Understand

Is the world real, or is it māyā?

The Gita calls nature divine and hard to cross — and also a veil.

One reading

The world is Krishna's lower nature, a real divine energy — all of it strung on him like beads on a thread.

BG 7.4 — Earth, water, fire, air, ether, Mind, and Reason also and Egoism—these are the eightfold division of My nature. read →
BG 7.7 — There is naught whatsoever higher than I, O Dhananjaya. All this is threaded on Me, as rows of pearls on a string. read →
BG 9.4 — By Me all this world is pervaded in My unmanifested aspect; all beings have root in Me, I am not rooted in them. read →

The tension

That same nature is a deluding power that hides the changeless behind the changing; the deluded don't see through it.

BG 7.14 — This divine illusion of Mine, caused by the qualities, is hard to pierce; they who come to Me, they cross over this illusion. read →
BG 7.25 — Nor am I of all discovered, enveloped in My creation-illusion. This deluded world knoweth Me not, the unborn, the imperishable. read →
BG 2.16 — The unreal hath no being; the real never ceaseth to be; the truth about both hath been perceived by the seers of the essence of things. read →

My reading

The Gita's māyā is closer to "a real thing that misleads" than "an unreal thing". Nature genuinely exists as divine energy (7.4–7), but taken as the whole story it obscures what does not change (7.25). The world is not a hallucination to escape; it is a surface to see correctly.