27. There are some that have advanced only a quarter or half or three fourths of a stage. Some have passed over four quarters and a half, and some six and a half. 28. Common people walking upon this earth, know nothing regarding these passengers in the paths of knowledge; but remain as blind as their eyes were dazzled by some planetary light or eclipsed by its shadow. 29. Those wise men are compared to victorious kings, who stand victorious on these seven grounds of knowledge. The celestial elephants are nothing before them; and mighty warriors must bend their heads before them. 30. Those great minds that are victors on these grounds of knowledge, are worthy of veneration, as they are conquerors of their enemies of their hearts and senses; and they are entitled to a station above that of an emperor and an autocrat, samrat and virat, both in this world and in the next in their embodied and disembodied liberations—_sadeha_ and _videha muktis_. NOTES:—These terms called the grades of knowledge may be better understood in their appropriate English expressions, as:— 1. Desire of improvement. 2. Habit of reasoning. 3. Fixity of attention. 4. Self-dependence—Intuition 5. Freedom from bias or onesidedness. 6. Abstraction or abstract knowledge. 7. Generalization of all in the universal unity. 8. Liberation is anaesthesia or cessation of action, sensation and thoughts. CHAPTER CXIX. ILLUSTRATION OF THE GOLD-RING. Argument. Ascertaining the True Unity by rejecting the illusory forms and on the said Grounds of Knowledge. Vasishtha said:—The human soul reflecting on its _egoism_, forgets its essence of the Supreme soul; as the gold-ring thinking on its formal rotundity, loses its thought of the substantial gold whereof it is made. 2. Ráma said:—Please tell me sir, how the gold can have its consciousness of its form of the ring, as the soul is conscious of its transformation to egoism. 3. Vasishtha said:—The questions of sensible men, relate only to the substances of things, and not to the production and dissolution of the existent formal parts of things, and neither to those of the non-existent; so you should ask of the substances of the soul and gold, and not of the ego and the ring, which are unsubstantial nullities in nature. (So men appraise the value of the gold of which the ring is made, and not by the form of the ring). 4. When the jeweller sells his gold-ring for the price of gold, he undoubtedly delivers the gold which is the substance of the ring and not the ring without its substance. (So the shapes of things are nothing at all, but the essential substance—Brahma underlying all things, is all in all). 5. Ráma asked:—If such is the case that you take the gold for the ring, then what becomes of the ring as we commonly take it to be? Explain this to me, that I may thereby know the substance of Brahma (underlying all appearances).