70. Nothing visible is real, and there is neither any spectator nor spectacle here. There is nothing as vacuity or solidity in nature, but all this is but a piece of extended Intelligence. 71. Ráma rejoined:—The adages relating the grinding of stones by the son of a barren woman, the horns of a hare, and the dancing of a hill with its extended arms; 72. And the oozing of oil from sand, the reading (of books) by dolls of marble, and the roaring of clouds in a painting, and such others are applicable to your words (of the reality of an unreal essence of God). 73. I see this world to be full of diseases, deaths and troubles, mountains, vacuities and other things, and how is it sir, that you tell me of their non-existence? 74. Tell me Sir, how you call this world to be unsubstantial, unproduced and inexistent, that I may be certain of this truth. 75. Vasishtha replied:—Know Ráma, that I am no inconsistent speaker, and hear me explain to you how the unreality appears as real, as the son of a barren woman has come to rumour. 76. All this was unproduced before, and did not exist in the beginning of creation. It comes to appearance from the mind like that of a city in a dream. (_i.e._ They are all but creations of the mind and fancy). 77. The mind also was not produced in the beginning of creation and was an unreality itself. Hear me tell you therefore, how we come to a notion of it. 78. This unreal mind spreads by itself the false and changing scenes of the visible world, just as we dream of changeful unrealities as true in a state of dreaming. (Here the dreaming philosopher sees dreams in his dream). 79. It then exerts its volition in the fabrication of the body and spreads far and wide the magic scene of the phenomenal world. 80. The mind by its potentiality of vacillation has many actions of its own, as those of expansion, saltation, and motion, of craving, roving, diving and seizing, and many other voluntary efforts (the causes of physical operations). CHAPTER V. ON THE ORIGINAL CAUSE. (MÚLA-KÁRANA). Ráma said:—Tell me, O chief of the sages! what cause is it that leads to our misconception of the mind, how it is produced and what is the source of its illusion. 2. Tell me sir, in brief of the first production (of the mind), and then, O best of the eloquent, you may tell the rest, that is to be said on the subject. 3. Vasishtha replied:—Incident to the universal dissolution, when all things were reduced to nothing, this infinity of visible objects remained in a state of calm and quiet before their creation. 4. There was then the only great God in existence, who is increate and undecaying, who is the creator of all at all times, who is all in all, and supreme soul of all, and resembling the sun that never sets. 5. He whom language fails to describe, and who is known to the liberated alone; who is termed the soul by fiction only, and not by his real nature (which is unknowable).