16. It is the absence of the light of the great celestial luminaries, that is called darkness, and there being no material property in the immaterial essence of God, there could be no such light or darkness with him before creation.
17. The light of the vacuous Brahma is an internal perception of the soul, and is only felt and perceived within one’s self, and never externally by any body; nor is this spiritual light ever clouded by any mist or darkness of temporal objects.
18. The indestructible Brahma is beyond and free from external and visible light and darkness; and is above the region of vacuum which is contained, as it were, within his bosom, and contains the universe as sheathed within its hollow womb.
19. As there is no difference between the outside and inside of a fruit (both of which is the same thing); so there is no shade of difference betwixt Brahma and the universe (the one pervading and the other pervaded by his spirit).
20. As the billow is contained in and composed of the water and the pot of the earth, so the world being contained in Brahma, it can not be said as null and void, but full of the spirit of God.
21. The comparison of earth and water does not agree corporeally with the spiritual essence of God, whose vacuous spirit contains and comprises the whole (Visva) within itself, as those elements do their component parts and productions.
22. Now as the sphere of the intellect is clearer and brighter far than the spheres of air and empty space; so the sense and idea of the word world as situated in the divine mind, is clearer in a far greater degree than this visible world appears to us.
23. (In answer to the third question with regard to the want of intellect), it is said thus:—As the pungency of pepper is perceived by one who tastes it, and not by him who has never tasted it; so the minutiae of the Intellect are known in the intellectual sphere by a cultivated intelligence, and by none who is without it.
24. Thus the Intellect appears as no intellect to one who is devoid of intelligence in himself (i.e. one having the Intellect, does not perceive it without a cultivated understanding). So this world is seen in the spirit of God or otherwise, according as one has cultivated or neglected his spiritual knowledge.
25. The world as it is, is seen either in its outward figure or in a spiritual light, as other than or the same with Brahma (by the materialist and spiritualist); but the Yogi views it in its fourth (turíya) state of susupta or utter extinction in his unconscious soul.