MAYA : THE DIVINE ENERGY OF THE SUPREME in English

 
Author - Since I am an Indian, the word maya was not new to me when I joined ISKCON. I may have been familiar with the word, but I had a very limited understanding of what maya actually is. I knew that material life is maya, that family attachment is mdyd. This concept is very common, even among people in general. When I joined ISKCON, I started to hear this word maya more frequently. At that time, the devotee who was my supervisor would use this word quite often. If I did anything he didn’t like, he would say, "This is mayd, prabhu! You are in maya, prabhu!" Whenever | didn’t get up for mangala-drati, he would say, "You are in maya, prabhu." Whenever I did not want to go out for book distribution, he would say, "You are simply in maya, prabhu." I used to hear the word maya so many times throughout the day. It is quite possible that we heard the word mayd more often than the word Krsna. In those days my concept of maya was different than it is now. That concept was not incorrect, but it was very limited. Now, after having read and studied Srila Prabhupada’s books thoroughly, I have come to know so much more about maya and about its manifold aspects. Much of what I have learned about maya will be described in this book. Maya is a word that has many different meanings. For example, the verse of the Bhagavad-gita that ends sambhavadmy dtma-mayayda (Bg. 4.6) has been explained by our dcaryas in a variety of ways, often giving a variety of definitions for the word mayd. Those explanations and definitions will be discussed in this book in a separate chapter. Despite those varied definitions, in this book we will use the word maya mainly in connection to the energy of Lord Sri Krsna. The Lord’s unlimited energies fall primarily into three different categories: the internal potency, the external potency, and the marginal potency. The internal potency is also known as the svarupa-Sakti or the antaranga- Sakti or the cit-Sakti.