30. So the personal acts of people are the causes of their repeated births and deaths in this or other worlds; and they ascend higher or sink lower by virtue of their good or bad deeds, which proceed from their hearts and the nature of their souls. 31. Our actions are the efforts of our minds, and shape our good or bad destinies according to the merit or demerit of the acts. The fates and chances of all in the existing world, are the fruits and flowers of their past acts, and even of those done in prior Kalpas; and this is called their destiny. (Sástra: No act goes for naught even in a thousand _Kalpas_. Má bhuktan kshiyate Karma, kalpa koti satai rapi). CHAPTER LXV. NATURE OF THE LIVING SOUL. Argument. The mind and its operations, the subjective and objective, and lastly the Divine Intellect. Vasishtha continued:—The Mind sprang at first from the supreme cause of all; this mind is the active soul which resides in the supreme soul (the Ens entium). 2. The mind hangs in doubt between what is and what is not, and what is right and what is wrong. It forgets the past like the scent of a fleeting odor by its wilful negligence. (Unmindfulness is the cause of forgetfulness). 3. Yet there is no difference between these seeming contraries; because the dualities of Brahma and the soul, the mind and máyá, the agent and act, and the phenomenal and noumenal worlds, all blend together in the unity of God. (All seeming differences converge in unvarying Mind). 4. There is but one Universal soul displaying its Intellect as a vast ocean, and extending its consciousness as a sea of unlimited extent. (These extend to all beings in the universe). 5. What is true and real shines forth amidst all that is untrue and unreal; so does the subjective essence of the mind subsist amidst all its airy and fleeting dreams in sleep. And thus the world is both true and untrue as regards its subsistence in God and its external phenomena. (The substance is real but the appearance is false). 6. The erroneous conception either of the reality or unreality of the outer world, does not spring in the mind, which is conscious of its operations only, and of no outward phenomena. This conception is like the deception of a magic show, and is concomitant with all sensuous minds. 7. It is the long habit of thinking the unreal world as real, that makes it appear as such, to the unthinking, as a protracted sleep makes its visionary scenes appear as true to the dreaming soul. It is the want of reflection, that causes us to mistake a man in a block of wood. 8. Want of spiritual light misleads the mind from its rationality, and makes it take its false imaginations for true; as children are impressed with a belief of ghosts in shadows, through their fear and want of true knowledge.