By Akruranatha Dasa
In Srimad-Bhagavatam culture, there is not such a breakdown between prosaic reality and poetic metaphor. Actual reality is far more enchanted and magical and strange than our modern scientific, mechanistic, deracinated conception. Things that we think of as concepts -- like fear, love, intelligence, decay and so on -- are actually living beings who can interact with other, similar beings. The universe is full of demons, demigods, ghosts, goblins, sages, yogis, siddhas, gandharvas, caranas, apsaras, humans, animals, plants, and all kinds of mystical beings. They are not symbols sprung from the imagination of a human artist, who in turn sprung from unconscious, soul-less chemical interactions. They are actual living beings, souls expressing themselves through different kinds of actual bodies (many of which are imperceptible to the limited vision of humans).