Maya, 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 Maya 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 jivas (individual or personal souls).  What is real in each jiva 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 jiva from another, is the offspring of Maya and as such unreal.

The phenomenal world or world of ordinary experience (vyavahara) 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 Maya.  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 Maya, which, like a veil, hides from it its true nature.  Instead of recognising itself to be Brahman, it blindly identifies itself with its adjuncts (upadhi), the fictitious offspring of Maya, and thus looks for its true Self in the body, the sense organs, and the internal organ (manas), i.e. the organ of specific cognition.  The soul, which in reality is pure intelligence, non-active, infinite, thus becomes limited in extent, as it were, limited in knowledge and power, an agent and enjoyer.  Through its actions it burdens itself with merit and demerit, the consequences of which it has to bear or enjoy in series of future embodied existences, the Lord—­as a retributor and dispenser—­allotting to each soul that form of embodiment to which it is entitled by its previous actions.  At the end of each of the great world periods called kalpas the Lord retracts the whole world, i.e. the whole material world is dissolved and merged into non-distinct Maya, while the individual souls, free for the time from actual connexion with upadhis, lie in deep slumber as it were.  But as the consequences of their former deeds are not yet exhausted, they have again to enter on embodied existence as soon as the Lord sends forth a new material world, and the old round of birth, action, death begins anew to last to all eternity as it has lasted from all eternity.