Argument:—The situation of the World in the womb of the Vacuous Intellect; and its outward appearance as the Imagination of the Mind. Ráma said:—Tell me sir, whether in your curiosity to observe the mutations of earthly things and affairs, you beheld them in their earthly shapes with your corporeal body; or saw them in their ideal forms, in the imagination of your mind. 2. Vasishtha replied:—It was in my mind, that I thought myself to have become the great earth; and all what I saw as visible, being but simple conceptions of the mind, could not possibly have a material form. 3. It is impossible for the surface of the earth to exist, without its conception in the mind; whatever thou knowest either as real or unreal, know them all as the work of your mind. 4. I am the pure vacuous Intellect, and it is that which is the essence of my soul; it is the expansion of this intellectual soul, which is called its will also. (This will is the eternal predicate of the Divine Spirit). 5. It is this which becomes the mind and the creative power Brahmá, and takes the form of the world and this earth also; and this vacuous mind being composed of its desires, assumes to itself whatever form it likes to take. 6. It was thus that my mind stretched itself at that time, and put forth its desires in all those forms as it liked: and from its habitual capacity of containing every thing, it evolved itself in the shape of the wide-stretched earth. 7. Hence the sphere of the earth, is no other than the evolution of the selfsame mind; it is but an unintelligent counterpart of the intelligent intellect. 8. Being thus a void in itself, it continues to remain forever as such in the infinite void; but by being considered as a solid substance by the ignorant, they have altogether forgotten its intellectual nature. 9. The knowledge that this globe of earth is stable, solid and extended, is as false as the general impression of blueness in the clear and vacuous firmament, and this is the effect of a deeprooted bias in the minds of men. 10. It is clear from this argument, that there is no such thing as the stable earth; it is of the same ideal form as it was conceived in the mind, at the first creation of the world. (The primary idea of creation is of its subtile and not gross form. “And the earth was without form and void”). 11. As the city is situated in a dream, and the intellect resides in vacuity; so the Divine Intellect dwelt in the form of the creation in the very vacuum. 12. Know the three worlds in their intellectual light, likening the aerial palace of puerile fancy and hobby; and know this earth and all visible appearances, to be the creatures of imagination. 13. The world is the ectype city or reproduction of the intellectual Spirit of God, and not a different kind of production of the Divine Will; it is in fact no real or positive existence at all, although it may appear as solid and substantial to the ignorant.