48. The mind which having sprung from the Supreme Soul in the form of goodness, is inclined afterwards towards the unrealities of the world; surely alienates itself from the Supreme, and exposes itself to all sorts of misery. 49. We are born to the doom of death, but let us not die to be reborn to the miseries of life and death again. It is for the wise and learned to betake themselves to that state, which is free from these pains. 50. First learn the truth, and attain to the true knowledge of your soul; and then abandon all your desire and dislike of the world. Being thus prepared with a dead-like insensibility of your internal feelings, you will be enabled to come to the knowledge of that transcendental state, which is full of perfect bliss and blessedness. CHAPTER LIV. CORRECTIVE OF DESIRES. Argument. The rise, progress and decline of Human Wishes. The Son asked:—What is this desire, father? how is it produced and grown, and how is it destroyed at last? 2. Dásúra replied:—The desire or will is situated in the mind or mental part of the one eternal, universal and spiritual substance of God. 3. It gets the form of a monad from a formless unit, and then by its gradual expansion extends over the whole mind, and fills it as a flimsy cloud soon covers the sky. 4. Remaining in the divine Intellect, the mind thinks of thinkables, as they are distinct from itself; and its longing after them is called its desire, which springs from it as a germ from its seed. 5. The desire is produced by the desiring of something, and it increases of itself both in its size and quantity, for our trouble only, and to no good or happiness at all. 6. It is the accretion of our desires which forms the world, as it is the accumulation of waters which makes the ocean; you have no trouble without your desire, and being free from it, you are freed from the miseries of the world (wherein one has to buffet as in the waves and waters of the sea). 7. It is by mere chance, that we come to meet with the objects of our desire; as it is by an act of unavoidable chance also, that we are liable to lose them. They appear before us as secondary luminaries in the sky, and then fly away as the mirage vanishes from view. 8. As a man who has the jaundice by eating a certain fruit, sees every thing as yellow as gold with his jaundiced eye; so the desire in the heart of man, pictures the unreal as a reality before him. 9. Know this truth that you are an unreality yourself, and must become an unreality afterwards. (Because there is but one self-existent entity, and all besides is but suppositions not entities). 10. He who has learnt to disbelieve his own existence and that of all others, and knows the vanity of his joy and grief, is not troubled at the gain or loss of any thing (which is but vanity of vanities, the world is vanity).