Form and Formlessness / Evolution and Involution
God is not a creator; the mind does that.  It will take an adept inspection of consciousness, like on the level of Sherlock Holmes, to get the mind to let go of form.  We need the foundation of formlessness.

We have to transcend a conventional superstition in this culture.  We have to come to grips with formlessness, with meditation and samadhi, and realize it in this life.  We must plumb the depths.  As Kubir sings: "Dive deep O mind, dive deep into the ocean of God's beauty.  If you descend to the uttermost depths, there you will find the gem of Love."

[Using the analogy of a pot full of water that is reflecting the sun:] Maya leads you to Brahman (by touching the reflected sun and finding it is unreal), as in lower truth to higher Truth.  But if you take maya as all there is, you will never find Truth -- that's the rub!

Sakshi, the Witness:  Here you see the difference between Self and phenomena.  Before practice and insight, you saw yourself as one thing and counted yourself as part of phenomena.  Now, maintain Sakshi-bhutam in meditation.  Do not allow yourself to go blank or go to sleep.  Stay present until the Kutastha comes forward. (Kutastha is the undifferentiated presence in and as the intelligence of all beings).

When one says "Maya" it infers that the formless Reality got covered.  People take form to be real, but scientists, even unknowingly, have proved otherwise.  It is all swirling particles in different configurations.  Our eyes are tuned to solidity.  But you will transcend the gross particle in dream, and dissolve the subtle particle in deep sleep.

Shut down the senses and make the world go away.  We are marvelous meditators -- in dream and deep sleep -- but we don't know we are doing it.  If we could freeze-frame what the mind does when it shifts from one realm to another, and study it frame by frame, as in a movie, we would be amazed at what our consciousness accomplishes all the time.  With that clue we could deconstruct the universe and cut time away.  This unfortunate decentralization away from our true Self would then become a thing of the past - the past being a mere memory.  So go ahead: "crush the stars to atoms and unhinge the universe!"

All you need to make the prison walls go away is to meditate them away.  Sri Aurobindo did that when he was in prison, and also had a vision of Sri Krishna.

It is the natural power of form to cover formlessness - called avarana-shakti.  Scum simply forms and covers a pond; it does not plan to.  So do not attribute sentiency to insentient things, like a devil.  And You are the only sentient principle in this universe.

Your core is Sentient, exquisite Sentience, that can drive you into ecstasy and to formlessness.

The rishis left footfalls in the ethers.  After the "stars are crushed to atoms and the universe unhinged" -- there, when the atomic particle is no more -- there is a particle of a subtle kind where the ancestors are, and further (more subtle), where the munis are, and further where the gods are, to a particle so fine that only the Seers can detect and abide in (i.e. where beings like the Dalai Lama go so they can return).  All of this is within us.  In formless meditation we go nowhere, but knowing the underlying particle is the gateway to coursing through the bhuvanas (subtle worlds). 

Thought in terms of particles is a great way to connect science, theology, and cosmology.  There's always a way to integrate these ways of seeing.

Question:  How do we get rid of our death grip on atomic reality? 
Babaji:  By seeing that it is not reality at all, but relativity.  This is done in practice little by little, using "nitya-anitya vastu viveka" or "brahman satya, jagad mithya." (discrimination between the eternal and the noneternal, and Brahman is Real/True, the world is false.)

When Vedantists talk about emptiness, we mean that the objects point us to Brahman, not that they are illusory.  In terms of evolution, this means that the Big Bang, down to the final-most outward waves of matter, lead us to involution [like dropping a pebble in the middle of a pond and the waves returning after reaching the shore].  It all came out of you, all the worlds, and you have to mentally enact the process of involution.  And purify the mind before attempting this....

When we let go of the atomic aspect of an object, the revelatory aspect appears.  All aspects have a mix of rajas (distorting), tamas (concealing), and sattva (revelation).  These secrets are covered by heavy layers of maya shakti.  But one needs only change one's perspective and the maya shakti removes herself.

We're projecting the world all the time -- that's the waking state. Then we're drawing it back within us -- that's the dream state.  When all is withdrawn, that is deep sleep.  When the nescience that covers deep sleep is penetrated, that's samadhi.