Soon after the insensibility occasioned by one’s death is over, there appears to him (soul) the sight of the world, as he viewed it with his open eyes when he was living.
2. It presents before him the circle of the sky and its sides with the cycle of its seasons and times, and shows him the deeds of his pious and secular acts, as they were to continue to eternity.
3. Objects never seen nor thought of before, also offer themselves to his view, as the sight of his own death in a dream, and as they were the prints in his memory.
4. But the infinity of objects, appearing in the empty sphere of the immaterial intellect, is mere illusion, and the baseless city of the world, like an aerial castle, is but the creation of imagination.
5. It is the remembrance of the past world, that makes it known to us (because it is impossible to recognise any thing without a previous impression of its kind in the mind). Hence the length of a kalpa age and the shortness of a moment, are but erroneous impressions proceeding from the rapidity and slowness of our thoughts.
6. Therefore knowledge, based upon previous notions or otherwise, is of two kinds, and things known without their cause, are attributed to Divine Intelligence (as the hidden cause of all).
7. We are conscious also of thoughts, unthought of before in our minds, as we often have in our dreams; and think of our parents after their demise by mistake of other persons as such.
8. Sometimes genius supercedes the province of memory, as in the first creation or discovery of a thing, which is afterwards continued by its remembrance.
9. According to some, those visible worlds are said to have remained in their ideal state in the Divine mind; and according to others, that there were no pre-existent notions of these in the mind of God.
10. According to some others, the world manifested itself not from the memory, but by the power and will of God; while others maintain it to be the production of a fortuitous combination, of intelligence and atomic principles on a sudden (Kákatálíya sanyoga).