30. After the nurse had finished her relation of the pretty parable, the boy seemed glad at what he had heard (though it is plain without understanding its import).
31. I have told you this story, O Ráma! in connection with my lecture on the subject of the mind; and it will serve to explain to you, the fabrication of the mind of this imaginary being of the world.
32. This air-built castle of the world, which has come to be taken for a reality, is like the story of the body, but a false fabrication of the old nurse’s imagination. (Or old grand-mother’s tale, and giving a name and form to an airy nothing).
33. It is the representation of the various thoughts and ideas of our minds, which exhibit themselves to view, according to the notions we have of them in our states of bondage and liberation. (i.e. Our bondage to gross bodies, exhibits them in their grosser form, and our liberation from the materialistic, shows them in their subtile and immaterial shapes).
34. Nothing is really existent except the creations of our imagination, and it is our fancy which fashions all the objects in their peculiar fantastic forms. (Everything appears to us as we fancy it to be; whereby the same thing is viewed in a different light, not only by different persons; but by the same person in a different state of mind).
35. The heavens, earth, sky and air, as also the rivers, mountains and the sides and quarters of the sky, are all creations of our fancy, like the visions in our dreams; which join and disjoin and fashion the views in their phantastic forms. (Imagination or phantasy, is a faculty representative of the phenomena of internal or external worlds. Sir William Hamilton).
36. As the princes, the rivers and the future city, were mere creations of the nurse’s imagination, so the existence of the visible world, is but a production of the imaginative power of man. (The nurse’s representations of the princes &c., were rather the prosopopœia or personifications of her abstract thoughts; as the material world is a manifestation of the ideal, and called by the sufis suwari manavi and suwari zahiri).
37. The imaginative power manifests all things all around, as the moving waters, show the rise and fall of the waves in the sea. “It gives a shape of airy nothing”. “It is the power of apprehending ideas and combining them into new forms and assemblages”.
38. It was this imaginative power of God, which raised the ideas of things in his omniscient and all comprehensive soul; and these ideals were afterwards manifested as real by his omnipotence; just as things lying in the dark are brought to view by the light of the day. (Imaginatio est rei corporae figuram contemplari. Descartes and Addison. It is a lively conception of the objects of sight. Reid. It recalls the ideas by its reproductive fancy, and combines them by its productive power).
39. Know hence, O Ráma! the whole universe to be the net-work of imagination, and your fancy to be the most active power of the mind. Therefore repress the thickening phantoms of your fleeting fancy, and obtain your tranquility by your sole reliance on the certainty of the immutable soul of souls.