What is "maya"?

Well here is an anecdote from Vitvan taken from the lesson "First Crossing" that will describe to you what maya ISN'T:

A while back I had occasion to drive one of our students around looking for a place to live.  She went in and examined one or two places.  Then I drove to another place and the lady went in.  She came out to the car and said, "Oh, to have to deal with this maya of living in a house."  I said, "Gracious alive, and you've been a student for 15 years in this school and call a house that you live in maya?  There is no maya about that house.  That is a pretty dynamic process on several levels.  That is a real event in a context of formative creative forces.  Both creative forces of man and creative forces of nature have gone into the configuration that we label house.  There is nothing mayaistic about it.  That is real, not maya.  And everything that went into it represents energy.  Think of the energy of man that goes into fashioning doors and windows, into the framework and finishing work.  Think of the energy that goes into making locks, the hardware.  That house is a concentrated point of creative energy, and that is just on one level.  Also, it contains the substance itself, on different levels, whether we use the animal product, vegetable product, or mineral product.  I want you to understand the different levels of concentrated, infolded dynamic fire and energy all locked up there, in addition to the energy of man that has gone into fashioning and construction.  What is mayaistic about that?  To me that is a dynamic center of force and power and energy, not an illusion, not maya."  So when she came out to the car and talked about the house being maya she got a lesson on the difference between the objective manifold of values and this world as a configurational world , a dynamic process, a configuration of units of energy.  She got a lesson on how to sharply differentiate between the objective manifold of values and the configurational world.  Do you understand what I am trying to get over to you in this this lesson?  Students in the School of the Natural Order, do not call this dynamic process maya, illusion, images-appearing-substantive, 'physical', 'material'.  There is nothing 'physical', 'material', or illusory about it.  It is real.  It is dynamic.  it's real estate.  You get the connotation now, the real state that we stand on at our present level of development in the configurational world."