He Is Transcendental

The second point to be made about the transcendental nature of Krsna is that He is not like an ordinary living entity, in that His memory is always perfect: "Many, many births both you and I have passed," He tells Arjuna. "I can remember all of them, but you cannot." (Bg. 4.5) Actually this capacity of remembrance and forgetfulness is one of the basic differences between the Supreme and the conditioned soul. The quality of the Supreme is cit, or perfect knowledge, past, present, and future, but the conditioned soul is always forgetful.

With each body that we take we leave behind the memory of the last. With each new body, and even within these bodies, we tend to forget, and especially in this present age called Kali-yuga, memory is being so reduced that we cannot even remember things very close at hand. I doubt if there is a single reader who could recite perfectly the first sentence in this essay. Yet it was not very long ago that a good brahmacari, or student, could hear a lecture and remember it perfectly. Such is our position in this age that we are going down and down, and all the while we think that we are advancing. That is called maya, what is not. We are being degraded and dragged down to hell, and maya says, "Isn't it nice."