If a mad dog happens to enter your room, you would stand up and shout to drive it away. If, on the other hand, you give it milk and bread, it will linger there and will not go away. Similarly, maya is like a mad dog. Drive it away as soon and as forcibly as you would drive away a rabid dog! Only then will you be saved from maya's clutches!
Continuing, Baba explained:
People say that God created maya, but that is not so. For example, take the hair on the head. The hair is maya and the head is God, the Creator. Although the hair grows on the head, the head does not know how, why and where it comes from. Then how can it be said that the head created hair, or God created maya? But in a way, the very creation of maya itself is dependent on God.
Maya is sheer illusion — the force of imagination. Where there is lust, there is maya. Where there is anger, there is maya. Where there is greed, there is maya. He who renounces maya finds everything! Do not be a slave to maya. Subjugate maya and you will see God in all His perfection.
But it is next to impossible to realize God. One must die to gain this state, not by drowning or committing suicide, but by renouncing maya and freeing oneself from its deluding allurements. And this maya is so tyrannical and powerful that even the best of persons succumb to its lures. The real heroes who eat her up are very rare. So hold tightly to my feet to ease your way or else you will not get even a whiff of Reality and your strenuous efforts to reach the Goal age after age will not bring you any nearer to it.
When someone mentioned doing yoga, Baba remarked:
For you, no yoga and no bhoga [worldly enjoyment]! All at once — quite in the dark and completely unknown to you — you are being taken UP!
What the Sadguru does for the members of his circle is to weaken and "clear away" their intellects and egos gradually, establishing a permanence to their eventual annihilation. He allows the minds of his circle members to remain because the Sadguru's working is continuously going on "behind" their minds, though he keeps them in the dark.
Baba then distinguished between maya and sanskaras: