17. Being led by his former impressions and accustomed habit, he kept wandering about the top of the mountain (as he was wont to do before); but fell down afterwards in the dark and dismal pit therein. 18. He found himself lying as dead at that spot, when the birds of air, as big as mountain peaks, alighted upon his dead body, which they tore to pieces and devoured at last. 19. But as he died on the holy mount, and had a spiritual body of himself; he did not feel the pains and pangs which are inevitable upon the loss of the material body, but retained his clear consciousness all along. 20. Yet as his self-consciousness, did not attain the transcendent perceptivity of his soul; he remembered the grossness of his past acts and deeds, and was sensible of them, as any living body. 21. Ráma asked:--How is it possible sir, for the unembodied mind, to perform the outward actions of the body; and how can our spiritual consciousness, have any kind of perception of any thing? 22. Vasishtha replied:--As desire drives the home-keeping man from his house, and as imagination leads the mind to many places and objects, so the mind of this prince was led from place to place (as his reminiscence portrayed them before it). 23. As the mind is moved or led by delusion, dream, imagination and by error or misapprehension and recital of stories, (to the belief of things); so the mind of the prince was led to the credence (of whatever appeared before him). 24. It is the spiritual or intellectual body (or the mind), which is subject to these fallacies (and not the corporeal body); but the human mind, forgets in course of time, its spiritual nature; and thinks on its materiality (_i.e._ takes it for a material substance). 25. But upon disappearance of these fallacies, in the manner of the mistaken notion of the snake in a rope; there appears the spiritual body only, in lieu of the corporeal one. 26. Consider well, O Ráma! that the spiritual body is the only real substantiality; because all that appears to exist here beside the intellect, is no existence at all (without the mind, which makes and unmakes them). 27. As the mind of a man going from one place to another, passes on quietly over the intermediate places, and is quite unconscious of them; such is the case with the intellect, which passes to endless objects, without ever moving from its fulcrum, or changing itself to any other form. 28. Say therefore, where is there a duality, and what object is there deserving your amity or enmity, when all this totality is but one infinite Deity, and known as the transcendent understanding. 29. The transcendental understanding is that calm and quiet state of the Intellect, which is without the workings of the mind; and though the prince Vipaschit was settled in his spiritual body, he had not yet attained to that state of transcendentalism. (This is Platonism or musing of the soul in itself).