26. The world is verily the quiet spirit of Brahma, it is one with Him, and without its beginning, middle or end; it is verily the void of Brahma, who assumes to himself the titles of Ego and the living soul, vacuous himself in his own vacuous self, as this vast and extensive phenomenon, and as something otherwise than what He is. (The world is the mirror of the divine Mind and its thoughts). CHAPTER CCXIII. NARRATION OF RÁMA’S PRIOR PUPILAGE UNDER VASISHTHA. Argument:--Vasishtha’s relation of a lecture delivered to Ráma in a former birth. Vasishtha continued:--O Ráma, the destroyer of thy enemies, this very question that you have asked me today, was put to me once before, when you had been a pupil under my discipline. 2. In a former age, there was once this spiritual discourse betwixt ourselves, when you had been a pupil of mine in a certain forest (according to Metempsychosis), the present is but a repetition of a past life. The wheel of life rolls and revolves incessantly from age to age. 3. As I sat there as your preceptor, and your sitting in my presence as my pupil; you then had put this very question to me, with the gravity of your understanding. 4. The Pupil said:--You sir that know all things, now deign to remove this doubt and difficulty of mine, regarding what things die and perish at the great deluge, and what things are not liable to destruction. 5. The Preceptor replied saying:--Know my son, that the relics of all things are utterly destroyed at the last deluge; as your thickening dreams disappear in your sound sleep. 6. The hills and rocks on all the ten sides of the earth, are all destroyed without any distinction, and of the actions of men and routine of their business, there remains nothing behind. 7. All beings are destroyed at the end, and the great void (that is the receptacle of all bodies), becomes a perfect void. 8. The gods Brahmá, Vishnu, Indra, Rudra and others, that are the prime causes of the causal agencies of this world, do all become extinct at the end of the world, and there remains no vestige of them at last. 9. There remains only the great vacuity of the divine intellect, which is ever existent and undecaying; and this appears from the divine spirits remaining as the witness both of annihilations as also of the regeneration of the past and future worlds. 10. The entity never becomes a non-entity, nor the non-entity never comes to be an entity; tell me therefore where the past world disappears, and from whence the future world comes to existence. 11. The Preceptor replied:--This world, my boy, is not wholly destroyed nor does it become altogether extinct; and it is quite true that nothing ever goes to nothing, nor does anything, nor does anything ever proceed from a nihility. 12. That which is an entity in reality, never becomes a non-entity in anywise, and how can that which is inexistent of itself, ever become a nil and null afterwards (Ex nihilo nihil fit &c.).