I suppose it's all academic and my impression or intuition is maya is what the Advaitists say it is, with the power to project and power to veil. Is maya the quantum foam, with virtual particles popping into and out of 'existence' and occasionally experiencing a phase transition resulting in a Big Bang? Would that be maya's power to project? And once the initial transition subsides, cools, attains lower energy levels and splits into multiple forces (gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear strong & weak forces) is that maya's power to veil?

That's my impression of "illusion" and "unreal". So yeah, it's darned real but not just real enough compared to the Absolute.

Concerning First Cause and the Absolute...

I'm particularly fond of the 'absolutely simple' part.

https://strangenotions.com/if-everyt...at-caused-god/

"Accordingly, when they arrive at God via a First Cause argument, there is no inconsistency, no sudden abandonment of the very premise that got the argument going. Rather, the argument is that the only way to terminate a regress of actualizers of potentials is by reference to something which is pure actuality, devoid of potentiality, and thus without anything that needs to be, or even could be, actualized; or it is that a regress of causes of composed things can be terminated only by something which is absolutely simple or non-composite, and thus without any parts whose combination needs to be, or indeed could have been, caused by anything; or that the only way to terminate a regress of things that cause other things to participate in being is by reference to that which just is being itself rather than something which merely has or participates in being, and thus something which neither needs, nor could have had, a cause of its own being; or that the only way to terminate a regress of causes of contingent things is by reference to something absolutely necessary, which by virtue of its absolute necessity need not have, and could not have, had something impart existence to it; and so forth."