58. The intellect is as the skylight, wherein its active power or energy resembling its consort, resides with her offspring of desire in the abode of the body, and is ever restless and busy in her actions. (This active power is personified as the goddess _sakti_ or Energy, and her offspring-desire is the personification of Brahmá). 59. Without the presence of the Intellect, it is no way possible for any one to perceive the taste of any flavour though it is set on the tip of his tongue, or see it with his eyes? (Intellect is the cause of all perception). 60. Hear me and say, how can this _arboretum_ of the body subsist, with its branching arms and hairy filaments, without being supplied with the sap of the intellect. 61. Know hence the intellect to be the cause of all moving and immovable things in nature, by its growing and feeding and supporting them all; and know also that the intellect is the only thing in existence, and all else is inexistent without it. 62. Vasishtha said:--Ráma! after the moon-bright and three-eyed god had spoken to me in his perspicuous speech, I interrogated again the moon-bright god in a clear and audible voice and said. 63. O lord! If the intellect alone is all pervading and the soul of all, then I have not yet been able to know this visible earth in its true light. 64. Say why is it that people call a living person, to be endowed with intellect so long as he is alive, and why they say him to be devoid of intellect, when he is layed down as a dead and lifeless mass. 65. The god replied--Hear me tell you all: O Brahman, about what you have asked me; it is a question of great importance, and requires, O greatest of theists! a long explication. 66. The intellect resides in every body, as also in all things as their inherent soul; the one is viewed (by shallow understandings) as the individual and active spirit, and the other is known (to comprehensive mind) as unchanging and universal soul. 67. The mind that is misled by its desires, views the inward spirit as another or the living soul, as the cupidinous person takes his (or her) consort for another, in the state of sleep or dreaming. (The unsettled mind takes every individual soul for the universal one). 68. And as the same man seems to be changed to another, during his fit of anger; so the sober intellect is transformed to a changeable spirit, by one's mistake of its true nature. (The _nirvi kalpa_ or immutable spirit, is changed to a _savi kalpa_ or mutable one). 69. The intellect being attributed with many variable qualities and desires, is made to lose its state of purity; and by thinking constantly of its gross nature, it is at last converted to the very gross object of thought. 70. Then the subjective intellect _chit_, becomes itself the _chetya_ or object of thought, and having assumed the subtile form of a minute etherial atom, becomes the element of sound; and is afterwards transformed to the rudimental particle of air _vata tan mátra_.