44. Vasishtha answered:—You forget, O Ráma! to think that Lílá had a material body, or could assume any at pleasure. She was in her form of pure intellect (lingadeha), and it was with her spiritual hand that she touched the inner spirit of the boy and not his body. (Gloss). Because whoso believes himself to be composed of his earthly body only, is verily confined in that; but he who knows his spirituality, is as free as air: (and it was in this aerial form that Lílá was ranging about and touched her son). 45. Belief in materialism leads one to think his unreal earthly frame as real, as a boy’s belief in ghosts makes him take a shadow for a spirit. 46. But this belief in one’s materiality, is soon over upon conviction of his spirituality; as the traces of our visions in a dream, are effaced on the knowledge of their unreality upon waking. 47. The belief of matter as (vacuous) nothing, leads to the knowledge of the spirit. And as a glass door appears as an open space to one of a bilious temperament, so does matter appear as nothing to the wise. 48. A dream presents us the sights of cities and lands, of air and water, where there are no such things in actuality; and it causes the movements of our limbs and bodies (as in somnambulation) for nothing. 49. As the air appears as earth in dreaming, so does the non-existent world appear to be existent in waking. It is thus that men see and talk of things unseen and unknown in their fits of delirium. 50. So boys see ghosts in the air, and the dying man views a forest in it; others see elephants in clouds, and some see pearls in sun-beams. 51. And thus those that are panic-struck and deranged in their minds, the halfwaking and passengers in vessels, see many appearances like the aforesaid ghosts and forests, as seen by boys and men in the air, and betray these signs in the motions and movements of their bodies. 52. In this manner every one is of the form of whatever he thinks himself to be; and it is habit only that makes him to believe himself as such, though he is not so in reality. 53. But Lílá who had known the truth and inexistence of the world, was conscious of its nothingness, and viewed all things to be but erroneous conceptions of the mind. 54. Thus he who sees Brahma only to fill the sphere of his intellect, has no room for a son or friend or consort to abide in it. 55. He who views the whole as full with the spirit of Brahma, and nothing produced in it, has no room for his affection or hatred to any body in it. 56. The hand that Lílá laid on the head of Jyeshtha Sarmá—her eldest son, was not lain from her maternal affection for him, but for his edification in intellectual knowledge. 57. Because the intellect being awakened, there is all felicity attendant upon it. It is more subtile than ether and far purer than vacuum, and leads the intellectual being above the region of air. All things beside are as images in a dream. CHAPTER XXVII.