Baba said no doubt that Maya is a covering over Chaitanya, but!

In this connection one may note the Maya theory that has been referred to in Srimad Bhagavata and in Baba’s teaching. In Baba’s teaching. the word ‘Maya’ is clearly indicative of darkness. That is, what binds one to darkness is Maya.

It has Aavarana and Veekshepa; the Aavarana portion of it covers up our consciousness and knowledge and Veekshepa creates fictions over that Aavarana.

For example a person who is a cooly dreams that he is a king, forgets his coolyship and assumes kingship, and the whole thing is a miserable fiction. Therefore, Maya does exist and is a thing to be avoided.

But Maya has another sense, namely, that it is the creative power of God. Even in this sense it creates fictions and makes the world run on the basis of those fictions.

But the conclusion drawn and acted upon by some people that everything in this phenomenal world is fiction is not to be accepted as its logical conclusion.

Baba said no doubt that Maya is a covering over Chaitanya, but he did not follow it to the logical conclusion that everything that is seen is merely a fiction and therefore to be disregarded. As long as we are in this phenomenal world with its rules and principles, we have to follow it.

Therefore Baba gave many directions to his pupils and never treated his relations to pupils and to others as mere fictions

He was a realist quite as much as any other that we have seen, and he asked people to stick to truth, the truth understood in the phenomenal sense and not in he sense of Advaitic philosophy, that is, a reality which is not sensed, but is merely conceived of in philosophy, as beyond all time and place.