Somewhere in this boundless space, the cloud of material creation forms, the aggregate of the 24 material elements that constitute material energy, where the conditioned souls who seek to impose their will against that of God are placed, so that they may give free rein to their aspirations under the tutelage of the external energy, or material energy of the Lord.

Just as the rainy season appears and disappears every year at regular intervals, so it is with creation, which is successively manifested and then annihilated by the sole will of Krishna.

In reality, this cycle of creation and annihilation of the material world is willed by Lord Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, to allow the souls conditioned by matter to act as they please and thus create their own destiny. Indeed, it is their own respective desires at the time of destruction that determine the conditions in which they will reappear.

All creation, material and spiritual, is a manifestation of the Lord's energy, just as light and heat are the energies of fire. The Lord exists in His impersonal aspect through the deployment of His energies, and thus sustains all of creation. However, as the All-Perfect, He retains a distinct identity, separate from creation, and no one should wrongly conclude that because of His unlimited impersonal manifestations, the personal aspect of God does not exist.

These impersonal deployments are all manifestations of His energy. The Lord thus forever retains His personal aspect, despite the countless and unlimited manifestations of His impersonal energies.

The human intellect will find it very difficult to comprehend that the entire creation rests on the simple emanation of His energy. But the Lord makes us understand that although immeasurable space contains air and all atoms, and serves as a kind of support for all created things, it nevertheless exists independently of all things and remains immutable.

Similarly, Krishna, the Supreme Lord, although sustaining all things by the emanation of His energy, remains distinct and complete in Himself.

At the moment of annihilation, the entire creation merges into the spiritual body of Narayana, Krishna's plenary emanation. It is also from him that it will manifest again, and with it, intact, the destiny and nature specific to each soul.

The individual souls, distinct from God, are minute fragments, integral parts of the person of Krishna, and as such, they are qualitatively one with Him. But they are indeed distinguished from Him, because they can actively and subjectively succumb to the attraction of material creation.