The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 4 (of 4), Part 2 (of 2)Valmiki
Religion
The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana of Valmiki, Vol. 4 (of 4), Part 2 (of 2)
Valmiki
Hinduism -- Doctrines -- Early works to 1800; Religious life -- Hinduism -- Early works to 1800
3. The soul sees itself in the form of the triple world, and every
thing besides in its different nature and figure, without changing
itself to any one of them. (_i.e._ The soul remains unchanged in all
the changeful scenes of nature).
4. Kunda-danta rejoined:--But how do you attribute the quality of
variety or multiplicity, to the purely simple and immutable nature
of the Supreme soul, as you see them appertaining to the intrinsic
character of everything else in nature. (Or as Pope says:--That changed
through all, yet in all the same; great in the earth, as in the
etherial frame).
5. The kadamba devotee replied:--The sphere of the intellectual
vacuum, is all quiet and serene, and there is nothing as any variety
or multiformity in it; the changes that are apparent in its face, are
no more, than the waves and eddies, whirling on the surface of the
changeless main.
6. It is in the immensity of intellectual vacuity, that infinite
creations seem to be continually purling about, as the rising waves are
seen to be whirling in the sea; and it is in its fathomless depth that
they appear to sink, like the waters subsiding in the hollow of the
deep.
7. The substantial forms of things, that rise in the unsubstantial
essence of the intellect, are as the various forms of substances, seen
in the dreaming state of the soul, and all which are utterly forgotten
in its state of sound sleep--susupti.
8. As a Hill seen in dream is no hill at all, and as things appearing
to be in motion in dreaming, are found afterwards to be perfectly
motionless; so are all things in nature but mere unrealities, and
though as real from the real nature of soul itself. (_i.e._ It is
the intellect that fashions everything in its own manner, and its
imagination gives a form to an airy nothing).
9. The intellect is an immaterial substance, and neither creates nor
perceives any thing material by itself; but conceives everything as it
is manifested to it in its idea in the beginning. (_i.e._ The ideas of
things are inborn in the mind).
10. As the intellect sees a great variety of objects in <its> dream,
which it takes for realities for the time; so its belief in the reality
of its ideas, causes it to conceive them as real entities.
11. The vacuous intellect, which glitters of itself in its own state of
transparence; comes to find the world shinning in the same light within
itself. (_i.e._ The world is subjective with the intellect, and not a
part from our intellectual light of the same).
12. As we have the consciousness of heat in the fire, even when it is
seen in a dream; so we are conscious of the presence of everything in
our minds, even in the absence of the thing itself from us. (It was
thus that the Bráhman brothers were conscious of their lordship, even
in their want of the realms themselves).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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