Devotee: "If individuality is not a fact, then Kṛṣṇa would not have stressed it so much even for the future. The Māyāvādī . . ."
Prabhupāda: Yes. He says that there was no such time when we are not individual, and there will be no such time in the future when we shall not remain individual. And so far present is concerned, we are all individual. You know. So where is the possibility of losing individuality, become imperson? No. There is no possibility.
This voidism, impersonalism, they are artificial way of negating the perplexing variegatedness of this material existence. That is the negative side only. That is not a positive side. A positive side is that, as Kṛṣṇa says, tyaktvā dehaṁ punar janma naiti mām eti kaunteya (BG 4.9): "After giving up this material tabernacle, one comes to Me." Just like after leaving this room, you have to enter another room. You cannot say that, "After leaving this room, I shall live in the sky." Similarly, after leaving this body, if you go to Kṛṣṇa in the spiritual kingdom, your individuality will be there, but you'll have that spiritual body. When there is spiritual body there is no perplexities.
Just like your body is different from the body of the aquatics. The aquatics, they have no disturbance in the water because their body is made like that. They can live there peacefully. You cannot live. Similarly, the fishes, if you take them out of the water, they cannot live.
Similarly, because you are spirit soul, you cannot live peacefully in this material world. This is foreign. But as soon as you enter into the spiritual world, your life is eternal, blissful and full of knowledge, real peace. Tyaktvā dehaṁ punar janma naiti (BG 4.9). Kṛṣṇa says: "After leaving this body, he does not come to this perplexities of material world." Mām eti, "He comes to Me." "Me" means His kingdom, His paraphernalia, His associates—everything.
If some rich man or some king says: "All right, you come to me," that does not mean that he's impersonal. If a king says: "Come to . . ." means that he has got his palace, he has got his secretary, he has got his nice apartment, everything is there. How he can be imperson? But he says only "Come to me." This "me" means everything. This "me" does not mean impersonal. And we get information from Brahma-saṁhitā:
- lakṣmī-sahasra-śata-sambhrama-sevyamānaṁ
- surabhīr abhipālayantam
- (Bs. 5.29)
So He's not impersonal. He's raising cows, He's with hundreds and thousands of goddess of fortune, His friends, His paraphernalia, His kingdom, His house, everything is there. So there is no question of impersonalism.