In the Upanishadic vision, māyā names the mystery by which a single, non-dual reality—Brahman, identical with the innermost Self (Ātman)—appears as a world of multiplicity, change, and limitation. In the older texts the term can carry the sense of “power” or “wonder-working capacity,” especially the creative power of the divine, and this gradually flowers into the more explicit teaching that the world as ordinarily experienced is a misperception of Brahman. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad, for example, speaks of the Great Lord as the possessor of māyā and of nature as māyā, suggesting a cosmic principle that allows the One to appear as many. Thus māyā is not sheer non-existence but a dependent, provisional reality—an appearance that borrows its seeming solidity from Brahman, much as a mirage borrows its semblance of water from heat and light.

This power operates in human experience as ignorance (avidyā) of the true Self. The Upanishads repeatedly describe human beings as moving in darkness while imagining themselves wise, bound to the cycle of birth and death because they mistake the impermanent for the eternal. Māyā makes the changing—body, mind, possessions, roles—seem ultimately real, while the unchanging Self seems hidden or even absent. Through this misidentification arise the sense of doership and enjoyership, attachment and aversion, and the whole web of desire, fear, and suffering that characterizes saṃsāra. In this way, māyā functions both as a veil that conceals Brahman and as the principle that projects names and forms, creating the appearance of separate individuals and objects.

The Upanishads illuminate this situation through a rich tapestry of images and analogies. Waking life is likened to a dream, where experiences seem real to the dreamer until a higher waking reveals their status as mere appearances in consciousness. The many selves are compared to reflections or to space seemingly divided by pots: they appear separate and limited, yet are never truly other than the one consciousness or undivided space. Such images help clarify that māyā does not create a second, independent reality but rather a misreading of the one reality, in which unity is overlooked and only multiplicity is seen.

The role of spiritual practice, as these texts present it, is not to destroy a second world but to see through a misunderstanding. Knowledge (jñāna, vidyā) is repeatedly praised as the means by which the “knots of the heart” are cut and all doubts are resolved. Through attentive hearing of the teaching, deep reflection, and sustained contemplation, the seeker learns to discriminate between the real—the Self that does not come and go—and the unreal, all that is subject to change. When Brahman-Ātman is directly realized in this way, māyā’s spell is broken: the world may still appear, but it is known as an appearance in the Self rather than as something other than it, and the underlying unity that māyā once obscured stands revealed.