Maya and Myspace

Is the illusion of Maya a force, a being or is it something we generate?

I was thinking today on the idea that "all we see is illusion". Having studied philosophy you get this idea in Kant's phenomenon vs noumenon, Joseph Campbell you get excessive talk of Maya coming from Hinduist traditions. I am sure many different cultures and places have dealt with the idea that the thing you see isn't exactly what you think it is. And here I guess is my take.

In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, maya is sorcery. it is something employed, a force used usually for "evil" intentions. It is not a state of nature. We are being purposely deceived and we allow ourselved to be decevied. It is a partnership of alientation from the object itself. The point is that it is active and it come from outside of the individual.

For Kant, a thousand years later, maya (my cross conception not his) is the natural state of being. Object obscure themselves from us. We cannot see the object in itself, only the phenomenon. Modern science might back this up with the idea that atoms are invisible, the essence of things, perhaps identical to all things, is obscured by the relationship between the sub-atomic particles.

What is interesting in both of these ideas is that maya only exists in relationships. The source of maya is really the individual observing the reality. But where does this illusion begin?

Next: Datapoints and relationships.