22. This triformed prince (the mind) is always fickle, and never steady in any; he resides in many bodies and plays his gambles there with his guard of egoism, and leaves one body for another at will, as a bird alights from one branch upon another. 23. This fickle minded prince is ever changeful in his will; he resides in one city and builds another for his future habitation. 24. Like one under the influence of a ghost, he stirs up from one place and runs to another, as a man builds and breaks and rebuilds his aerial castle at his hobby. 25. The Mind sometimes wishes to destroy its former frame and remove to another, and effects its purpose at will. 26. It is produced again as the wave of the sea, after it had subsided to rest; and it pursues slowly and gradually a different course in its renewed course of life. 27. This prince sometimes repents of his own conduct and acts in his new life, and then laments for his ignorance and miseries and knows not what to do. 28. He is sometimes dejected by sorrow and at others elated by success, like the current of a river, now going down in the hot season, and again overflowing its banks in the rains. 29. This king is led by his hobbies like the waters of the sea by the winds; it puffs and swells, falls and rises, runs fast and ceases to flow at once as in a calm. CHAPTER LIII. DESCRIPTION OF THE MUNDANE CITY. Argument. Interpretation of the Parable of the Air-born prince, and exposition of the Universe as the production of our Desires. Vasishtha continued:—The boy then asked his holy sire, who was sitting reclined on his sacred Kadamba tree, in the midst of the forest of the great Jambudvípa in the gloom of the night. 2. The son said:—Tell me Sir, who is this Air-born prince of Supernatural form, about whom you related to me just now; I do not fully comprehend its meaning, and want it to be explained to me clearly. 3. You said sir, that this prince constructs for himself a new abode, whilst residing in his present body; and removes to the same after he has left the old frame. This seems impossible to me, as the joining of one tense with another, the present with the future. 4. Dásúra replied:—Hear me tell you my son, the meaning of this parable, which will explain to you the nature of this revolutionary world in its true light. 5. I have told you at first that a non-entity sprang in the beginning from the entity of God, and this non-entity being stretched out afterwards (in the form of illusion), gave rise to this illusory world called the cosmos.