From Back to Godhead
In the Bhagavad-gita (7.14) Lord Krishna refers to maya, the deluding material energy, as mama maya: “My maya.” We Vaishnavas accept His word on this, with profound philosophical implications.
The chief philosophical opponents of Vaishnavas are the Mayavadis, or impersonalists, who posit ultimate reality as one homogeneous impersonal energy, with no second thing: All the unique entities we perceive, whether things or living beings, are merely mirages. Variety and individual
When I first came in contact with Srila Prabhupada’s Bhagavad-gita As It Is, I was excited about my discovery. I’d been searching for answers to life’s great questions, and after only a short time in the company of the philosophy of the Gita, I had to concur with Henry David Thoreau, who called it “stupendous” and said that compared to the Gita, “our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.”
When I shared my enthusiasm for the Bhagavad-gita with my coworkers, a young woman in the
Vilasini checks my heartbeat, temperature, and blood pressure, pokes my arm with a syringe, and then makes her incision. Fortunately, my six-year-old granddaughter’s plastic scalpel couldn’t cut anything tougher than cream cheese, so my post-op recovery is swift. Vilasini’s imitation doctoring is harmless, but when inept adults imitate well-trained practitioners in professions that require knowledge and skill, people get hurt. Medicine and law enforcement come to mind. We don’t want gunslingers
