We find everywhere in these treatises a restless striving to grasp the true nature of the pantheistic Self, now through one metaphor, now through another. Thus (Brih. Up. II. iv.) the wise Yajnavalkya, about to renounce the world and retire to the forest, replies to the question of his wife, Maitreyi, with the words: "As a lump of salt thrown into the water would dissolve and could not be taken out again, while the water, wherever tasted, would be salt, so is this great being endless, unlimited, simply compacted of cognition. Arising out of these elements, it disappears again in them. After death there is no consciousness;" for, as he further explains, when the duality on which consciousness is based disappears, consciousness must necessarily cease. In another passage of the same Upanishad (II. i. 20) we read: "Just as the spider goes out of itself by means of its thread, as tiny sparks leap out of the fire, so from the Atman issue all vital airs, all worlds, all gods, all beings." Here, again, is a stanza from the Mundaka (III. ii. 8):-- As rivers flow and disappear at last In ocean's waters, name and form renouncing, So, too, the sage, released from name and form, Is merged in the divine and highest spirit. In a passage of the Brihadaranyaka (III. vii.) Yajnavalkya describes the Atman as the "inner guide" (antaryamin): "Who is in all beings, different from all beings, who guides all beings within, that is thy Self, the inward guide, immortal." The same Upanishad contains an interesting conversation, in which King Ajataçatru of Kaçi (Benares) instructs the Brahman, Balaki Gargya, that Brahma is not the spirit (purusha) which is in sun, moon, wind, and other natural phenomena, or even in the (waking) soul (atman), but is either the dreaming soul, which is creative, assuming any form at pleasure, or, in the highest stage, the soul in dreamless sleep, for here all phenomena have disappeared. This is the first and the last condition of Brahma, in which no world exists, all material existence being only the phantasms of the dreaming world-soul. Of somewhat similar purport is a passage of the Chhandogya (viii. 7-12), where Prajapati is represented as teaching the nature of the Atman in three stages. The soul in the body as reflected in a mirror or water is first identified with Brahma, then the dreaming soul, and, lastly, the soul in dreamless sleep. How generally accepted the pantheistic theory must have become by the time the disputations at the court of King Janaka took place, is indicated by the form in which questions are put. Thus two different sages in the Brihadaranyaka (iii. 4, 5) successively ask Yajnavalkya in the same words: "Explain to us the Brahma which is manifest and not hidden, the Atman that dwells in everything."