CHAPTER LXVI.
Meditation of the Subjective and Objective.
Argument. Origin and Nature of Duality and the Manner of its Extinction.
Thus Ráma! there is one true essence, which appears many by our mistake; and this variety is caused by the production of one from the other, as one lamp is lighted from another.
2. By knowing one’s self as nothing as it was before its coming to being, and by considering the falsity of his notions (of his reality), no one can have any cause of grief (at its loss). (The Sruti:—The knower of the true-self, is above all grief and sorrow).
3. Man is but a being of his own conception, and by getting rid of this concept, he is freed from his idea of the duality of the world (as a distinct existence); just as one with his shoes on, perceives the whole earth he treads upon, to be covered over with skin.
4. As the plantain tree has no pith except its manifold coats, so there is no substantiality of the world beside our false conceptions of it.
5. Our births are followed by childhood, youth, old age and death one after the other, and then opens the prospect of a heaven or hell to our view, like passing phantoms before the flighty mind.
6. As the clear eye sees bubbles of light in the empty sky, so the thoughtless mind views the firmament full of luminous bodies (which are but phantoms of the brain).
7. As the one moon appears as two to the dimsighted eye, so the intellect, vitiated by influence of the senses, sees a duality in the unity of the supreme spirit.
8. As the giddiness of wine presents the pictures of trees before the drunken eye, so does the inebriation of sensation, present the phantoms of the world before the excited intellect.