over the destiny of all beings. God remains the Supreme Master who dominates all beings; spiritual realization consists in understanding this well. We sometimes wonder why the Supreme Lord created this material universe, where the living beings who are retained there must know so much suffering. In truth, God, the Sovereign Person, does not wish to create this material universe simply to inflict suffering on conditioned beings; He creates it only because they want to know the pleasures that this world can offer them.
Nature does not work automatically. It is only because the Lord looks at material energy that it performs all kinds of wonders. Atheist philosophers believe that it is the global material energy that generates the cosmic manifestation, but they are mistaken. Inert matter has no active power, so that it cannot act independently. It is the Lord who infuses his own creative power into the components of matter. Only then, by the will of God, the Supreme Person, does the matter come alive and transform under the effect of various interactions. God is the source of everything that happens in nature. Material nature being inert and lifeless, it cannot be the cause of creation. Krishna, God, shows his mercy by infusing his energy with this inert and inanimate matter. Thus, material nature becomes, by the energy of the Lord, the secondary cause of creation. Krishna is the original cause of the cosmic manifestation. Materialist men therefore make a gross mistake in thinking that matter moves independently, independently.
No one can act without God's approval.
Just like ether, which however penetrates everything, never mixes with anything, the living being, although it is now imprisoned in a material body of which it is the origin, remains distinct from it. We transmigrate from one life to another in bodies that are the product of our illusion, but as a spiritual soul, we have an existence eternally distinct from this material, conditioned existence. At the end of the existence of the body, the spiritual soul continues to exist without changing.
God, the Supreme Person, explains that both material and spiritual energies emanate from Him. Material energy is described as formed by all of the eight distinct elements of the Lord. But, though these eight gross and subtle energies, earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intelligence and false ego - are defined as separate from the Lord, they are not not actually. Just as fire seems to be distinct from wood and air circulating in the nostrils and the mouth seems to be separated from the body, so the Supreme Soul, the Supreme Lord seems to be separated from the embodied being, when He is in fact at both separate and not separate from Him. Because of his karma, the living