomenal self,
‘the naively conscious personality which together with its world of names and forms will in
time be dissolved’ (Zimmer, 1969, 11). It ‘denotes the unsubstantial, phenomenal character of
the observed world, and of the mind itself—the conscious and even subconscious
stratifications and powers of the personality’ (Zimmer, 1969, 19).
Formed of the root ma, ‘to prepare, form, build’, (Zimmer, 1969, 339) maya is the
vocabulary of creation. It is the source of all change, and is considered the ‘ubiquitous power
of self-transmutation’ (Zimmer, 1969, 339). As the cosmic creative power, it is manifested in
the goddess who embodies the union of illusion and power, Maya-Sakti, or ‘the power of self-
misrepresentation’ (Zimmer, 1969, 427). In this sense, all creation is misrepresentation, and
even the supreme god Brahman must be considered the ultimate, sublime misrepresentation of
reality. In its denotative meaning of ‘deceit, trick, the display of an illusion, fraud, any act of
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