And he saw the hells that, gorged with suffering, yet again yield up their prey to the weary round of rebirth and lo—heaven and hell and earth empty and vain, the Wheel of Birth and Death revolving evermore, hopeless and without delay or stay, now heaven-high, now low as earth, but ever and ever a whirling Wheel without rest. And in the third watch there came Perception higher still and our Lord entered upon the deep apprehension of Truth. And in this the secrets of birth and death were apparent and he became assured that age and death have their source in birth and are rooted in it as trees in the ground, for the body and earthly self implicate man in all evils, divided thus from the Source, and, in a word, life in this world of ignorance, is suffering. For here men walk blinded with ignorance, not knowing whence nor whither, and the high things move veiled about them and are not seen. And as to rebirth, he saw that its cause is in deeds done and thoughts thought in former lives. Swept on and up in ecstasy, perception becoming ever clearer, he beheld the so-called soul-self of man unravelled into its component parts and laid before him like the unwoven threads of a garment, and behold in these was no durability nor immortality, for there is but one Immortal, one Infinite, and the man who claims his own, his separate immortality, is dying and reborn through the ages and but the fierce desire of life gives him its simulacrum and the long-linked chain of births and deaths and griefs immeasurable. So then, swept on and up in ecstasy, he beheld the causes of the long-linked chain of existence stretching from Infinite to Infinite. And these are they, and this is the lineage of suffering: Contact brings forth sensation. Sensation brings desire. Desire produces the clinging to shows and illusions. Clinging to shows and illusions produces deeds. Deeds engender birth. Birth produces age and death. And this is the weary round, the offspring of Ignorance repeated in the endless turning of the Wheel, the dragging of a lengthening chain of births. For the ignorant man, desiring the things that are worthless, transient, illusory, seeing about him false shows instead of the high things which are real, creates in himself a passion which in turn creates more and more dangerous illusions, and thus is his own victim. But when false desire dies, illusions end, and Ignorance, dispersing like the night, gives place to the Sun of Enlightenment and the world lies about such a man as it truly is. And he _knows_, being no more the prisoner of time and space and their brood of follies, for Ignorance, the true cause of all ill, in him is dead.