Essence is eternal reality; existence is temporary manifestation from the ultimate cause.Listen — Srila Prabhupada Uvaca
Śyāmasundara: Todays philosopher is called Jacques Maritain he is a French, contemporary French philosopher, very influential, and he's a religionist. He believes in a personal God.
Śyāmasundara: Yes. His main philosophy is that existence and essence are both there; that existence is not possible without essence. He defines existence to be..., er, essence to be potential and existence to be the actual. So that a thing, and everything that we can perceive, has both existence and essence, in other words, potentiality and actuality. For instance, this cup has the potentiality to be something else, to be a piece of metal, but in its actual form it is like this. But it has potentiality to become something else. So he says these two things--the essence and the existence--exist simultaneously.
Prabhupāda: So we agree to this point. Just like soul, at the present moment he has got a certain type of body, human body, but the soul has potentiality to have a spiritual body or a dog's body. Both potentialities are there. So the essential is the soul, and the reality... It is not reality; temporary form in the material body. But the potentiality as the soul has his own spiritual body. When it is uncontaminated by the material contamination, he remains only reality without any so-called actuality or temporary form.
Śyāmasundara: He says that sense activity occurs on an immediate level of experience, without any conscious awareness of itself, but that true knowledge of reality comes through intuition, and that this reality is called being.
Prabhupāda: Intuity, also past experience. What you call intuition that is past experience. Just like when a child is born, by intuition it seeks mother's breast. Because the child does not know where is food, but by intuition, as soon as the mother's breast is given, pushed in its mouth, he is satisfied immediately. So by..., this is called by intuition. But actually it is his past experience. The same child, as the soul, may have picking[?] something else in a different body. So the fact is that the soul is wandering in different types of bodies, and when he comes to a particular type of body, he remembers everything from his past experience. Just like fifty years ago, when I was a businessman, so at that Gauya Math, as soon as I go there, I remember all those things; as if I am again fifty years back. That is actual... So this, suppose if I say I am going, I do not require to be directed that "Here is this thing, here is that thing." Immediately I enter that house I will understand that if I have to go to the toilet, "Here it is." If I go to the kitchen, "Here it is." So you may call it intuition, but actually it is experience, past experience. There is no..., nothing such thing as intuition. That is a vague expression. Actually it is past experience.
Śyāmasundara: He says that God, He is pure actuality. There is no potentiality.
Śyāmasundara: He is Absolute. He is pure existence and essence together, but that the..., everything else that exists besides God has these two characteristics of potentiality and actuality.