All those who reject God are influenced by the Lord's illusory energy.
Krishna's illusory energy is also called the energy of illusion or maya. Maya means “that which is not, illusion.”
Under its influence, the spiritual being, distinct from God, believes himself to be the master of creation, the possessor and supreme beneficiary. Identifying himself with material energy, that is, with his body (through which he seeks sensual pleasure), with the mind, and with material intelligence, he forgets the eternal relationship that unites him with God. The soul, conditioned by maya, embarks on the quest for worldly pleasures and thus becomes increasingly chained to the cycle of death and rebirth, or repetitive reincarnation.
The soul that distances itself from God and refuses to obey Him is subjected to the veil of maya, which conditions it and gradually obscures reality from it. The purpose of maya is not to lead the beings it conditions into misguidance, perdition, and suffering. Rather, it seeks to awaken reason in them so that they may finally turn to God, obey Him, do His divine will, surrender to Him, and ultimately serve Him with love and devotion, for their own good, and return to the Lord, in His absolute kingdom for eternity.
Maya, the illusory energy of the Lord, conditions human beings who seek to emancipate themselves from God, unaware that by doing so, they distance themselves from the Lord and plunge themselves into perdition, the darkness of ignorance, and endless suffering.
All those who are influenced by maya, the illusory energy of the Lord, which is akin to Satan, remain in illusion. The latter exerts its influence in two ways, either through the “projection” effect or the “veiling” effect.
Through the “projection” effect, it plunges living beings into the darkness of ignorance of the facts relating to God and existential truth, and through the “veiling” effect, it obscures the vision of human beings with scant knowledge of the existence of the Supreme Person. Maya, the illusory energy, also manifests its influence on people of lesser intelligence, leading them to believe that they are identical with God, or even God Himself.
Each of us is a spiritual soul distinct from Krishna, God, the Supreme Personality, a tiny fragment and an integral part of His Divine Person, so we must understand that being a part of the Whole, God, the fragment can never claim to one day become the Supreme. Rather, this should be seen as an indication that the soul conditioned by matter and the energy of illusion falls victim to the final trap of the illusory energy, which makes it believe that it is God.
To make the conditioned being that each of us is in this world governed by matter, to pretend to be one with the cosmic consciousness of the Lord, such is the final stratagem used by the illusory energy to bring it down.