The following is an excerpt from an article written by Shrila Prabhupada and published in His early editions of Back to Godhead Magazine which He compiled and distributed during His time preaching in India before coming to America.
"What is the inborn quality of the living being? Let us first of all understand the nature of inborn quality. We can understand the inborn quality of the five elements. The inborn quality of earth is solidity. The inborn quality of water is liquidity. The inborn quality of fire is burning heat and light. The inborn quality of air is mobile humidity. The inborn quality of ether is all-pervading enuity. The inborn quality of mind is determination and rejection. The inborn quality of intelligence is thinking and feeling and the inborn quality of ego is identification of Existence.
The living entity does not belong to either of the above eight different elements of material nature. These eight elements are called products of the inferior nature of Godhead. But there is another superior spiritual nature of Godhead, of which the living entity is made. Both the inferior and superior qualitative nature of Godhead are nondifferent from Him but the actions of the two different natures are completely different. The all powerful Godhead has innumerable different energies out of them the 'Para Prakriti' is known as His internal energy. The internal energy is always personally associated with the Personality of Godhead and therefore the inborn nature of the living entity is to remain personally associated with the Supreme Being.
The Supreme Being is eternally existent along with His associated internal energy and therefore in the 'Sruti Mantras' it is said that the 'Supreme Lord' is the Primeval Eternal Personality amongst innumerable other personalities of living being. In other words every individual living being is an individual person. Everyone has his personal separate existence and nobody is equal with another living being, that is the variegatedness of the living world. The Supreme Lord is also the Supreme living Personality with His separate identity, Form, existence and mode of life. The living entities are therefore equal in quality of the Supreme Lord, but the Supreme Lord is one and the Absolute while the living entities are innumerable and relative.
The Absolute Personality of Godhead has expanded Himself in his differentiated parts and parcels who are called by the name "Jiva" or the living being. Being one in quality, the living being has the proportionate fraction of the quality of overlordship propensity. When this relative overlordship propensity is manifested disproportionately in the living being, he falls in contact with the external energy of Godhead, called by the name material nature, and his ego is misidentified with the inferior nature. An appropriate example may be given here in connection with the disproportionate independant action of a state citizen. A citizen of an independant nation cannot be absolute. His independence is relative in terms of the state laws. When the citizen therefore disproportionately exhibits his independence, it becomes an act of civil disobedience and he is put under police action an inferior state of citizen life. The false ego is given to the material mind and the sense-perceptions thereof and as such, material sense-perceptions contact with material objects by form, taste, smell, sound and touch. That makes it possible for the living being to drag on a material existence with hard struggle for life. The hard struggle for life is manifest because the living entity is fallen in the material existence, a foreign and inferior quality of nature for the living being. It is something like a living being of the land thrown into the ocean of water, and thus a hard struggle for existence for the overthrown living being. The overthrown living being can be happy only when he is picked up from the ocean of material existence and reinstated again in his normal spiritual existence by the Grace of the Supreme Lord. That is his "Religion Real."
Shree Chaitanya Mahaprabhu therefore teaches us to pray like this:- "Oh my Lord who is born out of the body of Nanda Maharaj, please consider me who is fallen in the ocean of birth and death, out of Your immense and causeless mercy, as one of the particle of dust remaining at Your lotus feet.""
(BTGPY11a: Religiosity Real and Apparent)