The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 3 (of 4), Part 2 (of 2)Valmiki
Religion
The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 3 (of 4), Part 2 (of 2)
Valmiki
Hinduism -- Doctrines -- Early works to 1800; Religious life -- Hinduism -- Early works to 1800
26. Where is that body of yours, with which you seem to enjoy anything;
the enjoyment belongs to the mind and not to the body, and both of them
are real as well as unreal, owing to their presence at one time and
absence at another.
27. The body and the mind are known to be present with coeval with
their actions, and they participate with one another in their mutual
acts (without which they are said to be inexistent). Therefore it is
erroneous to say that, I am this body and am situated here, and these
things are mine, all which are illusory and caused by illusion. (Egoism
and meity are illusive ideas).
28. All this is the manifestation of the will or energy of the mind,
and you must know it either as a long dream or lengthened fallacy of
the mind.
29. Know this world, O son of Raghu's race, to be a display of the vast
kingdom of your imagination, and will vanish into nothing, when you
will come to your good understanding by the grace of your God.
30. You will then see the whole as clearly as in the light of the
rising sun, and know this world to be like a creation of your dream or
volition. (_i.e._ as you wish to have a thing for yourself).
31. So is this world a display of the will of the lotus-born Brahmá, as
I have said before in length in the book of creation.
32. There rises of itself a willful creation within the mind, and out
of its own accord as if it were so ordained by destiny; and the mind
being fully possest of the great variety of forms, is lost at last into
the error of taking them for true.
33. It is a creation of the will only and a display of it in the same
manner, as the fancied chimera of Brahmanship had possessed the minds
of the sons of Indu. (See the narrative of Indu's sons in the upasama
Prakarana).
34. After the soul has passed from its former frame, it receives the
same form which it has in view before it after the fancy of the mind,
which is either of the kind, to which it has been long used and
accustomed, or what it fondly longs in the mind.
35. The body shows itself in the form as it is shaped by the prior acts
of a person, and is also convertible to the intellect by the manly
exertions of some: (whose corporeal bodies may become intellectual
beings, as some persons have mere brutal, while others are highly
intellectual).
36. He that thinks himself as another, is transformed to the nature
of that air (as it is the pattern that moulds a thing after its own
model): and the thought that you are this or that, and have this
thing or others for yourself, is what actually makes you so in this
world. (The metamorphose of the natures and forms of things and
persons to other kinds in Ovid, were all owing to their tendencies and
inclinations towards them).
37. Whatever is thought upon keenly and firmly, the same comes to take
place accordingly; and whatever is thought of with intense and great
force of thought, the same must occur in a short time: (so are all
things done to which we set our minds).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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