The first thing to do is to seek to know the true nature of Krishna, God, the Supreme Person.

There is only one God, Krishna, the Supreme Person.

God Is, since He is the source of all that exists, and the cause of all causes. Without Krishna, God, the Supreme and Sovereign Person, nothing exists. Everything that exists has an origin, and the origin of everything is Krishna. He is the One Absolute without a second.

The Lord has an eternal, conscious, blissful body, and His spiritual energy is characterised by eternity, knowledge and bliss. In His ecstatic aspect He is the source of blissful power, in His eternal aspect He is the cause of all that exists, and in His conscious aspect He embodies supreme knowledge. He is the reservoir of all knowledge, pleasure and eternity.

The entire cosmic manifestation is but a combination of the lower and higher energies of the Lord, and the source of all these energies is Krishna, God, the Supreme Person.

The Lord says: There is really nothing that exists apart from Me, that is what you must clearly understand.

God is the ultimate reality, the only one. There is no other existence except that of Krishna, God, the Supreme Person. Nothing exists but Him and Him alone. He is the only Living Being there is. We are all, indeed, minute fragments of His Divine Person.

Verily, the individual and distinct spiritual souls of God, which each of us is, are spiritual atoms also called spiritual sparks, minute eternal fragments, minute eternal parcels, integral parts of Krishna, God, the Supreme Person.

Lord Chaitanya, the Golden Avatar says: The original nature of the living being is to be the eternal servant of Krishna, for he is the marginal energy and an emanation of the Lord, both identical and distinct from Him.

Plunged into oblivion of Krishna, the being has been seduced by his external energy or material energy since time immemorial. That is why mâyâ, the energy of illusion, an aspect of the external energy, causes him to undergo all kinds of sufferings in this material world.

Evolving within the material nature, the incarnated spiritual being sometimes reaches the higher planets, where he enjoys a prosperous life, and sometimes is plunged into hellish conditions of existence.

If the embodied soul, conditioned by matter, becomes Krishna conscious, through the mercy of holy beings, servants of God, who take it upon themselves to teach the scriptural injunctions, the knowledge of Krishna as He is, and to disseminate divine

knowledge in order to help it, it will be able to escape from the clutches of mâyâ, who will then release his grip.