23. Whatever is shining in this universe or ever was or is to be so, in any of the three—past, present and future times, know them all O Ráma! as forms of the Divine Spirit (which is free to take any shape it likes).
24. Ráma said:—Tell me, O Bráhman! why this view of liberation, appears so very difficult to me, as to make me believe it altogether incomprehensible to and unattainable by any body.
25. Vasishtha replied:—This (disembodied) liberation is called nirvána or total extinction of self-consciousness, and is styled Brahma also (in whom the human soul is finally absorbed). Attend now to the means of its attainment.
26. All such visible objects known as I, thou, this &c., being unproduced (anutpanna) from the eternal sat or entity of God, it is impossible to have any conception of them in our minds.[3]
27. Ráma said:—Methinks, O best of them that know the knowable! that the bodiless souls of the liberated, when they pass through the bounds of the three worlds, have again to be born according to the course of nature.
28. Vasishtha replied:—Those that retain the reminiscence of the three worlds have to move about in them, but such as have lost the idea of their existence, are absorbed in infinity.
29. For how can one derive the knowledge of the unity of God from his belief in the duality of the separate existence of the world? Therefore the figurative sense of cosmos as God (Viswa) can not give the spiritual and infinite idea of Brahma.
30. He is no other but himself, of the nature of pure intellect, and of the form of the clear and tranquil vacuum (that pervades all things). Brahma is said to be the world, to signify his manifestation of its unreality as a reality unto us.
31. I have well considered about a golden bracelet, and found nothing as a bracelet in it save its gold. (The form is changeable, but the substance is real).
32. I observed the billows, and found nothing in them but water; and where there was no water I saw no billow to rise. (It is the substance and not its shape or shadow that is to be looked into).