21. Ráma rejoined:--Tell me yet, O Venerable sir, how the great void of the intellect came to be produced from divine spirit; tell moreover its extent and duration in time and space. 22. Vasishtha replied:--The great God Brahma, is without beginning and ever existent and without decay; there is no beginning, midst nor end of him, nor are there any shapes of figures in his transcendent vacuum. 23. The vacuum of Brahma is without its beginning and end, and is spread unspent and unbounded to all eternity; it is this which makes the universe, which is ever without its beginning and end. 24. The reflexion of the intellectual vacuum in its own vacuity, is called the universe by itself to no purpose (_by itself_ or the human mind, which views the world in the wrong light of creation, and not as the Divine Mind itself. Gloss). 25. As a man sees a fair city in his dream by night, so is the sight of this world to him, in his dream by day light. (The Sanskrit word _Bhano_ in the text meaning reflexion, corresponds with the Greek Phano to see, and hence phantom or false sights). 26. Think not the solid rock to have any solidity in it, nor the fluid waters any fluidity in them; do not think the empty firmament to be a vacuity, nor the passing time to have any flight or counting of it. (All these are seemingly so, but they are nothing in reality). 27. All things are fixed in their formless, invariable and ideal states in the divine intellect; but it is the fallacious and fickle nature of the human mind, to give and view them in different forms, according to its own fancy. 28. The mind views the non-created eternal ideas of the intellect, as created objects before its sight, just as it sees rocks where there are no rocks, and the sky in a skyless place in its dream. 29. As the formless and insensible mind, sees the formal world in its sleep, as if it were in its waking state; so does it see the invisible and formless world in its visible form, during its waking hours of the day also. 30. As the motion of air always takes place amidst the air at rest (_i.e._ as the winds fluctuate amidst the still air); so also doth the spirit of Brahma, oscillate in his own spirit incessantly, and without its rise or fall. 31. This world resides in the same manner in the divine spirit of Brahma as the property of fluidity is inherent in water; and vacuity appertains to vacuum; and as substantiality is essential to all substances in the abstract. 32. The world is neither adventitious nor extraneous to the soul, and does not occur to or transpire from it, in the life or deaths of any body; it is causeless and comes from no cause, and is neither joined with nor set separate from the divine spirit.