REFLECTIONS ON DEATH. Argument. The lot of living beings and the cause of their death. The duration of human life as determined by their acts and enjoyments, and the merit of their conduct in life time. The goddess continued:—Those therefore who know the knowable God, and rely in virtue, can go to the spiritual worlds and not others. (Knowable means what ought to be and not what is or can be known). 2. All material bodies which are but false and erroneous conceptions of the mind, can have no place in Truth (the true spirit); as no shadow can have any room in sunshine. (So gross matter has no room in the subtile spirit). 3. Lílá being ignorant of the knowable (God), and unacquainted with the highest virtue (the practice of Yoga), could go no further than the city of her lord which she had at heart. 4. The waking Lílá said:—Let her be where she is (I inquire no more about her); but will ask you of other things. You see here my husband is about to die, so tell me what must I do at present. 5. Tell me the law of the being and not being of beings, and what is that destiny which destines the living beings to death. 6. What is it that determined the natures of things and gave existence to the categories of objects? What is it that has caused the warmth of the fire and sun, and gave stability to the earth? 7. Why is coldness confined to the frost and the like, and what forms the essence of time and space; what are the causes of the different states of things and their various changes, and the causes of the solidity of some and tenuity of others? 8. What is that which causes the tallness of trees and men above the grass and brambles; and why is it that many things dwindle and decay in the course and capability of growth? 9. The goddess said:—At the universal dissolution of the world, when all things are dissolved in the formless void; there remains the only essence of Brahma, in the form of the infinite sky stretching beyond the limits of creation on all sides. 10. It then reflects in its intellect in the form of a spark of fire, as you are conscious of your aerial journey in a dream. 11. This atomic spark then increased in its size in the divine spirit, and having no substance of itself, appeared what is commonly styled the ideal world. 12. The spirit of God residing in it, thought itself as Brahmá—the soul of the world, who reigned over it in his form of the mind, as if it was identic with the real world itself. (The world is a display of the Divine Mind). 13. The primary laws that he has appointed to all things at their first creation, the same continue invariably in force with them to the present time. (_i.e._ The primordial law or nature). 14. The minds of all turn in the same way as it was willed by the divine mind, and there is nothing which of itself can go beyond the law which the divine will has assigned to it.