Is Maya illusion?

Maya exists.

Whoever says maya is illusion, I feel like slaughtering those stupids, that repeat mantras mindlessly.

You equate non-existence with Maya, which is wrong.

The moment you cognize, you experience the world. You also experience the experiencer. This coming into being is due to the evolutionary-learning-process of human beings. No one is beyond this, rich and poor; intelligent and the dumb.

One can *break* this learning process, this is what Indian traditions do. The moment one breaks this process, the cognition doesn't enter the picture, unless on demand. Then you will function like a tape recorder. It records all garbage, it doesn't tell you whether it is music or its the word of your lover. Of course, if you want to go to Chennai, you gotta know things, you gotta remember. Call them functional knowledge. One needs that knowledge to survive. Thats all!

Maya is a learning process. Just reading a Shankara, discussing Advaita endlessly doesn't make you enlightened. You gotta break that learning process.. mere philosophizing is useless.

The first step is to keep the baggage minimal. If one gives up everything, one is close to that. Hardly do we give up. We are always about the future. We remember the experiences that caused pain and the ones that caused pleasure. We strive to avoid the former set, reproduce the latter.

In order to survive in the world, you dont need many things. Think about your pullampet citizens. They can live on millets. you can live on millets too, but you don't. You want to maintain some status quo, mimick someone else's status quo. "My sone wants to be an engineer", "I need to build a big house". Thats why you cant satisfy any of the human beings, no matter what you do, except for basic subsistence.

You assume that once you help someone, the latter will help others. That is wrong, because the guy is trying to help himself to maintain/mimick (others) status quo.