464
Śrīmad Bhāgavatam
[Canto 2, Ch. 9]
ātma-tattvam —the science of God or that of the living entity;  viśuddhi —purification;  artham —goal;  yat —that which;  āha —said;  bhagavān —the Personality of Godhead;  ṛtam —in reality;  brahmaṇe —unto Lord Brahmā;  darśayan —by showing;  rūpam —eternal form;  avyalīka —without any deceptive motive;  vrata —vow;  ādṛtah —worshiped.
TRANSLATION
O King, the Personality of Godhead, being very much pleased with Lord Brahmā because of his nondeceptive penance in bhakti-yoga, presented His eternal and transcendental form before Brahmā. And that is the objective goal for purifying the conditioned soul.
PURPORT
Ātma-tattvam  is the science of both God and the living entity. Both the Supreme Lord and the living entity are known as  ātmā . The Supreme Lord is called  Paramātmā  or  Parambrahma , and the living entity is called the  ātmā  or the  brahma  or the  jīva . Both the  Paramātmā  and the  jīvātmā , being transcendental to the material energy, are called  ātmā . So Śukadeva Gosvāmī explains this verse with the aim of purifying the truth of both the  Paramātmā  and the  jīvātmā . Generally people have many wrong conceptions about both of them. The wrong conception of the  jīvātmā  is to identify the material body with the pure soul, and the wrong conception of  Paramātmā  is to think Him on an equal level with the living entity. But both misconceptions can be removed by one stroke of  bhakti-yoga , just as in the sunlight both the sun and the world and everything within the sunlight are properly seen. In the darkness no one can see the sun, nor himself, nor the world. But in the sunlight one can see the sun, himself and the world around him. Śrīla Śukadeva Gosvāmī therefore says that for purification of both wrong conceptions, the Lord presented His eternal form before Brahmājī, being fully satisfied by Brahmā's nondeceptive vow of discharging  bhakti-yoga . Except for  bhakti-yoga , any method for realization of  ātma-tattva , or the science of  ātmā , will prove deceptive in the long run.
In the  Bhagavad-gītā , the Lord says that only by  bhakti-yoga  can one know Him perfectly, and then one can enter into the science of God. Brahmājī undertook great penance in performing  bhakti-yoga , and thus he was able to see the transcendental form of the Lord. His transcendental form is one hundred percent spiritual, and one can see Him only by