"So saying, O King, that wonderful Being vanished from my view. Then by and by this world was created again. Thus in the last Kalpa Pralaya did I witness this wonderful event. The Lotus-Eyed Diety I then saw, you brothers have now established blood relations with Him, this Krishna. It is through His grace that I have obtained uninterrupted memory, become so long-lived and endowed with the boon of dying at my will. This Krishna who is now sitting before us all, this Krishna present here, who is born in the line of the Vrishnis, is just now merely playing on His earth. But it is He, this Krishna, who is the Ancient Person, the Lord, the Unthinkable Soul, the Creator, the Destroyer, the Eternal and the Master of All! I have been able to remember all these facts only through the inspiration of His presence here. He is the Mother and Father of all beings: do you all take His Refuge." Krishna has been called Nārāyan here by Mārkandeya, because Nārāyan, the Fourth Form-manifestation of Krishna in the unfoldment of creation, is generally known as the Supreme Diety—Krishna. Nārāyan, as I have said before this, is Aniruddha out of whose navel springs the seed-bud Lotus with Brahmā, the operating Creator of the details Creation. SECTION XIII. NATURAL DISSOLUTION. What is popularly known as Universal Destruction, is termed in the Hindoo Scriptures "Prākritic Pratisanchar" or Natural Retrogression, which means Natural Disssolution. This marks the close of the Greatest Cycle of Time. It is the End of Time, the End of Creation. It is the Maha Pralaya. It involves the annihilation of the Universe, in one sense, because after its occurrence none of the Principles, except the Ultimate, exists. "In one sense" I say advisedly, for although the Manifest universe becomes non-existent, its latent spiritual impressions, forming its germ, are carried by the Three Cardinal Attributes into the Ultimate Principle, Love—Krishna—and preserved unconsciously, even during their rest in Krishna, in a state of equilibrium, It is out of this Mystic Ideation that, in the event of the inequilibrium of the Attributes, a fresh creation springs into existence. There is no such thing as destruction in the law of Nature. Nothing is destroyed totally; all forms of destruction are but phases of transmutation, from gross manifestation into fine, from fine into finer, from finer into finest, from finest into mystic ideation which belongs to the realm of absolute spirituality.