Text 34]
Answers by Citing the Lord's Version
513
its interactions of different energies, its deterioration and its disappearance—all has its basic relation with the existence of the Personality of Godhead. And as such, whenever there is forgetfulness of this prime relation with the Lord, and things are accepted as real without being related with the Lord, that conception is called the product of the illusory energy of the Lord. Because nothing can exist without the Lord, it should be known that the illusory energy is also an energy of the Lord. The right conclusion of dovetailing everything in relationship with the Lord is called  yoga-māyā , or the energy of union, and the wrong conception of detaching a thing from its relationship with the Lord is called  daivi māyā , or  mahā-māyā , of the Lord. Both the  māyās  also have connection with the Lord because nothing can exist without being related with Him. As such, the wrong conception of detaching relationships from the Lord is not false but illusory.
Misconceiving one thing for another thing is called illusion. The example of accepting the rope as a snake is illusion, but it is not false. The rope, as it exists in the front of the illusioned person, is not at all false, but the acceptance is illusory. Therefore the wrong conception of accepting this material manifestation as being divorced from the energy of the Lord is illusion, but it is not false. And this illusory conception is called the reflection of the reality in the darkness of ignorance. Anything that appears as apparently not being “produced out of My energy” is called  māyā . The conception that the living entity is formless or that the Supreme Lord is formless is also illusion. In the  Bhagavad-gītā  (Bg. 2.12) it is said by the Lord in the midst of the battlefield that the warriors who were standing in front of Arjuna, Arjuna himself, and even the Lord were all existing before, they were existing on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra, and they would all continue to be individual personalities in the future also, even after the annihilation of the present body and even after being liberated from the bondage of material existence. In all circumstances, the Lord and the living entities are individual personalities, and the personal features of both the Lord and living beings are never abolished; only the influence of the illusory energy, the reflection of light in the darkness, can, by the mercy of the Lord, be removed. In the material world, the light of the sun is also not independent, nor is that of the moon. The real source of light is the  brahmajyoti , which diffuses light from the transcendental body of the Lord, and the same light is reflected in varieties of light: the light of the sun, the light of the moon, the light of the fire, or the light of electricity. So the identity of self as being unconnected with the Supreme Self, the Lord, is also illusion, and the false claim that “ I am the Supreme ”