40. Hearing these words, Lílá gently touched the head of her son with her hand, as the lotus-bed leans to touch its offshoot by the stalk.
41. At her touch the boy was relieved of all his sorrow and misfortune, just as the summer heat of the mountain, is allayed by the showers of the rainy season.
42. All others in the house, were as highly gratified at the sight of the goddesses, as when a pauper is relieved of his poverty, and the sick are healed by a draught of nectar.
43. Ráma said:—Remove my doubt, sir, why Lílá did not appear in her own figure before her eldest son—Jyeshta Sarmá.
44. Vasishtha answered:—You forget, O Ráma! to think that Lílá had a material body, or could assume any at pleasure. She was in her form of pure intellect (lingadeha), and it was with her spiritual hand that she touched the inner spirit of the boy and not his body. (Gloss). Because whoso believes himself to be composed of his earthly body only, is verily confined in that; but he who knows his spirituality, is as free as air: (and it was in this aerial form that Lílá was ranging about and touched her son).
45. Belief in materialism leads one to think his unreal earthly frame as real, as a boy’s belief in ghosts makes him take a shadow for a spirit.
46. But this belief in one’s materiality, is soon over upon conviction of his spirituality; as the traces of our visions in a dream, are effaced on the knowledge of their unreality upon waking.
47. The belief of matter as (vacuous) nothing, leads to the knowledge of the spirit. And as a glass door appears as an open space to one of a bilious temperament, so does matter appear as nothing to the wise.
48. A dream presents us the sights of cities and lands, of air and water, where there are no such things in actuality; and it causes the movements of our limbs and bodies (as in somnambulation) for nothing.
49. As the air appears as earth in dreaming, so does the non-existent world appear to be existent in waking. It is thus that men see and talk of things unseen and unknown in their fits of delirium.