Mâyâ, under the guidance of the Lord, modifies itself by a progressive
evolution into all the individual existences (bheda), distinguished by
special names and forms, of which the world consists; from it there
spring in due succession the different material elements and the whole
bodily apparatus belonging to sentient Beings. In all those apparently,
individual forms of existence the one indivisible Brahman is present,
but, owing to the particular adjuncts into which Mâyâ has specialised
itself, it appears to be broken up--it is broken up, as it were--into a
multiplicity, of intellectual or sentient principles, the so-called
jîvas (individual or personal souls). What is real in each jîva is only
the universal Brahman itself; the whole aggregate of individualising
bodily organs and mental functions, which in our ordinary experience
separate and distinguish one jîva from another, is the offspring of Mâyâ
and as such unreal.

The phenomenal world or world of ordinary experience (vyavahâra) thus
consists of a number of individual souls engaged in specific cognitions,
volitions, and so on, and of the external material objects with which
those cognitions and volitions are concerned. Neither the specific
cognitions nor their objects are real in the true sense of the word, for
both are altogether due to Mâyâ. But at the same time we have to reject
the idealistic doctrine of certain Bauddha schools according to which
nothing whatever truly exists, but certain trains of cognitional acts or
ideas to which no external objects correspond; for external things,
although not real in the strict sense of the word, enjoy at any rate as
much reality as the specific cognitional acts whose objects they are.

The non-enlightened soul is unable to look through and beyond Mâyâ,
which, like a veil, hides from it its true nature. Instead of
recognising itself to be Brahman, it blindly identifies itself with its