Mantra Five
29
PURPORT
Here is an explanation of the Supreme Lord's transcendental activities by His inconceivable potencies. There are two sets of contradictory words mentioned herein to prove the inconceivable potency of the Lord. He walks, and He does not walk. These two phrases are contradictory. If someone can walk then it is improper to say that he cannot walk. These contradictions show the inconceivable power of God. With our limited fund of knowledge we cannot accommodate such things, and therefore the Lord is conceived in terms of our limited powers of understanding. The impersonalist philosophers of the  māyā-vāda  school accept only the impersonalist part of the Lord's activities, and refute His Personal feature. The  Bhāgavata  school, however, accepts the Lord in both ways, i.e., as Personal and impersonal. And the  Bhāgavatas  also accept His inconceivable potencies. Without inconceivable potency there is no meaning to the words  Supreme Lord .
We should not take it for granted that because we cannot see God before our eyes there is therefore no personal existence of the Lord. To refute this sort of argument,  Śrī Īśopaniṣad  warns us that the Lord is far away from us, but He is very near to us also. The Abode of the Lord is beyond the material sky. We have no means to measure even the material sky. If just the material sky is so far, far away from us, then what of the spiritual sky, which is beyond the material sky altogether? That the spiritual sky is situated far, far away from the material world is further confirmed in the  Bhagavad-gītā . But, in spite of the Lord's being so far away, He can at once, within less than a second, descend before us with a speed more powerful than the mind or the air. He can walk so quickly that no one can surpass Him. This fact has already been described in the previous verse.
When the Personality of Godhead thus comes before us, however, we neglect Him. This negligence on the part of the foolish people is condemned by the Lord in the  Bhagavad-