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Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam
[Canto 2, Ch. 5]
kālaṁ karma sva-bhāvaṁ ca māyeśo māyayā svayā ātman yadṛcchayā prāptaṁ vibubhūṣur upādade
kālam —eternal time;  karma —fate of the living entity;  sva-bhāvam —nature;  ca —also;  māyā —potency;  īśaḥ —the controller;  māyayā —by the energy;  svayā —of His own;  ātman (ātmani) —unto His Self;  yadṛcchayā —independently;  praptam —being merged in;  vibubhūṣuḥ —appearing differently;  upādade —accepted for being created again.
TRANSLATION
The Lord, who is the controller of all energies, thus creates, by His own potency, eternal time, the fate of all living entities, and their particular nature, for which they were created, and He again merges them independently.
PURPORT
The creation of the material world, wherein the conditioned souls are allowed to act subordinately by the Supreme Lord, takes place again and again after being repeatedly annihilated. The material creation is something like a cloud in the unlimited sky. The real sky is the spiritual sky, eternally filled with the rays of the  brahmajyoti , and a portion of this unlimited sky is covered by the  mahat-tattva  cloud of the material creation in which the conditioned souls, who want to lord it against the will of the Lord, are put into play as they desire under the control of the Lord by the agency of His external energy. As the rainy season appears and disappears regularly, similarly the creation takes place and is again annihilated under the control of the Lord, as is confirmed in the  Bhagavad-gītā  (Bg. 8.19). So the creation and annihilation of the material worlds is a regular action of the Lord just to allow the conditioned souls to play as they like and thereby create their own fate of being differently created again in terms of their independent desires at the time of annihilation. The creation, therefore, takes place at a historical date (as we are accustomed to think of everything which has a beginning in our tiny experience). The process of creation and annihilation is called  anādi , or without reference to date regarding the time the creation first took place, because the duration of a partial creation even is 86,400,000 years. The law of creation is,