Text 24] The Cause of All Causes 251
PURPORT

Materialistic ego, or the sense of identification with matter, is grossly
self-centered, devoid of clear knowledge of the existence of God. And this
self-centered egoism of the materialistic living entities is the cause of their
being conditioned by the other paraphernalia and continuing their bondage
of material existence. In the Bhagavad-gita this self-centered egoism is very
nicely explained in the Seventh Chapter (verses 24-27). The self-centered
impersonalist, without clear conception of the Personality of Godhead,
concludes in his own way that the Personality of Godhead takes a material
shape from His original impersonal spiritual existence for a particular
mission. And this misleading conception of the Supreme Lord by the self-
centered impersonalist continues, even though he is seen to be very inter-
ested in the Vedic literatures such as the Brahma-sittras and other highly
intellectual sources of knowledge. This ignorance of the personal feature
of the Lord is due simply to ignorance of the mixture of different modes.
The impersonalist thus cannot conceive of the Lord’s eternal spiritual
form of eternal knowledge, bliss and existence. The reason is that the
Lord reserves the right of not exposing Himself to the nondevotee who,
even after a thorough study of literature like the Bhagavad-gitd, remains
an impersonalist simply by obstinacy. This obstinacy is due to the action
of yogamay4, a personal energy of the Lord that acts like an aide-de-camp
by covering the vision of the obstinate impersonalist. Such a bewildered
human being is described as mitdha, or grossly ignorant, because he is
unable to understand the transcendental form of the Lord as being unborn
and unchangeable. If the Lord takes a form or material shape from His
original impersonal feature, then it means that He is born and changeable
from impersonal to personal. But He is not changeable. Nor does He ever
take a new birth like a conditioned soul. The conditioned soul may take a
form birth after birth due to his conditional existence in matter, but the
self-centered impersonalists also, by their gross ignorance, accept the Lord
as one of them because of self-centered egoism, even after so-called ad-
vancement of knowledge in the Vedanta. The Lord, being situated in the
heart of every individual living entity, knows very well the tendency of
such conditioned souls in terms of past, present and future, but the be-
wildered conditioned soul hardly can know Him in His eternal form. By
the will of the Lord, therefore, the impersonalist, even after knowing the
Brahman and Paramatma features of the Lord, remains ignorant of His
eternal personal feature as ever-existent Narayana, transcendental to all
material creation.
