21. It is only a spiritual substance, appearing as a thick mist to our sight; it is neither a void nor a substantiality either: but something purer and more pellucid, than the transparent vacuum about us. 22. It is formless with its apparent form, and an unreality with its seeming reality; it is entirely a pure intellectual entity, and appearing as manifest to sight, as an aerial castle in a dream. 23. It is termed the _nirvána_-extinction of a man, when his view of this outstretched gross and impure world, becomes extinct in its pure spiritual form in the vacuity of his mind. The vast and extensive world presenting all its endless varieties to view, has no diversity in it in reality; but forms an infinite unity, like the vacuous space of the sky, and the fluidity of waters of the one universal ocean on the globe. CHAPTER LVI. STORY OF THE GREAT STONE, AND VASISHTHA’S MEDITATION. Argument:—Here the story of the stone is given, in elucidation of the truth that Intellect is all in all. Vasishtha added:—It being proved before, that the Intellect is always and every where, and in every manner the all in all; it becomes evident, that it remains like the vacuous and translucent air in everything in the whole universe. 2. Wherever there is the Intellect, there is also the creation (inseparable from it); the Intellect residing alike both in the void as well as in the plenum, all things are full of the Intellect, and there is nothing whatsoever in existence beside this universal Intellect. 3. As all created things (whether the moving or unmoving), appear in their visionary forms in our dream; so it is the vacuous Intellect alone, which appears in the various forms of existence in our waking dreams also. 4. Attend now, Ráma, to my narration of the stone, which be as pleasant to taste, as a remedial of ignorance. In this I will relate what I have seen and actually done myself. 5. Being anxious to know the knowable One, I was fully resolved in my mind, to leave this world and all its erroneous usages. 6. I remained a long while in a state of calm and quiet meditation, after having forsaken all the eagerness and restlessness of my body and mind, for the sake of solitary peace and rest. 7. I then pondered in my mind, of betaking myself to some seat or shrine of the Gods; and there sitting in quiet, continue to survey the changing and transitory states of worldly things. 8. I find all things, said I, to be quite insipid to my taste, though they seem to be pleasant for a while; I never see any one in any place, who is ever happy or content with his own state. 9. All things breed but care and sorrow, with the acutest pangs of remorse and regret; and all these phenomenals produce but evil, from their appearance of good to the beholder of them. (Thus the goodly bright aspects of the sun and moon, are attended with sunstroke and lunacy to their observer).