a wet garment; in the rainy season he should expose himself naked to the tempest of rain. In the warm season he must sit between four fires in the hot rays of the sun.[217] By the eagerness and fervour of devotion which leads the ascetic to these self-tortures, and enables him to endure them, by these mortifications (_tapas_, _i.e._ heat) he must show that the pain of the body cannot trouble the soul, that nothing which befalls the one can influence the other, that he is liberated from his body. When the eremite had reduced his body by mortifications gradually increasing in severity, and attained complete mastery of the soul over the flesh, he enters into the last stage, that of the _Sannyasin_, who attempts by thought to be absorbed into the world-soul, to die while yet alive in the body, by completing his return to Brahman. For this stage the regulation is that the penitent is to wish for nothing, and expect nothing, to observe silence, to live absolutely alone, in ceaseless repose, in the society of his own soul. He must think of the misery of the body, the migrations of the soul, which result from sin, and the existence of the world-soul in the highest and lowest things; he must suppress all qualities in himself which are opposed to the divine nature of Brahman, and think of Brahman only. Brahman must be contemplated in "the slumber of the most inward meditation, as being finer than an atom, and more brilliant than gold!" By thus plunging in the deepest reflection the penitent will succeed in carrying back his soul to its original source: he will attain to union with Brahman, and will himself become Brahman, from which he has emanated.[218]