28 Elevation to Krsna Consciousness

put into it. Indirectly, the disobedient citizens force
the government to construct the prisonhouse. It is
not done for the pleasure of the government, which
has to spend a great deal of money in constructing
and maintaining it. On the contrary, the government
would be very glad to demolish prisons altogether
provided that there are no disobedient citizens in the
state. In the same way, this material world is created
by the Supreme Lord, but the Supreme Lord does
not will that living entities be put in it. The living
entities themselves make that decision. The residents
of this material world are therefore different from
those who are eternally engaged in the transcendental
pastimes of the Supreme Lord.

The impersonal monists have no information of
full-fledged independent life in the eternal spiritual
realm. According to them, the spiritual realm is
simply void. This is like prisoners thinking that there
is no life outside the prison. Life outside of a prison
is certainly free from prison activities, but is not
devoid of activity. The soul is by nature eternally
active, but the impersonalists try to negate the
activities of the soul in the spiritual realm. Thus they
misunderstand the miseries of prison life to be the
pastimes of the Supreme Lord. This is due to their
poor fund of knowledge.

The Supreme Lord never creates the actions and
reactions of an individual soul. In Bhagavad-gita this
matter is clearly defined in the following way:

na kartrtvam na karmani
lokasya srjati prabhuh
